TRENDS IN CONVERSION

As we have seen, the Jews of late medieval Italy were dispersed throughout hundreds of small and isolated communities, immersed in a Christian society whose power of attraction could make itself felt well in excess of an already crushing numerical superiority; this inevitably left their numbers exposed to depletion by conversion and baptism. Naturally enough, this tendency was more pronounced at times of crisis, when friction between Christian society and the Jewish minority was exacerbated by the enforcement of oppressive measures such as expulsion. The erosion of the spirit of tolerance and peaceful coexistence with which a Jewish group had been accepted in anyone place was usually a gradual process. When, as sometimes happened, it culminated in open hostility, some Jews chose baptism in preference to discrimination or exile, and conversions assumed proportions great enough to cripple the Jewish community as a whole and to cast a shadow across its future. The phenomenon of conversion and baptism in the Italian cities of the late Middle Ages has not as yet been the object of any quantitative research which would enable us to measure its impact on the Jewish community with any accuracy, and it is not therefore possible to verify its demographic effect or to correlate it, in quantitative terms, with other significant influences on Italian Jewry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Any conclusions as to overall trends must thus often be limited to the level of general impressions and theories usually based on interpretation of historical texts. Scholars are virtually unanimous in agreeing that the number of baptisms within Italian Jewry (and especially of those Jews living in the Papal State) rose sharply during the Counter-Reformation, as a result of the Church's increasingly intense policy of conversion and the antisemitic measures taken by the popes from the middle of the sixteenth century onwards. The period running from the 1542 bull Cupientes iudaeos (with which Paul III reinforced the measures encouraging Jewish baptism) to the 1555 Cum nimis absurdum (in which Paul IV gave an aggressive fillip to the Church's anti-Jewish policy), down to Pius V's bull Hebraeorum gens of 1569 (ordering the expulsion of the Jews from papal territory), undoubtedly witnessed a large number of baptisms within an increasingly disoriented and alarmed Jewish population.