The Case of Dr. Lopez 

Lately, in response to That Movie, we’ve been hearing of “countless” (we never get numbers, or even estimates) Christian persecutions of Jews in olden times, which often erupted, it is said, after performances of plays showing Jews as bloodthirsty killers of Christ. This canard not only insults Christians as fanatics; it implies that Jews were both stupid and passive, which doesn’t describe many Jews I know.

Consider the case of Dr. Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jew turned Christian, who was brutally executed — hanged, drawn, and quartered — in London in 1594 on a charge of plotting to poison Queen Elizabeth I. On the scaffold he protested his innocence, swearing, one witness wrote, that “he loved the queen as he loved Jesus Christ.” Because of his Jewish ancestry, the spectators laughed mockingly. An ugly scene.

An open-and-shut case of anti-Semitism? Not quite. As usual, the details put matters in a somewhat different light — even though Lopez was indeed probably innocent of the charge.

Lopez had lived in London for many years, rising to become the queen’s personal physician. But he also became involved in espionage, playing both sides of the street for the English and their hated enemy, Spain, which had sent its mighty armada to attack England in 1588. He incurred the enmity of the powerful Earl of Essex, who accused him of conspiring against the queen and gathered evidence against him from Lopez’s own letters.

Under interrogation, Lopez confessed that he had indeed promised Spanish agents that he would poison Elizabeth. But, he insisted, he’d only told them so in order to cheat them out of the money they were willing to pay for the deed, which he’d never intended to go through with.

The queen herself believed him. But the atmosphere of the times was against him: The English regarded Spain as Americans now regard terrorists with “weapons of mass destruction.” And old Lopez had put himself in a very compromising position through his reckless scheming. He was suspected more for his Spanish ties than for his Jewish origins, though the latter certainly didn’t help at all.

Popular f eeling in England ran against both Spaniards and Jews, but it wasn’t popular feeling that decided Lopez’s fate; it was his enemies at court. Essex was riding high, and he wanted Lopez dead. (Essex himself, the queen’s charismatic young favorite, would be beheaded for treason a few years later when he tried to overthrow her.)

Playing with fire, Lopez helped bring his bloody end on himself. He may have suffered a cruel injustice, but he wasn’t exactly a passive victim. He put himself smack into the thick of political intrigue and infighting — a bogus conspirator amidst real ones.

Elizabethan England had a rather famous fondness for the theater. Many popular plays in those years featured scheming Jewish villains: Barabas in The Jew of Malta, ascribed to Christopher Marlowe, and of course Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, among many others.

To hear the current propaganda, you’d think that these plays would have provoked riots against Jews, who at that time, under English law, were illegal aliens. England was a turbulent country, with Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and foreigners under scrutiny and sometimes active persecution; nobody had heard of “interfaith dialogue.” Blood-curdling public executions like that of Lopez were mass entertainment. But the Jews of London were unmolested.

So why didn’t anti-Jewish plays inspire anti-Jewish violence? Maybe because most people, whatever their prejudices, had enough common sense to know that a play was only a play. Even under legal disabilities, Jews were pretty safe. That was presumably why they migrated to England and other Christian lands for so many centuries, anti-Christian canards notwithstanding, instead of toward the Holy Land.

According to all the Jewish propaganda we now hear, they should have been running the other way. The very fact that Christian countries often expelled them, however unjustly, at least proves that they didn’t want to leave.

Under inspection, and regarded with common sense, most tales of those “countless” Christian persecutions of Jews turn out to be a little more complicated than the cartoon versions we’re now hearing. Anyone who was raised on lurid legends of the Spanish Inquisition, for example, will be disappointed by the dull facts.

But Catholic Spain has always gotten bad press — from the English, the Americans, and now the Jews. Dr. Lopez would have understood, too late.

Joseph Sobran