Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

  Leaving Spain In 1492 Spain’s Jews were given an awful choice. They were, by royal fiat, to convert to Christianity or they would be kicked out of the country. The majority half-halfheartedly took on the new religion. However, a minority of as many as 100,000, loyal to the God of their fathers, took, instead, […]

The recent post on the bodies in the well from Norwich took Beach through several books on medieval Jewish communities in England and the dominant impression on reading these accounts was the danger of being Jewish in that period. Let’s return to Norwich which included one of Britain’s bigger Jewish communities after London: one estimate has […]

The picture above is a horrific one. The bodies of seventeen individuals, eleven of them children (the youngest two years of age) who were, at some point in the Middle Ages (dating 1150-1300), thrown down a well in the East Anglian town of Norwich.  The bodies were discovered in 2004 and various years of careful […]

  ***Dedicated to KMH who came up with this link*** A recent post looked at Bible sandwiches, the idea of eating the Bible to cure yourself from ills or poison. The average reader might raise their eyebrows and wonder what the scriptural basis for that is. This was Beach’s residual-protestant reaction but, then, to his shock, […]

Beach has previously looked at ‘the gong of the world’, the desert boy Apion, who while still brushing sand from his hair, decided to insult the Jews of Alexandria and, indeed, the Jews of the entire Mediterranean. We do not have Apion’s anti-semitic work, the classical equivalent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: […]

In the late ninth century A.D. a curious encounter took place in Islamic Tunisia, an encounter between outsiders. On the one hand, there was the Jewish community of Kairouan, living now under Arab rule, but with its roots stretching back to Roman times and perhaps beyond. On the other, was a foreigner named Eldad Ben […]

Bizarrists must always be thankful for the Atlantic Ocean, because it has offered us some of the craziest history theories of the last two hundred years. Welsh Indians in Florida, Indians in Ireland, Gaels in Newfoundland, Vikings everywhere, the Chinese in New England building lighthouses, Babylonians in California,  Atlantis in Bolivia… Most of this is […]

There seems to be no question that early human societies were polytheistic. Might it even be said that polytheism is the natural human condition? Perhaps monotheism is the equivalent of Big Macs and fried mars bars, whereas we should all really be eating freshly killed gazelle and the fruits of the forest? There is, in […]

Here’s a bizarre scenario (with no basis in the historical record…). c.c.c.1000 a Jewish, a Muslim and a Christian missionary find themselves on the wrong side of the Ural Mountains among a horse-killing, horse-worshipping pagan people (and before anyone writes in there is some ancient and medieval evidence for Jewish ‘evangelism’). The Christian missionary, Peter, […]

What is a Catholic or an Orthodox Mass? Well, it is essentially an act of magic, a miracle, the bread and the wine that are brought together become the flesh and the blood of Christ, which Christians then devour. Put in these brief, crude terms Christianity is a cannibalistic and highly unpleasant: though, of course, […]

A Beachcombing favorite to day, the Marranos of Belmonte. In 1492 Spain expelled its Jews or at least those who refused to convert to Catholicism. Some of these fleeing Spanish Jews crossed the border into Portugal where they joined an already substantial Jewish population and the Jews of all descriptions there were driven out of […]

Suicide has proved abhorrent to most spiritual traditions. Certainly, the great monotheistic religions and most of the far Eastern religions have condemned ‘self-murder’: cue lots of pulpit bashing and descriptions of hell or unpleasant reincarnations. This begs the question though of what you can do if you live in 500 BC or 500 AD or […]