William Thomas Walsh (September 11, 1891 – January 22, 1949), was an historian, educator and author; he was also an accomplished violinist.

Biography

Walsh was born in

Waterbury Waterbury is a city in the U.S. state of Connecticut on the Naugatuck River, southwest of Hartford and northeast of New York City. Waterbury is the second-largest city in New Haven County, Connecticut. According to the 2020 US Census, in 202 ...

Connecticut Connecticut () is the southernmost state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York to the west, and Long Island Sound to the south. Its cap ...

. His educational background included a B.A. from

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

(1913) and an honorary Litt.D. from

Fordham University Fordham University () is a Private university, private Jesuit universities, Jesuit research university in New York City. Established in 1841 and named after the Fordham, Bronx, Fordham neighborhood of the The Bronx, Bronx in which its origina ...

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

Work

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 The Inquisition was a group of institutions within the Catholic Church whose aim was to combat heresy, conducting trials of suspected heretics. Studies of the records have found that the overwhelming majority of sentences consisted of penances, ...

or Isabella of Spain) and antisemitic prejudice. In the '' Dublin Review'' he wrote about the Jews that, "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". In ''Characters of the Inquisition'' he wrote, "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?"

Cecil Roth Cecil Roth (5 March 1899 – 21 June 1970) was a British Jewish historian. He was editor in chief of ''Encyclopaedia Judaica''. Life Roth was born in Dalston, London, on 5 March 1899. His parents were Etty and Joseph Roth, and Cecil was the youn ...

accused Walsh of resurrecting the

blood libel Blood libel or ritual murder libel (also blood accusation) is an antisemitic canardTurvey, Brent E. ''Criminal Profiling: An Introduction to Behavioral Evidence Analysis'', Academic Press, 2008, p. 3. "Blood libel: An accusation of ritual mur ...

in his book ''Isabella of Spain''. For instance, according to Roth, Walsh uncritically accepted the Spanish Inquisition's version of the La Guardia case. Walsh's reply Walsh's letter to the ''Dublin Review''
/ref> disputed the accusation.

Bibliography

*
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

1940 A calendar from 1940 according to the Gregorian calendar, factoring in the dates of Easter and related holidays, cannot be used again until the year 5280. Events Below, the events of World War II have the "WWII" prefix. January *January ...

* "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) * ''The Carmelites of Compiègne'' (a play in verse) * ''Saint Peter, the Apostle'' (1948)

Notes

References

* ''New Catholic Encyclopedia'', The Catholic University of America, 1967. * ''Characters of the Inquisition'', by William Thomas Walsh, TAN Books and Publishers, Inc, 1940/87. * Letters of William Thomas Walsh, kept in the archives of the Georgetown University Libraries, one of them described as "contains anti-semitic and anti-masonic references"

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Walsh, William Thomas 1891 births 1949 deaths 20th-century American poets People from Waterbury, Connecticut Roman Catholic writers Laetare Medal recipients 20th-century American dramatists and playwrights