Where they burn books

"Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings." ("Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.") - Heinrich Heine, in his 1821 play, Almansor

To exert social and religious control, in 1480, Isabella and Ferdinand agreed to allow the Inquisition in Spain. On January 2, 1492, the leader of the last Muslim stronghold in Granada surrendered to armies of a recently united Christian Spain. They offered the remaining Muslims and Jews three 'choices': leave Spain, convert to Roman Catholicism or be executed by the Inquisition. In 1499 about 5000 Arabic manuscripts were consumed by flames in the public square at Granada on the orders of Ximénez de Cisneros, Archbishop of Toledo. It is to this event that the Heine quotation refers. Over a century later, the Jewish Heine's own books were among the thousands of volumes that were torched by the Nazis in Berlin's Opernplatz.

The burning of books is as ceremonial, as ritualistic and as much a public spectacle as the execution of a heretic. And sometimes books themselves are put on trial as if they were guilty personages. In 1242, the French crown burned all Talmud copies in Paris, about 12,000, after the book was 'charged' and 'found guilty' in the Paris trial sometimes called 'the Paris debate'.