Ben-Zion Netanyahu, 102, a scholar of Judaic history who lobbied in the United States for creation of the Jewish state, wrote a revisionist account of the Spanish Inquisition, and became a behind-the-scenes adviser to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, his son, died Monday at his home in Jerusalem.

The elder Netanyahu’s views were relentlessly hawkish. He argued that Jews inevitably faced discrimination that was racial, not religious, and that compromising with Arabs was futile.

In the 1940s, as executive director of the New Zionist Organization in the United States, he met with policymakers like General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

His group, part of the right-wing movement known as revisionist Zionism, originally opposed creating the new Israel by dividing Palestine between Jews and Arabs. It wanted a bigger Jewish state, which would have included present-day Jordan.

The partition was made, but Mr. Netanyahu came to support the smaller state and was instrumental in building US support.

Mr. Netanyahu reinterpreted the Inquisition in “The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain’’ (1995). The predominant view had been that Jews were persecuted for secretly practicing their religion after pretending to convert to Catholicism. Mr. Netanyahu offered evidence that most Jews in Spain had willingly become Catholics.

Jews were persecuted, he concluded - many burned at the stake - for being perceived as an evil race, rather than for anything they believed or had done.

Jealousy over economic success fueled oppression, he wrote.

Though praised for its insights, the book was also criticized as having ignored standard sources and interpretations. Reviewers noted that it seemed to look at long-ago cases of anti-Semitism through the rear-view mirror of the Holocaust.