The story that John Davis tells in this book falls under the category of “truth is stranger than fiction.” Who would believe, outside of a fable or maybe a joke, that in Fascist Italy a group of several dozen Catholic peasants would spontaneously decide to convert to Judaism; that they would persist in calling themselves Jews even as Italy introduced Nazi-style anti-Semitic laws; that they would make contact with Jewish soldiers from Palestine, serving in the British Army that invaded southern Italy during World War II; and that finally, after two decades of dedication and hardship, they would undergo ritual circumcision and emigrate en masse to the newly created state of Israel? Yet it all really happened in the town of San Nicandro in the impoverished, isolated Gargano region of southern Italy.

According to Davis, the Jews of San Nicandro represent “the only case of collective conversion to Judaism in Europe in modern times.” Why did it happen just then, at the darkest hour for European Jewry, and in a region where no actual Jews lived? The answer lies in the religious genius—or madness—of Donato Manduzio, the founder of the San Nicandro group. Born in 1885, Manduzio grew up in the extreme poverty typical of southern Italy at the time, and never went to school. Of his childhood little is known, except that his father gave him the nickname “Shitface” (“although to judge from an early photograph,” Davis objects, “he seems to have been quite good looking”). His first exposure to the wider world came during World War One, when he was conscripted into an infantry regiment and contracted a disease that left his legs paralyzed.

After he returned to San Nicandro, Manduzio developed a local reputation as a faith healer and a seer. It is one of several elements in his story that makes him seem more a figure of the Middle Ages than the twentieth century—and in fact, Davis writes, the life of poor southern Italians was in many respects still pre-modern. (It was not until the 1930s that San Nicandro got a railroad line.) Certainly, the way he discovered Judaism has a pre-Reformation flavor. In the late 1920s, Manduzio read the Bible for the first time. Even at that late date, the Catholic Church in Italy discouraged lay people from reading the Bible; it was not until evangelical Protestants started to distribute an Italian-language edition that Scripture became accessible. (These Protestants, Davis writes, were often Italians who had spent time in the United States, where they were exposed to Christian sects such as the Pentecostals and the Seventh Day Adventists.)

What Manduzio read in the Old Testament amazed him. He became convinced “that Jesus had been a prophet but not the Messiah,” and that the fallen state of the world—so full of poverty and suffering—was proof that the Messiah had not yet arrived. When he read in the Ten Commandments that God had established the Sabbath on Saturday, he could not understand why Christians celebrated it on Sunday. Salvation, he now decided, “lay in following the Law of the God of Israel as it had been given to Moses on Sinai...Those seeking salvation and comfort must therefore learn to observe the Law of the God of Moses, forsaking other gods and idols, and following the path of the righteous.”

This is exactly the kind of conversion experience that led so many Protestants, in the sixteenth century, to reject established churches and identify their own sects with ancient Israel. Where Manduzio went beyond them was in deciding that he must actually revive the religion of Israel. For the most remarkable thing about his story is that, when he had these revelations in the late 1920s, he did not know that any Jews still existed in the world. As Davis writes, “Manduzio at first believed that the Jews had all perished in the biblical Flood and that he had been called by the Almighty to revive a faith that had long since disappeared from the face of the earth.”