Giulio Morosini

Morosini was descended from a wealthy Sephardi merchant family, the Nahmias (also spelled Naḥmias), which traced its ancestry back to the biblical Nehemiah. His great-grandfather left Spain at the time of the 1492 expulsion of the Jews by Ferdinand the Catholic, settling first in Albania and later in Salonica. The family subsequently moved to Venice, where Morosini's grandfather Isaac became a prominent figure in the Jewish community. Isaac, who had been baptized as a Christian in his youth before returning to Judaism, was known within the community as "Ba'al Teshuvah" (the penitent).^[1][3]

Sources disagree on his exact birthplace. The 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia gives Venice as the place of birth,^[1] whereas the Encyclopaedia Judaica states that he was born in Salonica and moved to Venice as a child.^[3] Drawing on Morosini's own statement in Via della fede that at the time of his baptism on 22 November 1649 he was thirty-seven years old, Benjamin Ravid concluded that Morosini must have been born between 23 November 1611 and 22 November 1612, and noted that Morosini himself did not state his birthplace in the book.^[2]

In Venice, Samuel Nahmias studied under the noted rabbi and polymath Leone Modena, of whom he later left one of the few surviving pupil's accounts.^[2][4]

Before his conversion, Nahmias engaged in commerce, travelling through the Ottoman Empire. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the family's fortunes declined in the 1640s, and this financial reversal formed part of the backdrop to his conversion.^[3] The Hebrew colophon of the 1625 Venice edition of 'Ein Yisra'el records the generosity of the brothers David and Joseph Nahmias, sons of Isaac Nahmias, in underwriting the reprint of that work, an indication of the family's prominence in the Venetian ghetto.^[2]

In 1649 Nahmias was present at a disputation held in Venice between two Jews, one of whom had already converted to Christianity, concerning the "seventy weeks" of the Book of Daniel. In his own account, Morosini wrote that the debate was adjudicated by his former teacher Leone Modena, and that Modena's reported words led both him and his brother Joseph to decide to embrace Christianity.^[2][1] The historicity of Modena's alleged statement has been widely doubted by modern scholars, including Heinrich Graetz, Moritz Steinschneider and Moses A. Shulvass, who regarded the anecdote as fabricated or heavily embellished.^[2]

The two brothers were baptized in Venice on 22 November 1649. Their godfather was the Venetian patrician Angelo Morosini, whose surname Samuel adopted, taking the Christian name Giulio (his brother Joseph became Gerolamo). His wife, Letizia Nahmias, refused to convert and remained within the Venetian Jewish community, where she is later documented as having operated a bookshop in the ghetto with commercial links to Rovigo, Ancona and the Levant.^[5] Ravid notes that a deposition given by Morosini to the Inquisition in 1661 gives the date of baptism as 22 December 1649, in apparent contradiction with the November date printed in Via della fede.^[2]

After his baptism, Morosini travelled to Rome under Pope Alexander VII, intending to enter the Capuchin order, but was dissuaded from doing so by the pope. Pope Clement IX appointed him scrittore (scriptor) of Hebrew at the Vatican Library, and he also taught Hebrew at the Collegium de Propaganda Fide.^[1][6] From 1671 he also served as a clerk in the Congregation de Propaganda Fide.^[3]

In Rome, Morosini worked closely with the Christian Hebraist Giulio Bartolocci, a colleague of many years whose monumental Bibliotheca Magna Rabbinica was published in the same period, and with the theologian Giovanni Pastrizio (Ivan Paštrić, c. 1636–1708), a lecturer at the Collegio Urbano de Propaganda Fide.^[2][7] Morosini completed the work, left unfinished at the death of the convert Giovanni Battista Giona (formerly Judah Jonah of Safed), on textual variants in the Targumim, which survives in manuscript at the Vatican (Vat. Urb. 59) and the Bodleian Library in Oxford (MS. 2341).^[3]

Morosini's major work, Via della fede mostrata a'gli ebrei ("The Way of Faith Shown to the Jews"), bearing the Hebrew title Derekh Emunah (דרך אמונה), was printed in Rome in 1683 by the press of the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide. The book runs to roughly 1,460 pages in three parts and is preceded by an engraved portrait of the author at the age of 72, signed by the engraver Nicola Billy and inscribed "Iulius Maurocenus olim Samuel Nahmias Venetus Aetatis Suae LXXII Anno MDCLXXXIII".^[2][8]

The first part argues that the Jews are no longer obliged to observe the Mosaic Law and ought to embrace Christianity. The second part, written in the form of a dialogue and widely considered the most valuable by historians, describes in detail the ceremonies, domestic customs, liturgy and communal institutions of the Italian Jews of Morosini's day, including the confraternities and musical academy of the Venetian ghetto. The third part attempts to show that Jews fail to observe the Decalogue, whereas Christians observe it fully.^[3][9]

Via della fede was described by the Italian chief rabbi Riccardo Di Segni in 2015 as a sort of Shulchan Aruch in reverse, a detailed compendium of Jewish normative practice written in order to refute it, but still useful for modern scholarship as a source on daily observance.^[10] The book also reproduces long passages of Talmudic, Midrashic, liturgical and medieval Hebrew texts in Hebrew type with Italian translation, and contains the first substantial Christian response to the Discorso circa il stato de gl'hebrei (1638) of the Venetian rabbi Simone Luzzatto.^[2] A polemical Jewish response to Morosini's book was written by Joshua Segre in his Asham Talui.^[3]

Morosini died in Rome in 1687, according to his Roman colleague Bartolocci, who records the year in the fourth volume of the Bibliotheca Magna Rabbinica. Some reference works, including the Encyclopaedia Judaica, give the year of death as 1683, which Ravid considers an error arising from confusion with the publication date of Via della fede.^[2][3]

Alongside his contemporaries Giulio Bartolocci and Giovanni Pastrizio, Morosini is counted among the Jewish converts and Christian Hebraists who shaped the study of rabbinic literature in seventeenth-century Rome.^[7] The historian Elisheva Carlebach has drawn attention to Morosini's unusually detailed autobiographical passages in Via della fede, in which he emphasizes the former wealth and standing of the Nahmias family in order to rebut the common Jewish accusation that converts had apostatized for material gain.^[11]

• Christian Hebraists
• Leon of Modena
• Giulio Bartolocci
• Venetian Ghetto
• Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples