You wrote:
“Roman Catholics who think that 1,700 years of church history is pristine.”
So why do Jewish historians like Kamen say it then?
“Anyone who has read the writings of the Jewish sages in Spain can read the history of a severly persecuted people, no matter what Roman Catholic revisionism tries to do.”
No one denies the persecution. It is a matter of the source. The inquisition did not forcibly convert Jews. It had no authority over people who were not baptized unless they somehow violated the natural law. Thus, a Jew, who just practiced Judaism and minded his own business could not legally be forced to do anything by any inquisitor.
Jews were pretty much restricted to MAKING STUFF and LEARNING ~ or TRADING.
There are quite elaborate laws regarding how things got "turned over" when a Christian prince conquered a Moslem principality, or vice versa.
Jews were left right where they were ~ so they could be taxed.
Obviously there were folks who managed to "convert", but the greater part of the literature on the matter suggests that Jews couldn't convert if they wanted to until the late 1400s. The Crown issued an edict that told them to convert, and evidence is most Jews converted to Christianity, as did Moslems. There were remarkably few people expelled.
Some analysts of this question have come to the conclusion that about 1/4 of the Spanish population is descended in whole or in part from Jews, with another large chunk being descended from Arabs and North Africans.
The smart guys went to the colonial empire as it developed.
It's worth reading about the Inquisition. Yes, it was bad, but not as bad as it's portrayed. It wouldn't hold a candle to the slightest of atrocities commited by the Nazis several centuries later.
Medieval Spain was considered quite Progressive by just about everybody alive at the time who could read and write and travel.
None of these places were anything you'd wanted to live in ~ compared to today ~ maybe like palaces stuck in the mud surrounded by dusty farmland with impoverished peasants and lots of pigs.