The ‘Renegade Rabbi’ from Morocco: Andrea de Monte and His Chapel in the Roman Church of the Madonna ai Monti. Conversion, Legitimacy, and Christian Propaganda

Following his resignation as preacher to the Jews, the former Rabbi and “new Christian” Andrea de Monte commissioned in 1584 the decoration of the Annunciation Chapel in the Roman church of the Madonna ai Monti, the new seat of the Confraternity of St. Joseph of the Catechumens and Neophytes. The chapel is replete with Hebrew and Latin inscriptions as well as with thus far neglected anti-Judaic stereotypes and liturgical elements borrowed from the traditions of the Synagogue. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this study proposes that the Annunciation Chapel can be understood as a place for fashioning de Monte’s identity, vindicating his silenced voice, and perpetuating his memory as preacher to the Jews. An analysis of the unique combination of Hebrew and Latin inscriptions in the chapel and the meaning of these texts reveals that the privileged audience to which the chapel’s visual and verbal message was speci!cally addressed was Christian, though not necessarily converts, and notably those Christians who were the most enthusiastic spectators of the forced sermons to the Jews and the most avid readers of conversionary treatises. With its rhetorical e"- cacy, the Annunciation Chapel provides a powerful propagandistic manifesto of the “successful” papal conversionary policy.