Italia Judaica: Gli Ebrei nello Stato Pontificio fino al Ghetto (1555). Atti del VI Convegno internazionale, Tel Aviv, 18-22 giugno 1995. [Pubblicazioni degli Archivi di Stato, Saggi 47.] (Rome: Ministero per i Beni Culturali a Ambientali, Ufficio Centrale per i Beni Archivistici. 1998. Pp. 307. Paperback.) This volume contains the proceedings of an international conference held at Tel Aviv under the joint auspices of the Italian government's Ministero per i Beni culturali a ambientali the Universities of Tel Aviv Jerusalem. The present installment of Italia Judaica, concerned with Jews in the Papal States until the establishment of the Roman ghetto in 1555, is the sixth in a series that dates back to the first congress held at Bari in May 1981. Fifteen papers were presented at the conference in Tel Aviv, but two, by Michele Luzzati on Jews in Bologna by A. Toaff on the Jewish bank in Umbria, are not included. English Italian are the official languages of the volume. There does not seem to be a thematic sequence to the order of the papers. Schlomo Simonsohn discusses the lot of Jews in the Papal States considers their condition to have been relatively favorable, despite ups downs, at least in contrast to their coreligionists elsewhere in Europe, until the advent of the Counter-Reformation such measures as the erection of the ghetto by Paul IV in 1555. Joseph Schatzmiller examines the papal monarchy as viewed by medieval Jews and the political expectations they nurtured-rightly or wrongly-regarding the Apostolic See (p. 30), focusing on the papal enclave at Avignon, which was the seat of the Roman Curia for part of the fourteenth century. Alberto M. Racheli, in a paper enriched with numerous plates, traces from an architectural viewpoint the transformations experienced by the Rione Sant'Angelo, the quarter enclosing the Roman ghetto. Simon Schwarzfuchs draws attention to the light shed on various aspects of Jewish life society in the Papal States from the late 1530's to 1569 by the response (judgments) pronounced by Rabbi Isaac Joshua ben Immanuel of Lattes in the course of settling marital morals disputes, controversies in the banking sphere, among many other matters. Micaela Procaccia, on a related theme, takes up Jewish encounters, not with rabbinical but with secular justice, specifically the criminal court of the Governatore in Rome in the first half of the sixteenth century whose records are remarkably complete, despite occasional lacunae, concluding that the establishment of the ghetto in 1555 produced an increase in Jewish criminality. Sandra Debenedetti Stow, in a technical but elegantly presented paper, deals with the linguistic cultural mediatory efforts conducted by Jewish scholars both within their own community as well as with the outside Christian world, with principal attention on the literary efforts of the fourteenth-century Rabbi Jehuda Romano. Fausto Pusceddu reconstructs the lively Jewish presence in the fourteenth fifteenth centuries in the provincial papal city of Rieti situated just north of Rome. With his dense, richly documented paper, Fausto Parente analyzes closely the debate that raged within curial circles, following the burning of confiscated Talmuds in Rome, on September 9, 1553. The contenders were, on the one hand, the hard-liners, led by the Spaniard Francisco Torres, rabidly anti Jewish, who argued for the suppression of Hebrew books commentaries, the more moderate, humanistic wing that would have contented itself with their expurgation. The next two papers, by Anna Esposito Cesare Colafemmina, offer concise but solidly documented studies of the progressive deterioration in the status of the Jewish enclaves in two provincial centers, respectively the Patrimony of St. Peter in Tuscia, including the occasional papal seat of Viterbo (Esposito), Benevento (Colafemmina). …