Professor Tamar Herzig from Tel Aviv University's Department of History presents her faculty seminar Art, Crime and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Florence.
Professor Herzig will speak on her new book, A Convert’s Tale: Art, Crime, and Jewish Apostasy in Renaissance Italy (Harvard, 2019), which explores the dramatic life and complex world of goldsmith Salomone da Sesso, who converted from Judaism to Christianity in 1491. Drawing on newly discovered archival sources, Herzig’s study delves into homosexuality in Renaissance Italy, the responses of Jewish communities and Christian authorities to allegations of sexual crimes, and the meanings of religious conversion half a century before Jewish conversion became a major priority of the Catholic Church.
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