A Convert's Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy by Tamar Herzig (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Convert's Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy by Tamar Herzig Andrew Berns Tamar Herzig. A Convert's Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. 400 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000222 A Convert's Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy tells the story of a Jewish convert to Christianity in fifteenth-century Italy. Based on thorough archival research in several northern Italian cities, Herzig combines narrative history with some historiographical engagement. The book will stand as an example of microhistory—Herzig explicitly acknowledges the influence of Thomas Robisheaux—and an appealing study of a colorful character from Renaissance Italy. The heart of Herzig's book is her story of the life of Salomone da Sesso, a Jew who converted to Christianity in 1491 and was patronized by the Este family in Ferrara. One of the better-known Jewish artists of the Renaissance, Salomone da Sesso was a successful goldsmith and swordsmith. Although specialists have long known this, the general reader might not be aware that goldsmithing was one of the major professional and creative outlets for Jewish artists at this time. Painting, sculpture, and manuscript illumination all presented unique challenges to the Jewish practitioner, since they were perceived by the Jewish religious leadership as encouraging the violation of biblical proscriptions against creating idolatrous images (18). As Herzig explains, da Sesso's conversion did not result from a genuine desire to apostatize, nor even to pursue economic advantage or social status. Instead, his conversion was coerced following an allegation of sodomy. If convicted, Salomone da Sesso would have faced execution by fire. As we know all too well from Michael Rocke's work, accusations and prosecution of homosexual activity as a crime was shockingly common in Renaissance Florence—and apparently no less so in the Duchy of Ferrara. Such allegations were especially frequent among goldsmiths (61). Following his conversion, Salomone was exonerated and took the name Ercole de' Fedeli, enjoying the protection and patronage of several members of the Este family—including Alfonso I and Isabella d'Este. Ercole de' Fedeli lived, so far as we can tell, as a practicing Christian for thirty years. Herzig's book is divided into four parts and twenty chapters, most of which are quite short. This brevity contributes to the book's overall readability. Part 1, "The Virtuoso Jew," sketches the life story of Salomone da Sesso. Part 2, "Apostasy," explores the circumstances surrounding his conversion—including his alleged homosexual activity. Part 3, "A Family of Converts," expands the story beyond Salomone himself to his daughter Caterina, who not only converted to Christianity, but also entered the tertiaries' house of Santa Caterina da Siena and took the monastic name Sister Theodora. Part 4, "Between Christians and Jews," explores Ercole's fate, and that of his family members, into the early sixteenth century. In terms of her historiographical intervention, Herzig argues that forced conversion complicates the "traditional historiographical view that stresses the Ferrarese rulers' benevolent Jewry policy" (2). Herzig also understands this conversion story as reflecting "the discriminatory and repressive dimensions of Jewish-Christian [End Page 455] relations in Renaissance Italy" (244). No serious scholar would doubt this: it is commonplace even among historians who emphasize creative collaborations and intellectual cooperation between Jews and Christians that those episodes were exceptional, and were underlaid by a social, economic, and juridical structure that treated Jews as inherently inferior. But Herzig adds a certain level of nuance to her work when she notes that her book "cautions against seeing members of the persecuted minority solely as passive victims" (244). Indeed, as Herzig demonstrates, Salomone da Sesso / Ercole de' Fedeli had plenty of agency throughout his life. There are other strengths to this book. Herzig is sensitive to the importance of social class—and not merely religious identity—in Renaissance Italy. She is perhaps at her best in disclosing "the chasm separating religious ideology from the social realities experienced by Italian Jews who consented to baptism" (10). Her training and experience as a social historian are also on display through this work: she is good at illuminating how occupational and social structures...