William Thomas Walsh: “I commenced my researches with a prejudice in favour of the poor persecuted Jews” - [PEACE]

[Zenaan Harkness]

>From le Wiki:

William Thomas Walsh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thomas_Walsh

William Thomas Walsh (September 11, 1891 – February 22, 1949),[1]
born in Waterbury, Connecticut, was an historian, educator and
author; he was also an accomplished violinist. His educational
background included a B.A. from Yale University (1913). Walsh
received an honorary Litt.D. from Fordham University.


Life

Born in Waterbury, Connecticut on September 11, 1891, William Thomas
Walsh attended local schools and received a bachelor's degree from
Yale University in 1913. the following year, he married Helen Gerard
Sherwood; they had six children. He began his career as a reporter,
working at papers in Waterbury and Hartford, Connecticut, New York
City, and on the Philadelphia Public Ledger. During the last year of
the Great War he held the position of Connecticut State Fuel
Administrator.[1]

In 1918, he took up teaching English in Hartford’s public high
school. From 1919 to 1933, Walsh was head of the English Department
at the Roxbury School in Cheshire, Connecticut. He then became an
English professor at the Manhattanville College of the Sacred
Heart.[1]

In 1941, he was awarded the Laetare Medal by the University of Notre
Dame.[2]

Walsh received international attention for his biographies Isabella
of Spain and Philip II. In 1944, he was given Spain's highest
cultural honor, the Cross of Comendador of the Civil Order of Alfonso
the Wise, and also the 1944 Catholic Literary Award of the Gallery of
Living Catholic Authors.

Walsh's work was set apart by its well-researched, documented,
footnoted, and faithful account of history. Heralded for his
uncompromising devotion to truth and accuracy, Walsh's frank
retelling of many sensitive but nevertheless historical events
elicited both acclaim as well as personal attacks from detractors
within the Jewish community. For instance, Jewish writer Cecil Roth
claimed that Walsh's recounting of events in his acclaimed book The
Last Crusader: Isabella of Spain, which had earned Walsh Spain's
highest cultural honor, the Cross of Comendador of the Civil Order of
Alfonso the Wise, had crossed the line. Roth accused Walsh of being
an "anti-Semite." Roth's charge had followed Walsh's factual
repudiation of the works of Lea and Loeb, whose account of the Jews
in Spain during Isabella's reign held popular sway but had been
challenged as historically dubious, if not anti-Catholic. Walsh's
famous reply to Roth's ad-hominem attack was published in "The Dublin
Review, A Quarterly and Critical Journal, October 1932, London: Burns
Oates and Washbourne Ltd., pp. 232-25," wherein Walsh wrote: "Dr.
Roth begins by accusing me of reading Spanish history 'with the eyes
of the wildest anti-Semite'. There are two errors here. The term
'anti-Semite' is inaccurate. Surely Dr. Roth does not mean that I am
against the Arabs, Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, and other
Semitic peoples? He really means that I hate Jews. And that is false.
If anything, I commenced my researches with a prejudice in favour of
the poor persecuted Jews. It was a popular prejudice that shrank
considerably in the strong light of historical truth. . . ."

One of Walsh's most popular books was Our Lady of Fatima, which to
this day is considered one of the best and most accurate accounts of
the event. The account was based on his own personal interviews with
visionary Sister Lucia and many of the visionaries family members and
acquaintances.


Bibliography
WTWalsh.jpg

  The Mirage of the Many (1910)
  Isabella of Spain, the last crusader New York, R. M. McBride & company, 1930.
  Out of the Whirlwind (novel, 1935)
  Philip II (1937)
  Shekels (blank-verse play, 1937)
  Lyric Poems (1939)
  Characters of the Inquisition New York, P.J. Kennedy & Sons [c1940]
  "Gold" (short story)
  Babies, not Bullets! (booklet, 1940)
  Thirty Pieces of Silver (a play in verse)
  Saint Teresa of Ávila (1943)
  La actual situatión de España (booklet, 1944)
  El casa crucial de España (booklet, 1946)
  Our Lady of Fátima (Doubleday, 1947) ISBN 978-0-385-02869-1
  The Carmelites of Compiègne (a play in verse)
  Saint Peter, the Apostle (1948)