My new piece is up at the Daily Beast:
Honesty is difficult, perhaps distasteful, in talking of man just now dead. Honesty nonetheless requires saying that Benzion Netanyahu would be briefly eulogized as a historian, and more briefly recalled as a footnote to forgotten Zionist rivalries, were it not for his other legacy: the son whose politics, view of history, and resentments he shaped.
Netanyahu, who died Monday at age 102, was a specialist in the history of the Jews of Spain. In his books, he asserted a revisionist thesis: Spanish Jews converted to Christianity willingly, not under duress. Their willing assimilation did not reduce their neighbors’ hatred of them. The Inquisition’s pursuit of conversos was not based on religion, nor was Spain’s expulsion of Jews who remained Jewish. Both persecutions expressed economic resentment and racial hate toward Jews. And, he wrote, “Just as the Jews of Germany failed to foresee Hitler’s rise to power… so the Jews of Spain failed to notice… the mountainous wave which was approaching to overwhelm them.”
I leave it to scholars of Spanish and Jewish history to debate whether Benzion Netanyahu’s depiction fits facts or explains them well. But I hazard to say that it is breathtaking example of how historians can write about the present when they portray the past, of how history can be autobiography. Netanyahu explicitly describes fifteenth-century Spain as a dress rehearsal for twentieth-century Jewish life in Germany and in his own native Poland. Jews who believed they could successfully assimilate were deceiving themselves, because gentile hatred was racial, implacable, unconcerned with the optical illusion of religion. Spanish Jews were as willfully blind to the danger as were Polish Jews who ignored the warnings of Netanyahu’s ideological mentor, Vladimir Jabotinsky. If Germany and Poland repeated Spain, then all of Jewish history was a series of repetitions, a “history of holocausts,” as Benzion told the New Yorker’s David Remnick in 1998.
As loyal son and prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu regularly repeats this doctrine. …
Read the rest here.