This book makes use of newly available archival sources to reexamine the Roman Catholic Church’s policy, from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, of coercing the Jews of Rome into converting to Christianity. Marina Caffiero, one of the first historians permitted access to important archives, sets individual stories of denunciation, betrayal, pleading, and conflict into historical context to highlight the Church’s actions and the Jewish response. Caffiero documents the regularity with which Jews were abducted from the Roman ghetto and pressured to accept baptism. She analyzes why some Jewish men, interested in gaining a business advantage, were more inclined to accept conversion than the women. The book exposes the complexity of relations between the papacy and the Jews, revealing the Church not as a monolithic entity, but as a network of competing institutions, and affirming the Roman Jews as active agents of resistance.

Forced Conversion in Christianity, Judaism and Islam explores the legal and theological grounds through which Christians, Jews, and Muslims sanctioned and reacted to forcible conversion in premodern Iberia and related settings.

In the Middle Ages, Jews who converted to Christianity occupied a shadowy and often dangerous place between the two religions. Rejected by their former community, and sometimes not accepted fully as Christians, converts were often destitute and at the mercy of noble benefactors. Only in London was there an official, royally sanctioned and funded, policy of conversion. When Henry III founded the Domus Conversorum, in 1232, he created a unique institution, one intended to house, protect, and instruct converts from Judaism. This book provides an analysis of Jewish conversion in England and continental Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries and offers a detailed look at London’s Domus Conversorum: its finances, its administration, and its inhabitants. Using royal records, financial accounts and receipts, Church letters and documents, London wills and assizes, and chronicles, this book presents the most in depth account of Jewish conversion in London to date.

Soon to be a major motion picture from Steven Spielberg. A National Book Award Finalist The extraordinary story of how the vatican's imprisonment of a six-year-old Jewish boy in 1858 helped to bring about the collapse of the popes' worldly power in Italy. Bologna: nightfall, June 1858. A knock sounds at the door of the Jewish merchant Momolo Mortara. Two officers of the Inquisition bust inside and seize Mortara's six-year-old son, Edgardo. As the boy is wrenched from his father's arms, his mother collapses. The reason for his abduction: the boy had been secretly "baptized" by a family servant. According to papal law, the child is therefore a Catholic who can be taken from his family and delivered to a special monastery where his conversion will be completed. With this terrifying scene, prize-winning historian David I. Kertzer begins the true story of how one boy's kidnapping became a pivotal event in the collapse of the Vatican as a secular power. The book evokes the anguish of a modest merchant's family, the rhythms of daily life in a Jewish ghetto, and also explores, through the revolutionary campaigns of Mazzini and Garibaldi and such personages as Napoleon III, the emergence of Italy as a modern national state. Moving and informative, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara reads as both a historical thriller and an authoritative analysis of how a single human tragedy changed the course of history.

The Jewish community of early modern Venice was perhaps the leading Jewish community of its time. It emerged as a response to the desire of the Venetian government to make credit readily available and, toward the end of the 16th century, it greatly expanded as Venice, faced with a serious decline in its international maritime trade, adopted a policy of attracting Iberian New Christian merchants. Yet Jews were still treated as the Other and subjected to restrictions and discriminatory measures, including confinement to a segregated enclosed quarter; the 'ghetto'. Despite this, the interplay between economically motivated raison d'état and traditional religious hostility resulted in a delicate balance which enabled the Jewish community of Venice to assume a real leadership role in the world of the Iberian Jewish Diaspora. Based extensively on previously unconsulted documents, these articles deal with central issues in the experience of the Jews of Venice, and so of Diaspora Jewish history in general: the Jewish quarter, maritime trade and urban moneylending, the Jewish distinguishing head-covering, relations with church and state, the forced baptism of Jewish minors, the converso problem, and anti-Judaism.

Exploring deep into the history of the conflict between Christians and Jews from medieval to modern times, this wide-ranging volume - which includes newly uncovered material from the recently opened post-Soviet archives - seeks to bring positive understanding to controversial issues of inter-faith confrontation. Here, a number of eminent scholars from around the globe, come together to discuss openly and objectively the dynamics of Jewish creative response in the face of violence. Through the analysis of the histories of both the Christian and Jewish religious traditions, we are brought to an understanding of their relationship as a modern day phenomenon.

This treatise was written about 400 A.D. Concerning it Aug. in Retract. Book II. c. xviii., says: I have written seven books on Baptism against the Donatists, who strive to defend themselves by the authority of the most blessed bishop and martyr Cyprian; in which I show that nothing is so effectual for the refutation of the Donatists, and for shutting their mouths directly from upholding their schism against the Catholic Church, as the letters and act of Cyprian. Aeterna Press