William Thomas Walsh

William Thomas Walsh, was an American historian, educator and author; he was also a violinist.

Biography

Walsh was born in Waterbury, Connecticut. His educational background included a B.A. from Yale University. In 1914, he married Helen Gerard Sherwood, and they had six children.
In 1933, he was given an honorary Litt.D. from Fordham University.
Walsh died in 1949, in White Plains, New York. His widowed wife died in January of 1967 at 75 years old.

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 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 accused Walsh of resurrecting the blood libel 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 disputed the accusation.