Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance

Emily Michelson

Princeton University Press, £30, 352 pages

In 1555 Pope Paul IV decreed that Rome’s Jews, “who through their own fault were condemned to eternal servitude”, should now live within the walls of a ghetto whose doors would be locked at night. These strictures marked a watershed moment; for the first time, the Jewish community in Rome was physically segregated from the rest of the population. Its history stretched back to antiquity; it was the oldest continuous Jewish settlement in Europe.

Ever since the second century BC, Jews in Rome had been confronted with changing political situations. Although they were mostly tolerated, their situation worsened after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in AD70. After the fourth century, Christian Rome offered Jews relative protection against the sort of popular violence they experienced in other places. Jews were always a tiny minority in Rome; in 1555 they accounted for only 3 per cent of the city’s population. Why did their presence suddenly become so problematic?

In the middle of the 16th century, the Jews of Rome were caught up, indirectly, in the struggle between Protestant Reformers and the Catholic Church after the Reformation. In its fight against Christian heterodoxy the Catholic Church reasserted its doctrines and clarified its beliefs, and new religious orders brought Catholic education to the most remote corners of the known world. Meanwhile, a group of non-Christians continued to live under the pope’s nose and remained seemingly indifferent to his efforts at Catholic renewal. The Jews’ symbolic importance was enormous.

From around the 1570s, each week a stipulated number of Rome’s Jews were forcibly subjected to conversionary sermons. Every Saturday they were marched from their ghetto across the city into a Christian church, where the sermons took place in the form of a public spectacle that was also attended by members of the city’s Catholic majority. The exercise had a double function: it was intended both for the edification of the Catholic faithful, and for the instruction of the Jews in the Christian faith.

As Emily Michelson states in her impressively-researched new book, conversionary preaching was “utterly fundamental to early-modern Catholic self-fashioning”. She argues that the sermons did not even primarily aim for the conversion of Jews, but that they were mainly a platform for showcasing the new aspects of Catholicism that were being developed in reaction to Protestantism. Among the regular onlookers were not only interested Romans but also foreign visitors and diplomats, many of whom were suitably impressed by the performance.

Based on understudied archival material, Michelson sheds light on the institutions and the persons who made these sermons possible, as well as on audiences and their reactions. Crucially, she demonstrates how Jews developed their own traditions of resisting conversion. During the sermons, they feigned sleep or made noises; at other times, they lobbied against aspects of the preaching legislation or protested against some of the sermons’ content.

Michelson’s finest chapters dissect the sermons themselves. Having previously published The Pulpit and the Press in Reformation Italy (2013), she is intimately familiar with the preacher’s art. The point of departure of her analysis of the sermons is that these were mostly repetitive and formulaic. Conversionary preaching had evolved out of the medieval tradition of scholastic disputations; disputations were intellectual exercises which aimed to show the superiority of one argument over another. Some conversionary preachers had expert knowledge of the Hebrew language, and argued that Jews had misinterpreted ancient scriptural passages; some were even Jewish converts.

On the flipside, such sermons were not easily adapted to local traditions; the Jews they addressed were “imaginary” rather than real. Eternal truths, it was thought, were more relevant to conversion than specific circumstances. Conversionary preaching therefore stayed mostly within its own rhetorical limits and did not address, or even acknowledge, the concerns of the actual Jews of early-modern Rome. Michelson introduces us to one preacher, however, who was the exception that proved the rule: Gregorio Boncompagni Corcos.

Corcos came from a family of Jewish converts to Catholicism; he was official preacher to the Jews from 1649 to 1688, and frequently spiced up his sermons with unprecedented themes. He included discussions of contemporary Protestantism and Islam, of the lives of recent saints, and of actual Jews of Rome. Nonetheless, Corcos, too, seems to have impressed the Christian bystanders much more than his involuntary Jewish audience.

“As the consummate other, Jews in Rome shaped early modern Catholicism from the outside,” Michelson concludes. She has solidified her reputation as an authority on Italian preaching with this thought-provoking book.

Dr Stefan Bauer is Lecturer in Early Modern World History at King’s College, London

The post Preaching to the unconverted appeared first on Catholic Herald.