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Taxation, Community and State: the Jews and the fiscal foundations of the early modern papal state . By Kenneth R. Stow. (Päpste und Papsttum, Bd 19.) Pp. ix + 187. Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1982. DM. 120.

Taxation, Community and State: the Jews and the fiscal foundations of the early modern papal slate. By Kenneth R. Stow. (Papste und Papsttum, Bd 19.) Pp. ix+187. Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1982. DM. 120. The development of papal government in the mid-sixteenth century has been discussed in various recent works, and this book, which examines the contribution made to this by the taxation of the Jews, is a useful addition to the available literature. It also throws light on how the processes of levying these taxes affected the Jewish communities themselves, and extends (in some cases modifying) the author's earlier work on papal attitudes to the Jews in the sixteenth century. The book comprises three sections, the first being an extended essay on papal fiscal policies and their implementation, with a consideration of their effects and the changing motivation behind them. There follows a collection of 42 illustrative texts, ranging in date from 1483 to 1566, which are printed in extenso, and a calendar of over 300 references to material in the papal archives on Jewish taxation, and related fiscal questions, extending from 1459 to the eighteenth century. This extensive documentation should be of considerable value to future students of the subject. The problems which the Jews had to face resulted from the fact that they lived within Christendom but were not of Christendom. This rendered them vulnerable to arbitrary pressure from the popes, as they had been, and indeed still were, from secular rulers. This vulnerability meant that they had to pay protection money in the form of taxes, and made them a convenient group on whom fiscal experiments could be made in the form of direct taxation. The tax levied, the Vigesima, showed a tendency to become fossilised as a fixed sum, but to an increasing degree the papacy treated it as a unit and levied money in multiples of it. As it proved successful, similar methods of assessment were applied to other groups, most notably the clergy. The development of more rigorous taxation was associated with increasing attempts, particularly from the pontificate of Paul m onwards, to bring pressure on the Jews to be converted. The debate on how far it was permissible to force conversions on non-Christians was an old one which, as the author points out, had received new force with the expansion of the European powers overseas and the growth of missionary activity in the newly discovered lands. This may well have been a factor in the increasingly hardline attitude taken by the popes towards the Jews, reflected not only in fiscal policies but also in the creation of ghettos and orders by the Inquisition for the burning of the Talmud. One may wonder if the author's arguments can be taken further, and if it might be suggested that papal inflexibility may also have been prompted by a mentality which saw salvation only in enforced orthodoxy at a time when the spread of Protestantism was posing a serious threat to the preservation of the existing order.