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

IF 0.2 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY
John M. Hunt
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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.","PeriodicalId":41352,"journal":{"name":"Mediterranean Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Mediterranean Studies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5325/mediterraneanstu.31.2.0253","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0

Abstract

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.
天主教奇观与罗马犹太人:近代早期的皈依与抵抗
罗马的犹太人和近代欧洲其他地方的犹太人一样,面临着巨大的法律和社会约束、地方性暴力、驱逐、隔离和强迫皈依。这些做法大多源于中世纪的反犹太论战。然而,对于罗马来说,其中的两个,隔都和通过在圣三一圣堂(Oratory of Santissima trinit<e:1> dei Pellegrini)布道使犹太人皈依的系统努力,是16世纪的创新。在《天主教奇观与罗马的犹太人》一书中,艾米丽·迈克尔逊提供了第一部用英语研究这些布道及其对犹太社区和罗马宗教生活的影响的专著。通过筛选大量的资料来源,包括教皇的训令、论文和改宗传教士的布道,迈克尔逊证明,尽管一些富有的犹太家庭有著名的改宗,但布道总体上是失败的。然而,对罗马犹太人的布道持续了近两个半世纪。迈克尔逊认为,布道的长盛不衰更多地归功于其“多层次”受众的价值,除了犹太社区外,还包括罗马的神职人员和公民精英、朝圣者和来自阿尔卑斯山以外的旅行者。这些听众都在皈依布道中找到了不同的含义,从烦恼和抵抗(犹太人)到庆祝后特伦丁教会(神职人员和信徒)的全球化使命。前三章探讨了导致教皇第一次持续尝试通过在圣三一圣堂布道来使犹太人皈依的环境。迈克尔逊将其根源归结于对犹太人的高度焦虑,这种焦虑导致他们分别于1492年和1497年被驱逐出西班牙和葡萄牙。在罗马,这些焦虑表现为1539年建立了圣彼得山,以阻止基督徒向犹太典当行借钱;1553年宗教法庭焚烧了《塔木德》;1555年保罗四世建立了犹太人区,其目的是,正如肯尼斯·斯托(Kenneth Stow)所展示的那样,迫使犹太人因监禁的痛苦而改变信仰。教皇让罗马犹太人皈依的目标在格列高利十三世(Gregory XIII) 1577年的诏书《Vice Eius Nos》(Vice Eius Nos)和1584年的诏书《Sancta Mater Ecclesia》(Sancta Mater Ecclesia)中达到顶峰。《Vice Eius Nos》确立了向犹太人和新信徒学院(College of Neophytes)传教的规则,其中规定了传教的精确规则,包括每个安息日必须有罗马三分之一的犹太人参加。迈克尔逊表明,皈依布道的基础受到了罗马神职人员和教皇官员的热烈欢迎。布道在最负盛名的罗马兄弟会圣三一圣堂举行,圣三一圣堂是由菲利普·内里创立的。布道很快吸引了枢机主教和有声望的宗教团体的赞助,他们都热衷于将犹太人的皈依视为教皇世界使命的一部分。这些例行布道的主要职责之一就是向犹太人布道。这个职位吸引了来自著名宗教团体的有才华的神职人员的注意,尤其是多米尼加人和耶稣会士,包括耶稣会的罗伯特·贝拉明和安东尼奥·波塞维诺。许多皈依犹太教的犹太人或他们的后代急切地接受了这个职位,比如格列高利奥·邦康帕尼·科科斯·德格利·斯卡林奇,他是格列高利十三世时期早期皈依犹太教的人的后裔,在17世纪担任了近40年的degli ebrei预言者。根据迈克尔逊的说法,这些人既有推进教皇传教目标的虔诚愿望,又有通过多产的著作和布道,或通过提升教会等级来提升自己的野心。在第四章中,迈克尔逊提出了她最具原创性和说服力的论点。在前几章中,她注意到犹太人对布道的抵制和他们的全面失败,她断言布道是一种仪式化的景象,与其说是为了改变犹太人的信仰,不如说是为了传播罗马作为虔诚和神圣中心的形象。布道和朝圣指南都将这一形象与其他罗马仪式联系起来——圣年、参观罗马七大教堂和四十小时祈祷。因此,犹太人是一个多层受众的一部分,但越来越不是主要受众,主要包括基督徒,主要是教会和城市精英,但也包括朝圣者和大旅行的游客。每个听众都从布道中得到了不同的东西,许多人实际上可以通过朝圣书籍和旅行记录来参加布道。对于教会精英来说,他们确认了后特伦丁教会的天主教使命。对朝圣者来说,他们将天主教教义及其使命作为公共戏剧来传授。
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来源期刊
Mediterranean Studies
Mediterranean Studies HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY-
CiteScore
0.20
自引率
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发文量
20
期刊介绍: Mediterranean Studies is an interdisciplinary annual concerned with the ideas and ideals of Mediterranean cultures from Late Antiquity to the Enlightenment and their influence beyond these geographical and temporal boundaries. Topics concerning any aspect of the history, literature, politics, arts, geography, or any subject focused on the Mediterranean region and the influence of its cultures can be found in this journal. Mediterranean Studies is published by Manchester University Press for the Mediterranean Studies Association, which is supported by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and University of Kansas.
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