Would you class the witch trials as a war or a genocide?

To me, the Witch trails were no different than what Hitler did to the Jewish people. I was a war against women. Thousands of women (and a few men and children) were horribly tortured and murdred in the name of religion. Most were not witches and it was just an excuse to get their land. (a large amount were actually Jewish). Very sad.

Neither. It’s not a genocide because they did not spare anyone who was suspicious of doing magic. And they did not in any way concentrate on a certain group or people. Most victims were women, but men could also be accused of doing magic or having a pact with the satan.

And it was not a war either. Not a real war. It did not have an army involved. No one was fighting back.

To me the medieval witch burnings look more like an instrument of terroar established by the churches to keep people in a permanent state of fear. Fear of dark magic and fear of being accused. To keep them controllable. And to have a way to remove everyone who is inconvenient in any way. With a lot of officially accepted collateral damage brought about by everyone who wanted to get rid of a hated neighbor… and thus accused them of witchery.

bye, the sheep

p.S. I know terroar is spelled without the a. But it will not let me post that word.

None of them were really witches. Some maybe believed that they were. But inquisition is a totally different thing than genocide. It’s not like anyone was trying to remove women from the face of earth. Nothing like that. Inquisition was an instrument for the powerful (that is, the church) to do away with inconvenient people. Women with too much knowledge happened to be inconvenient. They did not fit in the role model. Many of the victims were midwives.

Besides. The genocide against the Jews had absolutely nothing to do with religion. It was a purely racist thing. It did not help a Jewish person at all if they converted to another religion in the Nazi-Reich.

Genocide. It was just the killings of a lot of innocent people because they were ‘witches’

Genocide is the systematic destruction of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.. As a percentage of women only a small number of women were convicted as witches and since the women who were accused to be witches almost never were it was more of an attack on women than witches. There was a great deal of misogyny in medieval Europe. women were blamed for the fall of men, were considered morally inferior to men, and thought at best a necessary evil. The various calamities and plagues of the period instead of being blamed on natural phenomena were blamed on witchcraft. In large part witch trials in Europe served as a way to deal with the population of elderly spinsters and widows. When older women who were a burden on others started to get senile, demented, or a little baffy they might be accused of witchcraft and either locked away or executed. American witch trials were less common and short lived. Often they were motivated by disputes between neighbors.

Clever (mis)spelling; I think I like it better than the original. :)

A few points:

1. The European witch hunts clearly weren’t genocide, which by definition targets an ethnic, racial, cultural, or nationality group. The real question is, was it gynocide?

2. Most of the women who were targeted were mature, single, and poor, with no land or assets to motivate their accusers. It was generally about falsely blaming these women for threats to the social-cultural-religious-economic order, not about greed.

3. The same Inquisition that took the lead in some of the witch hunts also more-or-less invented European racism during those same years. How? By expanding from persecution of Jews for their religion to include the persecution of certain Christians because they had “Jewish blood,” meaning that their Christian parents or grandparents had converted from Judaism. (This is exactly what Astrid rightly points out the Nazis did much later, but they got this idea from the Inquisition.)

4. @Astrid: The Nazi genocide against Jews absolutely did have a religious basis - not in the religion of the Jews, but in that of the Nazis. Similarly with the witch hunts.