This is an important book, one that makes us reflect on past conclusions. It inspires us to ask what constitutes modernization, and what are the antecedents of Jewish–Christian reciprocity in a post-emancipation world. Its specific theme is whether censorship is an indicator of cultural transformation, if not also a generating force; the author himself is ambivalent about the latter interpretation.

The book opens with a discussion of the thirteenth-century burning of the Talmud and subsequent censorship. It presses on to the problems of censors and consistency from the late fifteenth century onward, and it describes the roles of printers, editors, and (principally convert) censors as they worked together in the print shop, identifying some of the most important censors. It notes the hurdles that censorship is said to have sought to overcome, talks of humanism and Hebraism as factors in censorial work, and measures the input of Jews in the act of censorship. There is a long chapter on the Sefer ha-zikkuk and the standards it set, and an attempt to link censorship with overall cultural change among Jews, even with respect to present-day Jewish historical writing. Theoretical observations about reading and its effects introduce the whole and accompany every argument.

The question is whether the book's central thesis holds. Did censors create an “autonomous Jewish space” based on a body of “permitted” Hebrew literature, which, in turn, became the grist of modern Jewish reading, shaping a “modern Jewish consciousness” more tolerant of Christianity, which Jewish historians have also projected back onto the Jewish medieval past? (197). Did the censored products of the printing press in Italy's limited arena affect Jewish thinkers outside the peninsula, in Western Europe and beyond? (The book refers directly, and fleetingly, to echoes only in the Ottoman Empire.) The answers are not always easy to find; this is a book full of interjected reflections and ruminations, which interrupt even the lengthy discussion of Domenico Gerosolomitano's Sefer ha-zikkuk, where detail and narrative are so needed.

The fundamental difficulty in determining its impact, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin—who is scrupulously forthright—admits openly, is that censorship was inconsistent. There may have been rules, but violations and inconsistencies were constant, and the censors were unqualified, as I myself have chronicled in an essay that Raz-Krakotzkin generously cites. Yet it is not clear whether this confusion disappeared. A full answer would have required a lifetime of comparisons and would have made for an unending book. Nonetheless, more extensive particulars and direct citation from the sources would have helped undergird the primary argument that censorship fashioned works fit for Hebraists while also creating what is called “autonomous [Jewish] space.”

The same applies to the author's statement that censorship reflects a newer ethnographic view of Jews, no longer a purely theological one from the Christian side. However, Buxtorf's claim—he is adduced as a prime example of “demystified” (181) ethnography—that Jewish children would “pollute [inquinare]” meat that Jews sold to Christians by urinating on it reveals that newer thinking blended with the theologically rooted old more than canceling it out. Conversely, when the Franciscan Fortunato Coppoli said that Jews, with their lending, “have sucked our [town's] blood,” he meant that Jews—as a distinct cultural group—were attacking the societas fidei, the corpus Christi; the theological image overlies a charge of ethnic competition. Ultimately, it is Coppoli whom Giovanni D'Arco echoes in his late eighteenth-century portrait of the ghetto as a place where Jews hatched unsavory business plots in order to undermine Christian stability—read: subverted the societas fidei. Where does theology end and ethnic stereotyping begin? Not to mention that Raz-Krakotzkin himself candidly admits that what we see on paper is not necessarily what people thought.

What the book calls new was not necessarily so. The later sixteenth century may have produced lists of permitted books. Nonetheless, the first to say that Jews were entitled to literature essential for their continuity—specifically, the Talmud—was Innocent IV, in 1247: “suis libris nolumus injuste privare.”Footnote ¹ From the time of Innocent IV, moreover, attacks on Jewish literature were centered on blasphemy, not the nova lex charge of the late 1230s that made the popes uneasy, whose canonical collection, the Decretals, of 1234, was also a nonscriptural nova lex. If, alongside accusations of blasphemy, the idea of nova lex did, as claimed, resurface in the sixteenth century, it was exclusively within the context of “rabbinic deliramenta” that were said to block conversion; contemporaries are clear.

To be sure, Tommaso Campanella argued that the Talmud's conception of God was faulty by philosophical standards (this is not noted in the book), but this does not mean, as is said many times (e.g., 38), but not supported with hard evidence, that the Talmud was treated as heretical or magical. Campanella, moreover, balanced calls for expurgation with others to exploit the alleged Christological content in rabbinic writings intuited by Christian savants. If censorship “cleansed,” for people like Campanella, the purpose was to attack Judaism “with its own sword.” And he was seconded—preceded would be more correct—by a large and influential chorus whose voice went unheeded: The Talmud was forever proscribed. Regardless, therefore, of the Talmud's likely (full or partial) underground circulation, how can it be asserted that the censors created an enabling body of legitimate Jewish literature, when that legitimacy excluded the most central of Jewish books, for whose reinstatement censors apparently did not plead and for whose absence, codes (themselves actually proscribed, at least originally, and once again as late as Clement VIII) and books of prayer or reflection could not compensate.

As for linking censorship to “disciplining,” the term that Italian historians of the Papal Roman Inquisition employ to describe this body's activities, leading historians of this institution such as Gigliola Fragnito see disciplining not as refining, as does Raz-Krakotzkin, but as draconian and destructive, terms that seem better suited to describe the attack on the Talmud. Likewise, to assimilate the actual censorship of Hebrew works with the Catholic reaction to Protestantism and the internal Catholic attempt “to clean house” sweeps too far to the side those thirteenth- and fifteenth-century precedents in Spain, which, though (partially) surveyed in an early chapter, are subsequently neglected. Besides, fears (not mentioned), such as those of one Cardinal Scaglia, that the Talmud was fomenting Protestant schism in Germany led to a call for a total ban, not expurgation.

This call does gibe with Raz-Krakotzkin's claim that one reason for burning the Talmud was to prevent Judaization among a wider Christian population. Yet how might persons other than members of a very small Hebrew-reading elite be seduced by reading an unexpurgated text, readers who would not have been fooled by the censors' codes and for whom euphemisms such as aku”m for goi had to have been transparent? Similarly, there seems to be some haste in drawing conclusions with respect to the treatment of sixteenth-century methods of classification and indexing. It greatly facilitates the claim about creating a body of enabling Jewish literature to say, “We cannot distinguish between the confiscation and burning of Hebrew books and the confiscation and burning of books in other languages,” because the Talmud “was classified under the category of Incertorum Auctorum libri prohibiti” (37). Yet one look at the randomness that characterizes sixteenth-century indices cautions against building on this categorization.

As all too often elsewhere, the canons and ius commune are not addressed head on. It was they—not a prooftext adduced by Augustine and first cited by Innocent III—that for 1,500 years formally justified a Jewish space in Christian society and that even the Roman ghetto's founder, Pope Paul IV, explicitly sustained. Censorship perhaps helped refine long-standing legal definition and practice. That it actually created a novel sphere of Jewish legitimacy, I doubt. Indeed, to attribute so critical a role to censorship requires firm textual evidence. The same applies to making a convincing argument that censors were—as this book portrays them—enabling mediators. This portrayal implies that, either consciously or unconsciously, censors were bent on doing the opposite of what so many contemporaries said the censor should be doing, namely, forwarding conversion. In fact, it implies that censors were running a quasi-conspiratorial operation to undermine papal conversionist and restrictionist goals. These include convert censors—for so many censors were converts—who, like Andrea del Monte, otherwise wrote and preached virulently about Judaism's perniciousness; and whose activities, Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini, in his I nomi degli altri: Conversioni a Venezia e nel Friuli Veneto in etá moderna (Florence, 2008)—using archival material as his source—finds overwhelmingly pernicious in both intention and fact.

What we are asked, then, is to accept on faith, not particulars, that the admittedly abrasive atmosphere of the print shop, in which Jews, Christians, and converts worked together to produce expurgated yet accurately edited books, ended on a positive note that favored both Jews and Christian Hebraists. Yet, the ambivalences noted in Neofiti-Jewish relations aside, it is hard to believe the idea was to make life easier for Jews. To me, it seems that if convert censors sought accuracy, their motive was neither the benefit of Jewish readers nor the good of the publisher. Rather, it was to produce better texts to forward conversion, for which a bowdlerized version would never do.

Censors, as the book says, may have been facilitating Christian Hebraism, creating a text that Christians could use without fear of the Inquisition. But the goal of even this Hebraism was principally conversionary or, at least, deprecatory. Likewise, even should we stipulate that the involvement of Jews in censorship mirrored the transition to a more accepting Jewish attitude toward Christianity, the argument seems overstated. Change came earlier. The famous tosafist discussion of the talmudic passage ‘Avodah Zarah 2a already asks whether Christianity is idolatry, paralleling the Meiri's well-known doubt of Christian idolatry hundreds of years before the sixteenth century. Clearer definitions, such as that of Leon Modena, thus suggest a culmination, not sharp innovation. Nonetheless, Modena's admission that Christianity was monotheistic went hand in hand with the assertion that it was also structured from a chain of errors. And when the scientist, encyclopedist, and university graduate, the eighteenth-century Isaac Lampronti, differentiates goi from aku”m, he has strong reservations: A goi is said not to practice idolatry—when it comes to allowing Christians to give testimony—yet a Jew is not to dine with a goi, even if the Jew consumes his own food.Footnote ² The more popular (so-called) autograph diary of Anna del Monte, published in 1793, has a convert-preacher (and potential censor) tell her in the Casa dei catecumeni, “E Voi ci andate descrivendo per Idolatri” (You go around calling us idolaters).

Christian attitudes changed even more slowly. The same preacher tells Anna, “I Talmudisti, e … loro libri … causa della flagellazione delle vostre Anime” (The Talmudists and their books, the cause of the perdition of your souls). Censorship may have introduced clarity, but it did not, as Raz-Krakotzkin feels, bespeak a revolution. To say as well that censorship removed “vengeance” from the Jewish mentality means to assume, not just assert, that a vengeful posture once existed, rather than what I myself would call pervasive derision.

Moreover, should we accept Raz-Krakotzkin's thesis that censorship's intent was to justify a continuing Jewish space in Christian society, then we must also appreciate this justification's potential treachery. Reemphasizing the Jews’ canonical and civil (ius commune) rights (including the right to books, however expurgated) also meant, as the eighteenth-century priest, legist, and firm supporter of the Roman Casa dei catecumeni Antonio Ricciulo said, condoning the effectively legal kidnapping of Jewish children whose converted (ex-Jewish) relatives had “offered” them for baptism; the legal excuse was that the state that guaranteed legal observance also saw itself as empowered to determine the welfare of children, including their souls. Whatever is asserted about its theoretical potential for Jewish continuity, in practice, censorship was a tool in the hands of a regime determined to end Jewish existence.

As for the so-called autonomous Jewish space—whether that of the ghetto itself or some amorphous intellectual sphere—it would have been liberating only if we accept that in the ghetto, as Bonfil has argued and Raz-Krakotzkin seconds, Jews were freer to maintain their Judaism and acculturate. Evidence says acculturation preceded the ghetto: The syntax (not just interjected words) of the Hebrew found in notarial acts and entries in the record books of various communities is purely Italian, and from well before the ghetto period; rentals were recorded in Italian directly. The Jewish and Christian diet was essentially the same, as were dress and modes of popular expression. Not every ghetto was identical, but it is hard to argue that ghetto space itself and a set of approved books were the engine of modernizing changes.

Nonetheless, and to return to the positive note on which I began, this book is worth the read. Raz-Krakotzkin writes history by emphasizing the nuances and inconsistencies intrinsic to cultural change and acculturation, a method that is not to be superciliously dismissed, as at least one writer did, by calling it “hedging.” It is through pointing out gradations and distinction that we are led to wonder what converts and censors really intended and whether true change in Jewish–Christian mutuality was taking place. This book thus challenges us, and regardless of how we regard its conclusions, it should not be put aside. Raz-Krakotzkin himself is aware of the limits, which he often spells out. If readers follow the author's own careful lead, they will be well rewarded.