The Pope From The Ghetto: A Novel

The Pope from the Ghetto by Gertrud von Le Fort, tells the fabled story of the Pier Leone family, the Jewish financiers of the popes in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in the form and manner of a mediaeval chronicle. Intimately depicting ghetto life, spreading extensive allusions to Hebrew scripture and ritual, and evoking the mood of Messianic expectation, Le Fort offers an objective, realistic study of Pier Leone's conversion to Catholicism and its devastating consequences of persecution and schism.

This history is spread across the golden city of Rome in countless fragments, huge and small: where they can still be read, they have been patched together, and where they can no longer be read, Night writes in the intervals between.