Rare books, manuscripts and ephemera from five centuries

An overzealous convert lists others 

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MEDICI, Paolo Sebastiano. CATALOGO DE' NEOFITI ILLUSTRI usciti per misericordia di Dio dall’Ebraismo e poi rendutisi gloriosi del Cristianesimo per esemplarità di costumi, e profondità di dottrina... In Firenze: Per Vincenzo Vangelisti, 1701. £950

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FIRST EDITION. 8vo, pp. xxiv, 80; woodcut head- and tailpieces; small tears to foot of a couple of leaves, not touching text, and some light dampstaining to lower half of first few gatherings; old ink erasure of ownership signature on title-page, and occasional spotting, but otherwise clean; in contemporary vellum, spine with raised bands, title in ink on spine; lower joint cracked at foot, and light wear, but still a good copy.

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Sole edition of this extraordinary compendium of the lives of noted Jewish converts to Catholicism, compiled by the Tuscan Jew turned Catholic biblical scholar and apologist Paolo Sebastiano Medici (1671-1738).

Medici was born into a Jewish family in Livorno, home of the largest Jewish population in Italy at the time, and given the name Moisè. In his youth, he distinguished himself in his study of the Scriptures and languages, and began to study for the rabbinate, but, under the influence of the Capuchin friar Ginepro de Barga, converted to Catholicism, being baptised in 1688 in the Cathedral at Livorno. In the same year he took minor orders, before being ordained as a priest in Florence in 1695. Even before his ordination, he was already teaching Hebrew at the Accademia Fiorentina, publishing מחלשון הקודש or Midolla della lingua santa in 1694, in which he built on the first Hebrew grammar in Italian, which had been published by another convert, Guglielmo Franchi, in 1591. He went on to publish numerous works of exegesis, but his (mixed) reputation today is based more on his work as a preacher and proselytiser, who had set himself the task of converting the Jews of Tuscany to Catholicism. In a series of works, the best known of which is Riti e costumi degli ebrei confutati, first published in 1736 and much reprinted, he attacked with a convert’s zeal the beliefs and practices of his former coreligionists, to the extent that as early as 1697 representations were already being made to the Inquisition by the Rabbi of the Roman Jewish Community, Tranquillo Vita Corcos, asking for a retraction and denunciation of Medici’s fabrications (Alla Sacra Congregatione del S. Offizio, per l'Vniuersità degl'Ebrei. Memoriale., Romae typis Reu. Apost.). 

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The present work is entirely representative of Medici’s output; as an incentive to conversion, Medici adapts the standard literary genre of a catalogue of illustrious people to present as examples well-known rabbis who had converted, especially noting where they went on to publish works of Catholic theology or, better still, apologetics; the fifty-odd subjects, while mainly Italian, also include those from Spain, Jerusalem, Thessaloniki, Germany, and France, among whom are Pablo de Santa Maria and his son Alfonso, both of whom became bishop of Burgos; Epiphanius of Salamis, and the Dominican bishop of Furlì, Alessandro Franceschi. Beyond offering biographical sketches of these men, Medici elaborates the privileges granted by the church to neophytes, in the hope of encouraging further converts. 

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See Lisa Saracco’s entry on Medici in DBI Vol 73; Marina Carriero, ‘Alle origini dell’antisemitismo politico, l’accusa di omicidio rituale nel sei-settecento tra autodifesa degle Ebrei e pronunciamenti papali’, Publications de l'École française de Rome 306 (2003), 25-59; outside Continental Europe, OCLC records copies at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Chicago, Pennsylvania, Hebrew Union College, Leeds, and the British Library. 

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