Piracy and law in the Ottoman Mediterranean

Abstract

manding narrative deserves. Especially the perspectives of those Eastern Christians, whom Eliano spent the majority of his life trying to convince of his Catholic truth, are given rather short shrift. More sustained comparison with other Catholic missionary efforts to the Ottoman Empire – from those of the merchants Giovanni Battista Vecchietti and Giovanni Battista Britti, to those of the Jesuit Giulio Mancinelli and the papal legate Léonardo Abela – would have been another insightful way to peel back the many layers of Eliano’s narrative. One could also object that it is at times not immediately apparent how the specifics of the shifts described in the book – that is, the order’s rising scepticism regarding its Jewish-lineage members – played out in Eliano’s case. For not all of Clines’s inferences on these points are borne out by the evidence he cites. It is not unlikely that Eliano indeed had to recalibrate the nature of his Jewishness in light of the apprehension about religious dissimulation that filled the Society of Jesus in the late sixteenth century. But numerous other developments – from Eliano’s disastrous first attempt at converting the Copts and the Order’s remarkably fervent belief in his abilities, to Eliano’s training as a Jesuit priest – can explain why he and his superiors made decisions the way they did. The book would thus have benefited from a more thorough analysis of the tensions between the contingencies of Eliano’s own life and the broader currents of change that swept through the Society of Jesus and the Mediterranean in this period. And, therefore, depending on how much liberty one allows Clines to fill the gaps in the historical records and how much contingency one looks for in excavations of this kind, some readers may find the book a touch too deterministic and reductionist. Notwithstanding these concerns, as a portrait of the only Jewish-born member of the Society of Jesus, A Jewish Jesuit succeeds in demonstrating that for Eliano “becoming Catholic was far more difficult than being baptized” (87). Clines raises a number of fundamental questions about the nature of early modern conversion, and illuminates in great detail how one convert – through words and works – carved out a life for himself as a missionary, proving his worth and looking to allay suspicions of religious dissimulation. And Clines does so in engaging and highly readable prose and through dozens of colourful vignettes. The book is therefore a valuable contribution to our understanding of that intricate nexus of conversion and missionary work in the early modern eastern Mediterranean.