What the Inquisition accomplished through public shaming is now attempted to be achieved through doxing campaigns, online mobs, public lists and professional blacklisting.
There are moments when history feels like a distant echo—something we learn about, visit in a museum or hear whispered from our ancestors. Then there are moments when that echo grows loud enough to feel present, immediate and real. Right now, that echo is coming from Spain in 1478.
The Spanish Inquisition was not just a tragic chapter in Jewish history. It was an institutional system of enforcement decreed by Ferdinand and Isabella that lasted until 1834. Jews in Spain and its territories, including the kingdom of Sicily, were given a choice: to convert or leave. If you did neither or converted but still practiced Judaism, you risked the penalty of death.
An example of the latter is my ancestor, Jacobo De Andrea (from Trapani, Sicily), who was suspected of practicing Jewish rituals in secret and sentenced to death by strangulation prior to the public burning of his body in the cathedral square on Oct. 18, 1512. Its purpose was to police identity. The Kingdom of Spain used secret denunciations, coerced confessions, public humiliation, trials without transparency and punishments aimed squarely at Jews who had already converted.
The message was clear: You may live among us, but only if you abandon who you are fully, publicly and permanently. Sound familiar?
That demand for “conversion” is not as distant as we want to believe.
Today, across North America, Jews are once again facing pressure to abandon a part of themselves for acceptance.
It’s no longer forced religious conversion; it is now ideological conversion. The demand is clear: Reject Zionism if you want to be accepted and belong. Reject the foundational belief that the Jewish people have the right to a homeland in our ancestral land. In countless academic departments, unions, cultural institutions, activist spaces and even government bodies, Jews are being told, explicitly or implicitly, that participation is conditional on renouncing something that is tied deeply to Jewish peoplehood.
This isn’t a political disagreement. This is a modern-day purity test.
During the Inquisition, Spain developed the doctrine of limpieza de sangre, the “pure blood” concept that marked Jews as permanently suspect. Even generations after conversion, ancestry alone could bar someone from schools, professions or public life. Your blood determined whether you were worthy, while today’s equivalent substitutes ideology for ancestry.
Jews are asked: “Are you a Zionist?” And depending on the answer, they are either welcomed or excluded. It is the same structure, just wrapped in an evil modern flair. A Jew who believes in Israel’s right to exist, regardless of their politics, can be pushed out of clubs, coalitions, conferences or jobs. Their identity itself becomes the threat. Their presence becomes a problem needing to be “handled.”
What the Inquisition accomplished through public shaming is now attempted to be achieved through doxing campaigns, online mobs, public lists and professional blacklisting. Back then, Jews were dragged into city squares to be humiliated before crowds. Today, Jewish students and professionals are dragged into the comment sections of social-media threads, where their names, faces and employers are targeted. It is a different theater, but the same spectacle—a modern-day version of flogging in the town square.
In Spain, Jews lost their livelihoods as a consequence of accusations. Property was seized, Businesses destroyed or vandalized, and positions taken away. Today, we are watching Jewish professors suspended for refusing to renounce Zionism, Jewish artists uninvited from festivals, Jewish students pushed out of leadership roles, Jewish employees investigated or fired for expressing grief for Israeli victims or praying for hostages. Businesses are being boycotted just because they are Jewish-owned or refuse to subscribe to the narrative of the mob.
Entire careers are being shattered not because of misconduct, but because Jews refuse to abandon a piece of their identity. The tools have evolved, but the intent—to strip Jews of safety and status—is painfully recognizable.
We tell ourselves that history is linear, that progress is permanent and that the lessons of the past provide us immunity from repeating the same mistakes. Yet what is happening now proves otherwise. The institutional targeting of Jews—whether through ideological tests, professional penalties or public shaming—mirrors the same mechanisms Spain used centuries ago.
This moment in history demands clarity. It demands that we recognize the difference between acceptable political debate and the policing of identity. It demands that unions, universities, governments and cultural institutions reject the normalization of excluding Jews from public life unless they “convert” to the approved ideology of the moment.
We have seen exactly where this road leads. Though it is not currently sanctioned by law in North America like it was in Spain, the acceptance of this form of targeted isolation has achieved social sanctioning by the absence of rebuke.
If there is one lesson the Jewish community carries from generation to generation, it’s that targeting Jews never stays contained only to us. It spreads, it escalates, and it erodes the moral fabric of an entire society. We are at a moment to push back, a moment to stand up, a moment not to look away.
Because when society begins demanding Jewish conversion, ideological or otherwise, it never stops there. And it never ends well for anyone.