I think people are sort of mindless in their attacks on the Inquisition as well. The Spanish Inquisition came after 700 years of oppression by the Muslims in Spain, who used Jewish administrators very often, and who allied in part with Sephardic Jews in the conquest, reconquest and defense of Muslim expansion in Spain. The Inquisition was in part in the nature of what we would today classify as “counter-intelligence,” “war crimes tribunals,” and other types of proceedings that are conducted post war. At that time, I’m sure, there remained a fear that Islam would again attack and reconquer Spain.
While I can understand the motivation of those beginning the Inquisition, and also understand that they lived in more savage times than we (at least here in the US - I wouldn’t say that about much of the Arab World), the gratuitous use of the most horrible forms of torture by the Inquisitors over the course of centuries, and even in the New World, wasn’t justified. Torqueamada didn’t get his brutal reputation for being a nice guy. Burning people alive wasn’t excusable, and it was done a LOT. Check out http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Inquisition.html for more information.
You’re correct, most people are misinformed about the Inquisition.
The Spanish Inquisition was instituted to weed out those baptized Jews and Moslems who pretended to be sincere Catholics, while they secretly adhered to the practices of Judaism and Mohammedanism, which is a most serious sacrilegious offense. They were also enemies of the State, which was Christian in principle and carried the Cross in battle against the Crescent. As further evidence, consider what Dr. Salo Wittmayer Baron, one of America’s foremost Jewish historians, has to say about this matter. I quote from “A Social and Religious History of the Jews” (N.Y., 1937, VOL 2 p. 58) -
“It appears to be a fact as well as a theory that Jews who never ceased professing Judaism were, on the whole, left undisturbed. - In the fourteen years of the activity of the Spanish Inquisition, from its establishment in 1478 to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, we hear of only one persecution directed against a Jewish community, where the Jewry of Huesca was accused in 1489 of having admitted conversos (pseudo-converts from Judaism to Christianity) to the Jewish fold. It was precisely the inability of the inquisitorial courts to check Jewish influence on the conversos that served as a decisive argument for the Catholic monarchs in banishing Jews from Spain......