Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. ix + 268. Hb, $99.99.
In his seminal 1949 work, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe ii (Paris, Librairie Armand Colin), the founding father of Mediterranean studies, Fernand Braudel, privileged structures over actors in a history of the sea that was largely devoid of humans. One of the more interesting strands in Mediterranean studies in recent years has seen scholars such as Natalie Zemon Davis, Mercedes García-Arenal, Noel Malcolm, and Erin Maglaque upend Braudel’s paradigm and use the lives of individuals and families as a point of entry into examining broader trends and themes within the early modern Mediterranean world. Robert John Clines’s A Jewish Jesuit in the Eastern Mediterranean: Early Modern Conversion, Mission, and the Construction of Identity represents a richly researched, compelling entry into this body of scholarship.
On one level this book is a biography. It recounts the captivating story of Giovanni Battista Eliano, the only Jewish convert to join the Society of Jesus during the early modern period. Eliano is a fascinating and important figure in his own right, and this book is a much-needed and long-awaited treatment of his life. His story is also important because, compared to conversion narratives generated from inquisitional and other institutional sources, we know much more about Eliano’s spiritual and religious views and experiences because of the rich repository ego literature in the form of his letters, mission reports, and a fascinating autobiography he composed at the end of his life. This allows us an unprecedented and rare glimpse into his religious and spiritual life.
The book is organized chronologically: Chapter one explores Eliano’s early life between Rome and Venice as a member of a noted family of Jewish intellectuals, his education, conversion, and eventual entry into the Society. Ignatius of Loyola, Diego Laínez, and other Jesuit leaders encouraged Eliano because they believed that his Jewishness, his unique education and cultural cognizance, as well as his formidable linguistic abilities might all prove useful to the order’s numerous Mediterranean projects. The following chapters examine Eliano’s several missions, which were largely spent in the Levant laboring among the region’s Eastern Rite Christians. Chapter two traces his first major assignment, a mission to the Egyptian Copts whose objective was to implement doctrinal reforms and encourage submission to Rome. The mission was unsuccessful largely due to Coptic resistance, but also in part because Eliano’s Jewish past was used by Jews in Egypt, who knew his family and resented his apostasy, to stir up trouble with local Ottoman authorities, which led to Eliano’s hasty retreat. After a brief interlude in Rome, he was sent again into the Levant, this time to the Lebanese Maronite Christians. The objectives of his two missions to Lebanon, which are the focus of chapters three and four, were similar to those of his first mission to Egypt, but proved more successful, in part because of Eliano’s leadership and his ability to skillfully navigate the local culture. Chapters five and six treat Eliano’s second mission to the Copts, which to his great dismay followed a very similar pattern to the first and produced the same disappointing results. The final chapter of the book examines the waning years of Eliano’s life spent in retirement in Rome: it was during this time that he composed his fascinating autobiography at the request of Claudio Acquaviva.
Beyond biography, however, A Jewish Jesuit in the Eastern Mediterranean is also a thoughtful interrogation of the fraught questions of conversion and religious identity. As Clines notes in his excellent introduction, there is now a rich body of scholarship on conversion in the early modern era generally, and in the Mediterranean more specifically. The foundational work of Bartolomé and Lucille Bennassar has been supplemented more recently by scholars such as Tijana Krstić, Marc Baer, Kenneth Stow, Tobias P. Graf, Bernard Heyberger, Peter Mazur, Marina Caffiero, Giuseppina Minchella, to name only a few.
Clines’s contributions to this discourse are several. Where previous scholarship has often treated conversion collectively and in largely pragmatic, opportunistic, and functional terms, Clines insists that we must approach it individually and take it seriously, no matter how problematic our attempts to assay motivation and sincerity may be. He poses the provocative question, if we acknowledge that some “converts were not dissimulators but were actually motivated to convert out of a sense of religiosity” (7) and in a sincere effort to find meaning, how might this alter the way we think about conversion and religious identity in the early modern era.
In response, Clines’s argues that conversion must be seen as a process rather than an event, a step in a lifelong “conversion career” (9). “Conversions were never complete,” and thus individuals had to constantly both situate themselves within and defend religious borders that were “too amorphous to define,” but also “too important to ignore” (88). The process of religious identity formation was ephemeral, evolutionary, and inherently conflictual. As a result, conversion was “a persistent source of anxiety” (11), and converts were often not trusted nor were their claims of religious transformation and conviction accepted at face value. Becoming a Christian (or Muslim or Jew) was “far more difficult than simply being baptized” (87): converts faced a lifetime of performing their new faith in ways that reassured suspicious members of both their new and old religious communities. Clines reads Eliano’s numerous attempts at self-fashioning and controlling his narrative as a lifelong attempt to integrate by proving the veracity and sincerity of his fateful decision to become a Christian in a time and place that had serious doubts about the possibility of true conversion, and in which Jewish, Muslim, and Christian individuals and institutions consistently questioned his religious identity.
A Jewish Jesuit in the Eastern Mediterranean is an engagingly written work of topnotch historical research that grapples with important questions about conversion and religious identity in new and imaginative ways. It is a valuable addition to the scholarship on these topics, and going forward, this book will be an important point of reference for scholars grappling with these thorny questions.
doi:10.1163/22141332-00704008-15
