Catholic Spectacle and Rome's Jews

Early Modern Conversion and Resistance

Emily Michelson

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691233291
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: History

A new investigation that shows how conversionary preaching to Jews was essential to the early modern Catholic Church and the Roman religious landscape Starting in the sixteenth century, Jews in Rome were forced, every Saturday, to attend a hostile sermon aimed at their conversion. Harshly policed, they were made to march en masse toward the sermon and sit through it, all the while scrutinized by local Christians, foreign visitors, and potential converts. In Catholic Spectacle and Rome's Jews, Emily Michelson demonstrates how this display was vital to the development of early modern Catholicism.Drawing from a trove of overlooked manuscripts, Michelson reconstructs the dynamics of weekly forced preaching in Rome. As the Catholic Church began to embark on worldwide missions, sermons to Jews offered a unique opportunity to define and defend its new triumphalist, global outlook. They became a point of prestige in Rome. The city's most important organizations invested in maintaining these spectacles, and foreign tourists eagerly attended them. The title of "Preacher to the Jews" could make a man's career. The presence of Christian spectators, Roman and foreign, was integral to these sermons, and preachers played to the gallery. Conversionary sermons also provided an intellectual veneer to mask ongoing anti-Jewish aggressions. In response, Jews mounted a campaign of resistance, using any means available.Examining the history and content of sermons to Jews over two and a half centuries, Catholic Spectacle and Rome's Jews argues that conversionary preaching to Jews played a fundamental role in forming early modern Catholic identity.

CHAPTER ONE

The World of Conversion in Early Modern Rome

HE WOULD LIVE TO REGRET the conversation. Prospero di Tullio Serampino, Roman Jew and proud father of five, found himself in the position of the biblical Jepthe, forced to keep a promise too hastily made and yield up a child. Prospero’s chance conversation with a Dominican friar may have seemed friendly enough at first. The friar, Giovanni Domenico Nazzareno, asked Prospero how many children he had, and whether he would consider making any of them Christian. He wouldn’t. But Nazzareno pushed, describing the great benefits of a Christian life, and the care and comfort that a baptized child would receive. Prospero still refused. Would it make any difference, asked the friar at last, if the pope himself conducted the baptism? A frustrated Prospero finally spat back this specific response: “If this is so, I’ll give him to you, for God wants to give him to you.” The documentary record emphasizes that these were the exact words he used, noting them so carefully that in the manuscript original, the handwriting becomes more precise, and in later printed versions the words are underlined or italicized.

Nazzareno, no fool, pounced. He informed Prospero that the hasty statement was binding and roped in bystanders as witnesses. Prospero objected immediately, insisting that he had not been serious. Nazzareno then pulled every string he could. He took the case to the rector of the House of Catechumens. The rector immediately consulted the conversionary preacher to the Jews, Giuseppe Ciantes. Ciantes determined that Prospero’s retort constituted a legally binding promise. From there, the case circled up to the Catechumens’s cardinal protector and then to the pope. Urban VIII Barberini agreed with delight to sponsor the baptism of Prospero’s child personally.

In the middle of the night, and over Prospero’s repeated protests, the rector of the House of Catechumens raided the Serampino house in the ghetto and emerged with two children: a thirteen-month-old girl, Gemma, and a boy, Solomon, who seemed about six. The Jews of Rome rallied around Prospero, furious, betrayed, and angry enough to turn the city upside down. The record describes them as mad dogs howling (latrare). The boy, Solomon, lavished with attention within the House of Catechumens, seemed to agree to convert. The rector reassessed the boy’s age to be at least seven, the age of reason and free will. In response to strenuous Jewish objections, a group of officials, again including Ciantes, reviewed the case and confirmed, predictably, that both children still merited baptism. Baby Gemma would fulfill her father’s promise; Solomon was converting of his own volition, having been persuaded. To the Catholics involved, the incident was a shining example of Urban VIII’s benevolence. For the papal baptism, they staged an elaborate ceremony in the Dominican church of the Minerva, where Nazzareno was based. It may have been the first time a pope had ever performed such a baptism personally.¹ On March 27, 1639, the children—now called Anna Urbania and Urbanus Urbanius—wore white, silver, and gold wool. The little boy was mounted on the pope’s own white horse in a triumphal procession, followed by carriages, drums, and trumpets. The crowds overflowed. The procession proceeded directly through the ghetto itself and then around much of Rome.

In some ways, this story is clearly extraordinary. Compared with other records, it stands out for the curious circumstances of the offerta, or offering of relatives for baptism, and its violence and drama. It is the only extended narrative in the record book of seventeenth-century baptisms; all other entries merited only two to three lines. Remedio Albano, the rector who recorded the story, proudly noted his own role in the action: “The friar came to me, Remedio Albano, Rector.” To him, it demonstrated “the confusion of the cursed and obstinate Jewish rabble [cenaglia], and praise of the omnipotent triune god, of the glorious Virgin Mary, and … the holy triumphant and militant church.”² The story, with its many officious meetings and performative legalism, also provided a valuable precedent for instances of contested baptism. The rector’s narrative was printed up verbatim into a pamphlet, which was later incorporated into other collections of cases. The pamphlet appears, for example, bound inside a 1694 manuscript in the archives of the Holy Office as evidence in the baptismal case of a woman offered against her will to the House of Catechumens by her husband. In 1713, it was included in a printed collection of evidence about other ambiguous offerings of catechumens, which refers to the manuscript in the baptismal record as the original. Copies of it are also preserved elsewhere in the Inquisition archives and again in the archives of the Vicariate.³ It has become one of the most retold stories in modern Jewish histories of Rome.⁴

But in other, possibly more important ways, this case is part of a general pattern—one slightly unusual incident in Rome’s sweeping conversionary campaign. The baptism of these two children, for example, was part of a regular series of baptisms of Jews and Muslims throughout the early modern period. Just a month before he oversaw the baptism of the two children, Gianbattista Scannaroli, the suffragan bishop of Rome, had baptized two young men in the church of Santa Lucia in Selce; a month later, on Holy Saturday, he baptized two more in the basilica of Saint John Lateran.⁵ Cardinals and even popes had performed extraordinary baptisms before, and would again. Dominicans and their church remained deeply involved. The celebration of conversion was already, and would remain, a priority in early modern Rome. This story, stretching from the humble priest Nazzareno to the illustrious Barberini pope, tugs on the threads that bound the entire early modern city together, revealing the wide range of institutions involved in conversionary efforts.

Nazzareno’s involvement also exposes the long influence of conversionary preachers to Jews in Rome. It was the preacher Giuseppe Ciantes who first determined that Prospero’s vow could be considered binding. Ciantes’s decision allowed Nazzareno’s once-private conversation to go public, thereby engaging cardinals and popes. Moreover, Ciantes served on the committee that concluded that neither child should be returned to the ghetto. But the two men already shared a longer history. Nazzareno owed Ciantes a much deeper debt. He described it a year later when he republished an anti-Jewish tract by a previous conversionary preacher, with a new dedication to Ciantes himself (figures 1.1 and 1.2).⁶ Nazzareno’s letter of dedication is both congratulatory and personal. It celebrates Ciantes’s “glorious efforts over the course of so many years in Rome, in the holy preaching of the true faith and the conversion of the Jews and other infidels … so that with the force of this light those vain shadows of their faithlessness will be largely cleared from Jewish hearts.”⁷

FIGURE 1.1. Pietro Pichi, Le stolte dottrine de gli ebrei con la loro confutatione. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

FIGURE 1.2. Pietro Pichi, Le stolte dottrine de gli ebrei con la loro confutatione. Domenico Nazzareno’s dedication to Giuseppe Ciantes. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Yet the bond between Nazzareno and Ciantes revealed how far Jewish conversion mattered in other contexts too. Nazzareno, nicknamed “the Armenian” for his origins, explicitly thanks Ciantes for individual help. He recalls his own experience as a convert to Catholicism in the House of Catechumens in Rome and the kindness Ciantes had shown him at the time. Finally, Nazzareno brings up his own plans to return to Armenia “to commit myself totally to the conversion of souls at your example.” After the Council of Trent, Armenian Orthodox and other Eastern rite Christians increasingly found themselves defined as targets for Catholic missionary efforts in the church’s drive for universalism.⁸ In short, Nazzareno’s involvement demonstrates how two conversionary preachers to Jews in Rome—the original author and the second dedicatee of this tract—fed the Roman Church’s global mission.

The story of Prospero and Nazzareno is not the story of two men alone. The dispute between them drew in many major players on the Roman stage, from preachers to popes, whose interest in conversion extended far beyond Jews. Nazzareno’s written dedication to Ciantes, for example, mentions the “many people zealous for the propagation of the faith” who had asked him to republish the tract. The phrase evokes the recently founded congregation of the same name that coordinated global missionary efforts. His efforts also required the involvement of the Dominican Order, the House of Catechumens, and many other cardinals. If we extend the story to include the earlier edition of Pietro Pichi’s conversionary tract, we can add in the vicar of Rome, to whom it was dedicated, the Holy Office of the Inquisition, which the dedication praises, and the Master of the Sacred Palace, who provided an imprimatur. The complex network of institutions and people involved in conversion efforts is staggering. It reflects the extensive range of organizations that jointly animated the city and its pious activities.

Nazzareno was only one of many who linked Jewish and global conversion. Another preacher, Stefano Sirleto, had been so successful preaching to Jews thirty-five years earlier that the pope sent him to reconvert a straying bishop in Armenia.⁹ Antonio Possevino, the famed Jesuit diplomat, recalled how Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, had held the conversion of Jews, heretics, and gentiles “close to heart” and central to the Jesuits’ purpose. Ignatius set up mis...