I have a confession to make. I have long been a fan of Cecil Roth (1899-1970) and his histories of Italian Jewry. My copy of Roth's The Jews in the Renaissance, published in 1959, was one of the first books in Jewish history I acquired as a youth, years before I became interested in the profession of history. This relatively worn copy still adorns my shelf and dates quite accurately my fascination with this engaging popularizer of the Jewish historical experience from my high school years.