History Belongs To The Victors

The person who tells the story, controls it.  If you know the person is dishonest or takes liberty with the truth, you can set your disbelief level.  When the story is shrouded in events that happened many years before you were born, to verify facts would take a great deal of effort.

History belongs to the Victors. Who writes history owns it.

The history of the Jews is one of those in which everything one has been taught in American and
European schools needs to be reversed, for every great victory of the majority resulted in anguish for the Jewish population.

Most of us have been taught how the Moors invaded the Iberian pennisula and conquered the Europeans, and remained for eight hundred years until driven out.  We are to cheer this great
feat, for subsequently came the voyages of Columbus, and the discovery of the New World.

Yet, for those eight hundred years of Muslim occupation of Spain, the Jews lived in a golden age where they could practice their religion, acheive high office and enjoy the priveleges.  To live on the Iberian pennisula during the Moorish occupation was, for the Jews, a happy time.

Yet history, writen by other hands, paints that a terrible period of struggle, and forgets that after the Moors were driven out, the Inquisition began.  And how many hundreds of thousands of Jews were  tortured and murdered by that Inquisition?  How many hundreds of thousands of Jews had to flee, or convert to Catholicism to survive?

Oliver Cromwell, in England, is cast as an evil figure because of his Irish campaigns. Yet during his time Jews enjoyed rights denied by the more 'enlightened' monarchs. As Lord Protector, Cromwell was aware that the Jewish community was instrumental in the economic success of Holland,  England's leading commercial rival and decided to lure them back to England.

His toleration of the right to private worship of those who fell outside evangelical puritanism  led to his encouraging Jews to return to England in 1657, over 350 years aftertheir banishment by Edward I, in the hope that they would help speed up the recovery of the country after the disruption of the Civil Wars.

These are just two examples of how history, written by 'The Victors' gives a rather one sided
view of history.