I didn’t forget about blogging! I swear! I had to finish a book and stuff.

My poor blog. I seem to have neglected it more than I neglected my houseplants (Sorry Rosemary Clooney, St. Basil the Great, and Elvis Parsley). It was a busy summer: I had a few outstanding projects that needed to be wrapped up, my book went into production, and I gallivanted about Rome with a cavalcade of undergrads. This is not me making excuses (it’s totally me making excuses), but I am back to blog as the new academic year is upon us.

The exciting news is that A Jewish Jesuit in the Eastern Mediterranean is officially in production and is set to be released this winter by Cambridge University Press. You can pre-order it here or here.

It was a fun book to write. It traces the story of a Jewish-born priest who lived from 1530 to 1589 named Giovanni Battista Eliano. I first came across him in 2008 while working on my MA thesis and then decided to explore his life and world more fully for my PhD. Then, his life was so fascinating that I wanted to tell his story to a much wider audience. So I decided to write this book!

Eliano is an interesting figure. He was trained as a book printer and lexicographer (fancy way of saying text editor/linguist/translator) and was a merchant with his father in Egypt. He then decided to become a rabbi. But midway through his rabbinical studies, he converted to Catholicism, became a priest, and traveled to Lebanon and Egypt to convert Eastern Christians to Catholicism. Much of his life, though, was about trying to prove he was no longer Jewish both to his Jewish family as well as to his fellow Catholics.

This was never easy for Eliano: he got arrested twice, often had to wear disguises, was in a shipwreck, his mother disowned him, and even fellow Catholics distanced themselves from him when the feared he might be what they called a renegade, someone who pretended to practice one faith to gain some sort of social advantage.

We may never know the truth of Eliano’s beliefs (belief is a hard thing to prove), but his story teaches us things that I think more than historians like me will find fascinating: we often struggle with family members who don’t like our life choices; trying to be our best selves isn’t always a linear progression of personal growth; being a part of a new group and leaving an old one often means people question your desires and motives (think of renegade as another word for poser).

All in all, his life makes for a captivating story. Whenever I tell people about him and the book I’ve been writing, the response is always that I am the one doing the great work of telling his story. While I suppose it is true that I had to do the research and writing, just like any historian on any project, I would be lying if I didn’t say I feel like a little guilty for taking credit for his story. While I’ve had the great pleasure of giving him a voice and will continue to tell others’ stories, I’ve tried my best to show him using his own words by quoting his personal papers as much as possible.

While A Jewish Jesuit will probably tell you something about me as a historian, I really hope it tells you more about Eliano and his world. He’s an intriguing enigma of a figure whose voice has been muted by many layers of history. It’s time that voice gets to shine. So go buy my book!