Emily Michelson. Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews: Early Modern Conversation and Resistance

With Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews, Emily Michelson brings together years of work in the archives and libraries of Rome (and beyond) and opens the way to essential reflections on the present and future of the history of the Jews in Italy. The volume includes seven chapters, with an introduction and a conclusion. The careful construction of the text starts with a convincing presentation of the Roman conversionist system at the height of the Counter-Reformation. Working from largely unexplored sources, Michelson inserts the specific history of the preaching addressed to Roman Jews into this context, reconstructing for the first time both the Jews’ movements in and out of the ghetto and the organization of the preachers’ speeches, to then focus on their careers. In this sense, this case study offers a backdrop for reading the development of global Catholicism, which, in Europe and beyond, was engaged in mission projects aimed at reaching all the peoples of the world. The intellectual and family biography of Gregorio Boncompagni Corcos, specifically, offers essential discussion in this vein which carries the reader to the final pages, which tell the story of failure (chap. 6). In fact, in the end, all the extraordinary effort the Church expended in its capital city to convince Jews to become Christians amid ghettoization, forced preaching, and psychological violence in the House of the Catechumens did not achieve the desired results. The large majority of Jews firmly remained Jews, continued living in the serraglio, and organized themselves in a variety of ways to resist the enormous pressure to convert to which they were subjected.