In May 1749, papal police forcibly removed Anna del Monte, a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old, from her parental home in the Jewish ghetto and imprisoned her in the Roman House of Converts, the Casa dei catecumeni. For the next two weeks, she was subjected to constant preaching from clergy and other converts, who used a combination of promises of eternal salvation and earthly benefits, and threats to hold her indefinitely, in a campaign to break her will and lead her to accept baptism. Sometime after her release, Anna wrote a memoir of her experience, which was in turn edited and then circulated by her brother Tranquillo, in 1793. Kenneth Stow's remarkable book opens with a full translation of Anna's memoir (20–53), accompanied by extensive explanatory notes. Anna's story is followed by a series of chapters that place her account in a broad context of papal policy, canon law, and state initiatives to dismantle confessional regimes in which civil status depended on religious affiliation.

Kenneth Stow is fully aware that Anna's memoir is a problematic text; one of the strengths of his book is that it is able to explore the ways in which Tranquillo used his sister's story to argue against the practice of coerced conversions that continued throughout the eighteenth century. Stow argues persuasively that this rhetorical intent does not compromise the essential accuracy of Anna's memoir, which can be used to illuminate both the repressive tactics used in Rome to convert Jews and the broader history of Jewish-Catholic relations. In recounting her time in the House of Converts, Anna recalls with striking detail the individuals who cajoled and threatened her. Perhaps her brother's edited version exaggerates at times the clarity and power of her responses, but Anna's successful emergence from the Casa dei catecumeni after two weeks suggests real strength of character, and the descriptions of her anxiety, loneliness, and exhaustion are compelling and convincing.

Anna's story is a moving account of persecution and resistance, and it opens a window into an institution whose goal and methods will strike most contemporary readers as cruel and reprehensible. Stow shares this judgment, but he also shows us the history and rationale for the church's position on conversion, how it evolved over three centuries, and how Jews and some Christians sought reforms that would grant Jews civil status and erode the power of confessional regimes. Over the course of its history, from 1542 to 1871, over 2,500 Jews were converted in the Casa dei catecumeni, and given that the population of the Roman ghetto was on average 4,000, Stow concludes that “just about every Roman family had a converted relative” (75). The zeal for converts seems to have faded somewhat in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, but then grew more intense in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, setting up the background for Anna's kidnapping. Ecclesiastical officials were reacting to fear over the claims of states to erode the power of church policy and courts and to the enduring anxiety that the presence of Jews threatened to pollute the body of Christian society. Stow tells this story of increasing pressure through a close examination of papal pronouncements and the canon law that guided relations between Christians and Jews. I was struck in particular by Stow's reference to Benedict XIV's bull Beatus Andreus (1755) in which he beatified two supposed victims of ritual murder from the fifteenth century (93–94).

Stow is careful to point out that official church policy prohibited forced conversions, but he also shows how this obligation was circumvented in practice, especially during the reign of Benedict XIV. By making it easier for Jewish converts to “offer” family members to the church, Benedict created the conditions for the kidnapping of Anna, who was seized when a convert angry with her family sent her to Casa dei catecumeni by falsely claiming that she was his wife. The other legal basis for coercing Jews to convert was the concept of favor fidei (in favor of the faith), on which papal officials relied when faced with a conflict between civil law (which might have protected potential neophytes) and church canons encouraging conversion. For Stow, only the sharp separation of state and church, as enacted in the United States and France in the late eighteenth century, could offer protection for the civil rights of Jews, inevitably compromised in confessional regimes such as the Papal State.

Stow's impassioned presentation of the kidnapping of Anna del Monte can be placed alongside David Kertzer's The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (Random House, 1997), which tells a similar tale from the middle of the nineteenth century. Stow refers to this case, and to pronouncements from Leo XIII and Pius XII that suggest a sustained attachment to the principle that canon law takes precedence over civil law, which he sees as responsible for the House of Catechumens. Stow's book appeared in 2016, too late for him to comment on the December 2015 statement of the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable. This document looks back on the troubled history of Catholic-Jewish relations and affirms that in the present moment “the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews” (http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/relations-jews-docs/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_20151210_ebraismo-nostra-aetate_en.html). Seen in light of the cases of Anna del Monte and Edgardo Mortara, this is a welcome development; Stow's book reminds us of the tragic human costs of the previous policy and its long and vigorous defense by Catholic officials.