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 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 overlap, and how professional knowledge networks ramify into unexpected places. For example, her remarks on the connections between moneylending—a hugely important occupation for Jews in Renaissance Italy—and knowledge of precious metals amplify her presentation of the social and economic dimensions of Salomone da Sesso's world (e.g., p. 19).

At times the book flattens the religious experience of Jews in fifteenth-century Italy. Herzig places a lot of importance on Jewish religious practices when social (or economic) considerations may have been as important. For example, she deduces from a bill for the forty-eight meals that Salomone ate at a Jewish osteria in Ferrara that he ascribed much importance “to observing the Jewish dietary laws” (29). Perhaps. And perhaps lodging and eating at that particular osteria was his only option as a professing Jew, or simply more socially advantageous to him. In another instance Herzig mentions a particular well-known liturgical phrase and assumes that “the Jews of Mantua” “recited it daily” (43). From the work of Umberto Cassuto, Vittore Colorni, Reuven Bonfil, David Ruderman, Diane Owen Hughes, and many others, we know that there was a variety of religious expression among Jews in fifteenth-century northern Italy. We cannot assume monolithic orthopraxy in any premodern Jewish diaspora, especially not Renaissance Italy.

There are other defects in this book. The effort to tell a story in a readable manner sometimes results in oddly casual English phrases out of place in a historical work published by a leading university press: “debt gets racked up somewhere” and “Salomone relied on his mother to save his neck” are two examples early in the book (26, 27). It is puzzling that there is no guide to the numerous abbreviations in the endnotes. Also, a bibliography would have been useful. Unfortunately, the transcriptions from archival documents abound in odd and unnecessary interventions. The author inserts numerous editorial corrections where none are necessary, usually because Herzig expects premodern Italian vernaculars to conform to modern orthographic standards. She singles out dona as an erroneous spelling (249n1), when in fact it was common for northern Italian vernaculars during this period to halve consonants in words such as donna, mamma, and nonna. She flags se spolgiò as an error (295n32), but substituting lg for gl is a common rendering for the voiced palatal lateral approximant in premodern Italian vernaculars. Examples could be multiplied.

In spite of these drawbacks, Herzig has succeeded in writing an accessible book that should garner readers from a number of academic disciplines and subfields: the social history of the Italian Renaissance, the history of conversion in the later Middle Ages, Jewish studies, the history of art, and the history of religion. Given the sensational aspects of her story, and the robust multimedia marketing campaign led by Harvard University Press, the book should find readers outside the academy as well.