Marina Caffiero's study, first published in Italian in 2005 and expertly translated by Lydia Cochrane, is a welcome addition to an expanding literature on the fraught relations between Jews and their different host communities in early modern Italy. In particular, it builds upon the work of historians like Kenneth Stow, David Kertzer and Anna Foa to detail the conflicted relations between Jews and the Catholic Church in Rome, here during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It does so by constructing a dense web of dramatic and sometimes tragic individual case histories of Jews who converted to Catholicism and the tensions involved in the coerced baptisms which the Church employed: baptising infants against their parents' wishes, obliging new converts to single out close relations ripe for conversion, and so on. This was at a time when conversion meant severing oneself from the Jewish community, with its bonds of affection and support networks, in particular via the Church's House of the Catechumens and Neophytes, founded in 1543. Caffiero makes effective use of the records of the Roman Holy Office (now Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), not long ago made available to scholars. If the telling of numerous stories threatens at times to overwhelm the author's narrative voice, and if we get little sense of how the Roman experience of conversion compares with the experience of living between two faiths in other urban realities, such as that of Venice, we do get a rich sense of how the Church in Rome sought to exercise control over the Jews of the ghetto (here countering the myth of the Church's tolerance towards them), and how Rome's Jewish community, in turn, sought to exercise a degree of control over their own lives (countering the myth of Jewish passivity).