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.

But to Mr. Netanyahu, “Jewish history is a history of holocausts,’’ as told David Remnick of The New Yorker in 1998. He suggested that Hitler’s genocide was different only in scale.

Ben-Zion Mileikowsky was born in Warsaw, then part of the Russian empire. His father, Nathan, was a rabbi who toured Europe and America making speeches supporting Zionism. After Nathan took the family to Palestine in 1920, he changed the family name to Netanyahu, which means God-given.

In 1940, Mr. Netanyahu went to the United States to be secretary to Vladimir Jabotinsky, who was seeking to build US support for his militant New Zionists.

While in the United States, Mr. Netanyahu earned his doctorate from Dropsie College of Hebrew and Cognate Learning in Philadelphia. During the 1950s and ’60s, he and his family lived alternately in Israel and in the United States, where he taught at Dropsie, the University of Denver, and Cornell University.

In addition to Benjamin, who was Israel’s prime minister from 1996 to 1999 and elected again in 2009, Ben-Zion Netanyahu leaves another son, Iddo, a radiologist and writer. His wife, the former Cela Segal, died in 2000.

Mr. Netanyahu’s eldest son, Jonathan, commanded the rescue of more than 100 Jewish and Israeli hostages on board an Air France jet at Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976. He was the only Israeli soldier killed.