Justice & Law Quote by Jack Schwartz

Schwartz is mapping the grim elasticity of scapegoating: when open hatred needs a rationale, it latches onto whatever Jewish figure can be framed as both insider and threat. The “Court Jew” isn’t invoked here as a real sociological type so much as an enduring political prop - the alleged fixer with “the ear of the ruler,” a convenient bridge between envy of access and conspiracy about control. It’s an accusation engineered to feel self-evident: if the ruler is corrupt, blame the whisperer; if policy is unpopular, blame the intermediary. The phrase works because it compresses class resentment and paranoia into one character.

Then he pivots to the Inquisition, where the target shifts without changing the underlying mechanism. “Thrived after their conversion” points to conversos/Marranos, people whose formal Christianity did not grant safety because suspicion can’t survive without inventing a category of impure belonging. The subtext is brutal: assimilation is not an escape hatch when the culture is invested in policing origins. Prosperity becomes incriminating; proximity to power becomes proof; survival itself becomes “evidence.”

As a scientist, Schwartz writes with a clinical, comparative impulse - two historical snapshots offered like data points in a pattern. The intent isn’t antiquarian detail; it’s to show how anti-Jewish animus mutates to fit the moment, swapping costumes (court influence, false conversion) while preserving the same storyline: Jews as uniquely adept manipulators who prosper illegitimately. That storyline is less about Jews than about societies looking for a morally satisfying culprit for their own instability.