Kenneth Stow. Anna and Tranquillo

Although Anna and Tranquillo: Catholic Anxiety and Jewish Protest in the Age of Revolutions ostensibly focuses on events that occurred in May of 1749, its real chronological center is 1793. The earlier date is when the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Anna del Monte, the unmarried daughter of a prominent and wealthy Jewish family in the Roman ghetto, was kidnapped from her home by agents of the Catholic Church and placed in the House of Converts, the Casa dei catecumeni, where for a period of thirteen days, she was subjected to continual threats, sermons, visitations, and exhortations designed to induce her to convert. The latter date is when her brother Tranquillo publicly circulated a version of the diary she had produced detailing her ordeal, culminating in her eventual release and return to the ghetto and to her family. In this brilliant and ambitious analysis, Kenneth Stow argues that while Anna’s diary contains authentic elements, it was effectively reshaped decades after her untimely death. Tranquillo rewrote his sister’s text into a potent political tract, both a diagnosis of the church’s mistreatment of the Jews and an appeal for their liberation. The year 1793 was not only the revolutionary year in which the Jacobins guillotined Louis XVI but also when the ghetto was besieged by an antirevolutionary mob, and the year after another similar episode of a Jewish woman’s kidnapping and attempted conversion had occurred. But more broadly, it fell within the period blending Enlightenment and revolution, in which, according to Stow, Tranquillo and his fellow Roman Jews felt most acutely the disparity between their aspiration for emancipation as citizens and the Roman polity’s retrenchment as an oppressive confessional state. Stow presents Anna’s—or rather, Tranquillo’s—diary as a veritable cri de coeur against this intolerable state of affairs.

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