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

The Jews of Rome, like Jews everywhere in early modern Europe, faced tremendous legal and social constraints, endemic violence, and expulsion, ghettoization, and forced conversions. Most of these practices were rooted in anti-Jewish polemics dating to the Middle Ages. Yet, for Rome, two of these, the ghetto and systematic efforts to convert Jews through sermons at the Oratory of Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini, were innovations of the sixteenth century. In Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews, Emily Michelson offers the first monograph in English to examine these sermons and their impact both on the Jewish community and on the religious life of Rome. Sifting through a plethora of sources, including papal bulls, treatises, and sermons of conversionary preachers, Michelson demonstrates that despite a few celebrated conversions of wealthy Jewish families, the sermons on the whole failed. Nevertheless, the sermons to Roman Jews persisted for close to two and a half centuries. Michelson argues that the longevity of the sermons owes more to their value to a “multi-layered” audience that, besides the Jewish community, included the clerical and civic elite of Rome, pilgrims, and travelers from beyond the Alps. Each of these audiences found different meanings in the conversionary sermons that ranged from annoyance and resistance (Jews) to a celebration of the globalizing mission of the post-Tridentine church (ecclesiastics and the faithful).The first three chapters explore the milieu that led to the foundation of the papacy’s first sustained attempt at converting Jews through preaching at the Oratory of the Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini. Michelson locates the origins in heightened anxieties about Jews that had led to their expulsions from Spain and Portugal, respectively in 1492 and 1497. In Rome, these anxieties took the form of the establishment of its Monte di Pietà in 1539 in an effort to deter Christians from borrowing money from Jewish pawnbrokers, the burning of the Talmud in 1553 by the Inquisition, and the creation of the Ghetto in 1555 by Paul IV, with its aim, as Kenneth Stow has shown, of forcing the Jews to convert due to the misery of confinement.The papacy’s goal of converting Roman Jews culminated with Gregory XIII’s bull of 1577, Vice Eius Nos, which established conversionary sermons to the Jews and the College of Neophytes, and his bull of 1584, Sancta Mater Ecclesia, which prescribed precise rules for the sermons, including the required attendance of one-third of the Jewish population of Rome on every Sabbath. Michelson shows that the foundation of the conversionary sermons was met with enthusiasm by Rome’s clergy and papal officials. The sermons took place in the oratory of the most prestigious Roman confraternity, the Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini, founded by Philip Neri. The sermons quickly attracted the patronage of cardinals and prestigious religious orders, all keen on seeing the conversion of the Jews as part of the papacy’s world mission.One of the key offices of these routinized sermons was that of the predicatore degli ebrei, the preacher to the Jews. The position attracted the attention of talented clergymen from prominent religious orders, especially the Dominicans and Jesuits, including Robert Bellarmine and Antonio Possevino from the Society of Jesus. Many converted Jews or their descendants eagerly took up the post, as in the case of Gregorio Boncompagni Corcos degli Scarinci, scion of an early convert under Gregory XIII and a predicatore degli ebrei for nearly forty years in the seventeenth century. These men, according to Michelson, combined a devout desire to advance the papacy’s missionizing goals with an ambition to promote themselves, either through prolific writing and sermons or by advancing up the church hierarchy.In chapter 4, Michelson makes her most original and convincing arguments. Having noted the resistance of the Jewish to the sermons and their overall failure in the previous chapters, she asserts that the sermons were a ritualized spectacle, concerned less with converting the Jews than with disseminating an image of Rome as a center of piety and holiness. Both sermons and pilgrim guidebooks connected this image with other Roman rituals—Holy Years, visiting the seven great churches of Rome, and Forty Hours’ Devotions. Jews were thus part of a multi-layered audience, yet increasingly not the primary audience, which consisted of Christians, primarily members of ecclesiastical and urban elite, but also included pilgrims and tourists on the Grand Tour. Each of these audiences took something different away from the sermons, which many could attend virtually through pilgrimage books and travel accounts. For the ecclesiastical elite, they confirmed the Catholic mission of the post-Tridentine church. For pilgrims, they taught Catholic doctrine and its mission as public drama. For tourists, often Protestants from the North, the sermons played up the exotic nature of the Jews, who had been exiled from France and England for centuries.Michelson, in fact, maintains that Jews were “living props” used by Christians to express a variety of views. She continues this theme in chapter 5 with a detailed reading of many sermons that have survived from the seventeenth century. Here, Michelson shows how worn-out tropes dating to the Middle Ages, especially in the sermons of San Bernardino of Siena and Saint Vincent Ferrer, continued to inform early modern conversionary sermons. These tropes ranged from stubbornness and ingratitude to myths of blood libel. The sermons, moreover, created a trite dichotomy between the false Jews with their modern ritual practices and the good Jews of antiquity with their god-fearing ways. For Michelson, the sermons and writing of conversionary preachers created “imaginary Jews,” since neither depiction was grounded in any social or theological reality.Chapter 6 continues the exploration of tropes, but this time from the perspective of one preacher, Gregorio Boncompagni Corcos. In this chapter, Michelson sifts through his abundant oeuvre of sermons, notes, and other writings that he accumulated over the course of his tenure as predicatore degli ebrei (1649–1688) and finds that Boncompagni adopted a more restrained view of Jews and their rituals in his sermons, although he could still alienate them, as when he sought to give a sermon on the beatification of Pius V in 1672. His sermons explored global Catholicism’s encounters with Protestantism, Islam, and heresy through the lenses of Jews and their beliefs.In her last chapter, Michelson examines the various ways in which Jews protested and resisted the sermons. Most commonly this took the form of everyday acts of resistance—James C. Scott’s notion of the weapons of the weak—during the sermons. The Jews who were forced to attend the sermons plugged their ears, talked among themselves, used secret signals, shouted, and made various other noises to disrupt the preachers. Catholic officials issued countless decrees against these activities and had constables patrol the oratory to fine Jews who were not sitting quietly and modestly during the sermon. Jews also publicly protested with petitions, complaining of preachers who attacked their rituals and moral character, and of the presence of Christians at the oratory. Michelson concludes by suggesting that the individual and collective resistance to the sermons bore tangible results and planted the seeds for emancipation in the nineteenth century.Michelson offers a compelling, nuanced exploration of the conversionary sermons with their multiple goals and layered audiences. Her book is brimming with ideas that should inspire further research. However, the book is more a work of cultural and religious history than of social history. Rome’s urban population is rarely mentioned, except in the context of Carnival races and violent encounters. Did Romans of all social ranks attend the sermons? Were scripted encounters of the sermons and other forms of ritual the only ways Jews and Christians could legitimately interact with one another after the foundation of the Ghetto and the sermons? The records of the Governor’s Tribunal of Rome suggest a different interpretation, one that still needs further study. Nonetheless, Michelson has told a convincing and well-researched story that should make important contributions to the history of early modern Rome, its Jewish community, and the Catholic Church’s encounter with religious minorities.