Anna and Tranquillo: Catholic Anxiety and Jewish Protest in the Age of Revolutions

Description

A historical interpretation of the diary of an eighteenth-century Jewish woman who resisted the efforts of the papal authorities to force her religious conversion After being seized by the papal police in Rome in May 1749, Anna del Monte, a Jew, kept a diary detailing her captors’ efforts over the next thirteen days to force her conversion to Catholicism. Anna’s powerful chronicle of her ordeal at the hands of authorities of the Roman Catholic Church, originally circulated by her brother Tranquillo in 1793, receives its first English-language translation along with an insightful interpretation by Kenneth Stow of the incident’s legal and historical significance. Stow’s analysis of Anna’s dramatic story of prejudice, injustice, resistance, and survival during her two-week imprisonment in the Roman House of Converts—and her brother’s later efforts to protest state-sanctioned, religion-based abuses—provides a detailed view of the separate forces on either side of the struggle between religious and civil law in the years just prior to the massive political and social upheavals in America and Europe. Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 1. The Diary 2. Crises 3. The Roman Ghetto 4. The Confessional State 5. Conversion and the State 6. Under Papal Rule 7. Legal Obstacles 8. The Jews’ Defenders 9. Jewish and Christian Awareness Appendix I: Leo XIII The Encyclical Immortale Dei of 1885 Appendix II: Conversion and Innovation in Canon Law Appendix III: The Limits of Port Jewry’s Achievements Appendix IV: Lorenzo Virgulti (1685–1735) Notes Glossary Bibliography Index