William Thomas Walsh born in Waterbury

Waterbury

Waterbury is a city in Connecticut in the United States.Waterbury may also refer to any one of the following:-Places:United States*Waterbury, Nebraska*Waterbury, Vermont*Waterbury , Vermont,a village within the town of Waterbury, Vermont....

, Connecticut

Connecticut

Connecticut is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south .Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately...

, was a prominent historian, educator and author; he was also an accomplished violinist. His educational background included a B.A. from Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

 (1913) and an honorary Litt.D. from Fordham University

Fordham University

Fordham University is a private, nonprofit, coeducational research university in the United States, with three campuses in and around New York City. It was founded by the Roman Catholic Diocese of New York in 1841 as St...

. In 1914, he married Helen Gerard Sherwood, and they had six children.

Walsh's historiography and alleged antisemitism

Walsh's work is written from an avowedly Catholic point of view. In some cases he has been accused of crossing the line between apology (for example, for the Inquisition or Isabella of Spain) and antisemitic prejudice.

The blood libel controversy in the Dublin Review

Dublin Review (Catholic periodical)

The Dublin Review was an influential Catholic periodical founded in 1836 by Michael Joseph Quin, Cardinal Wiseman and Daniel O'Connell. Quin had the original idea for the new journal, soon persuading Wiseman to lend his support, and next enlisting O'Connell whose Catholic Emancipation campaign he...

Cecil Roth

Cecil Roth

Cecil Roth , was a British Jewish historian.He was educated at Merton College, Oxford and returned to Oxford as reader in Jewish Studies from 1939 to 1964...

 accused Walsh of resurrecting the blood libel

Blood libel

Blood libel is a false accusation or claim that religious minorities, usually Jews, murder children to use their blood in certain aspects of their religious rituals and holidays...

 in his book Isabella of Spain . For instance, according to Roth, Walsh uncritically accepted the Spanish Inquisition

Spanish Inquisition

The Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition , commonly known as the Spanish Inquisition , was a tribunal established in 1480 by Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile. It was intended to maintain Catholic orthodoxy in their kingdoms, and to replace the Medieval...

's version of the La Guardia

Holy Child of La Guardia

The Holy Child of La Guardia was the purported victim of a ritual murder by the Jews in the town of La Guardia in the central Spanish province of Toledo . On November 16, 1491 an auto-da-fé held outside of Ávila concluded the case with the public execution of several Jewish and converso suspects...

case. Walsh's reply disputed the accusation.

Walsh's general view of the Jews

...all their miseries, for which I could weep, are not the result, fundamentally, of the hatred and misunderstanding of others, but the consequence of their own stubborn rejection of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ who predicted in unmistakable language exactly what has befallen them.

Finally, let us be realistic about the matter - there is a quality in the Jews which does not exist in any other race...is it not possible, is it not indeed obvious, that the elusive difference is spiritual?...how could such a people, cast off once more by a just God whose divine Majesty they had affronted, fail to experience an inner dislocation of the spirit, which, as the core and animating principle of their whole being, must inevitably extend disharmony, discontent, and futility to their outward acts, bodily and mental?