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The issues covered best in this book are those relating to child abuse . Especiallyvaluable are the discussions of what happens in therapy and of the handling of thosecases brought to Court . Terms like `satanic abuse' and the more common term `ritualabuse' cloud an already complicated problem . The latter term partially conceals thereligious motivations of those making claims or allegations. Bringing Satan into somecourts (though not in all cases) has not been so effective unless masked by the vaguebut sinister `ritual' with its echoes of earlier alleged conspiracies by Masons, Commu-nists, Jews and Catholics .

1992 is the 300th anniversary of the hanging at Salem of Mary Esty who expressedthe hope that `no more innocent blood may be shed' . A similar scare is now rife inNorth America and is growing in Britain .

Child abuse does take place but the satanism scare does not help solve these crimes .This book deals with this socially constructed problem with clarity and insight .

G. A . P. HARVEYNewcastle-upon- Tyne

Mircea Eliade, Journal, vols I, II, III, IV. Chicago & London, The Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 1990, 1989, 1989, 1990, no price given . ISBNs 0 22620416 2/204138 8/20408 1/20414 6 .

These four volumes of Mircea Eliade's journal cover four decades of Eliade's life, inother words, roughly half his life . They are the distillation of fifty-six notebooks, overfour thousand pages of manuscript, all that Eliade himself wished to be made publicof the events of his life from 1945 on, jottings, diary entries, comments on events andmovements and people . Eliade kept a journal from a very early age but all the pre-World War II notebooks, covering his life in Romania, as well as three years in India,along with hundreds of other documents and his whole library up to that time, werelost, since the material was left behind in Bucharest when he became an envoy of theRomanian government in 1940, first in London and then in Lisbon. For an account ofhis life before World War II one has to turn to the first volume of his Autobiography(1981), in which, later, he thought he had been too modest about his achievements .

Covering as it does a forty-year period and including thousands of entries it isdifficult to present the essence of the Journal briefly . Let us concentrate on three areas,the man, his life and his work .

Eliade's person comes across in gigantic proportions . From an early age he knewthat he was going to be a person of significance and he loses very few opportunities torecord flattering remarks about himself by other people . When he wonders why he isbothering to `squander time' on writing on `Myth' for the Encyclopedia Britannica hesays it is in order to assure that the work does not fall into the hands of some `mediocretype' . (11 :203) As one reads the recorded plaudits, one wonders if this is really a greatman merely recording what is fact . It is not until very late in the story when one is toldof the `causticity' of Zwi Werblowski in an address in 1974 in Eliade's presence inreferring to the latter's `proverbial modesty', that certain suspicions are strengthened .In the same address Werblowski said that in the `realm of the history of religions, weare living in the "Eliade era" .' (111 :178) Eliade was a great man in many ways, withhonours bestowed on him in many countries, and he liked to remind us of the fact . Incontrast, he scorned most other scholars of religion, `so-called historians of religion',sociologists, anthropologists and `specialists' of various disciplines .

Eliade's life is one of considerable tragedy . Raised in privileged circumstances inRomania, his first wife died before theJournal begins. His second marriage to Cristinel

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took place in Paris in 1949, while Eliade was in considerable poverty . He was personanon grata with the Communist regime in Romania after 1945 so he was forced to spendthe rest of his life in exile. Both his parents died while he was exiled, though he was ableto speak to his mother on the telephone a few years before she died . His sister Corintravelled to Paris to meet him in the relatively liberalized 1970s . Deep agony appearsin his last decade when arthritis really does attack his body, his eyes, always myopic,begin to suffer from cataracts and even walking is difficult . These final pages portrayhis frustration at not being able to complete his life work because of the ravages of hisbody. He sees his life in terms of one of his constant themes in the history of religions :the different stages are 'initiatory trials', an `ordeal by labyrinth' (111:277) .

In his work he was a novelist, short story teller and, he would claim, a `scientific'historian of religion, his constant aim being to bring knowledge of `archaic' cultures tothe `modern' West . He easily became angry in later years if commentaries on his workfailed to portray him `totally' (IV : 16) . He claimed that he was a unique writer withno-one to model himself on . His capacity for reading published sources of all kindswas gargantuan . In researching for his book Shamanism (1964) he admits to feeling`almost crushed by the massive Soviet ethnographic production' (1 :90) . In vol . II wecan almost follow the construction of From Primitives to Zen (1967) by the jottings hemakes as he reads the sources for the texts reproduced in this `source book' forstudents. The same can be said of the construction ofA History ofReligious Ideas (1979onwards) in reading vol . III. The picture he paints of his study over his years inAmerica is of a largeish room overflowing, at first, with his own library of books,university library books and mountains of files of notes culled from books . Later,as his reputation grew, with added mountains of books sent to him by scholars fromall over the world . The books and the notes were the raw materials, other scholars'primary works, from which he made the bricks with which to construct his ownworks .

Eliade had his critics when he was alive, though he claimed never to read them . Hestill figures in the current methodological debate regarding the history of religionsand `theology' and `quasi-theology' . He claimed to be `scientific' . The history ofreligions had a number of goals for him, including the identification of `the transcen-dent in human experience' . The history of religions is a soteriological, `saving' disci-pline (11 :296) ; it has the function of `changing' the participant, `this change is theequivalent of a step forward in the process of self-liberation' (11 :310) . There is oneentry in the Journal (11:74) which raises serious questions regarding the `scientific'nature of his work and questions his integrity . It comes in a reference to his majorwork Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958) . Eliade refers to `the secret method of thebook' and wonders if it has been understood. The `secret' is `the "theology" impliedin the history of religions as I decipher and interpret it' . Why did he think it necessaryto keep his `theological' motivations `secret'?

The journal was originally written in Romanian . The work involved three transla-tors, vols I and IV by one translator direct from Romanian, vols II and III byseparate translators from previously translated French versions . No attempt has beenmade to edit the four volumes into a whole series . As a consequence there are manyunfortunate inconsistencies and poor examples of translation . Indologists are con-stantly referred to as 'Indianists', Saivites as 'Sivaists' ; a corpse in India is 'inciner-ated' rather than cremated and Fatehpur Sikhri is referred to as a town in `theMongolised Indies', i .e . Moghul India.

The translators would have done the reader a favour if they had exercised someeditorial control over Eliade thereby saving us from some very boring and, at times,meaningless entries . Although Eliade kept hisjournal for many years innotebooks, ata later stage he took to writing it on pieces of paper which he then wrote up in anotebook. Tighter editing by someone would have prevented him placing one entry in

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November 1972, when he was in Mexico, and the same entry in Winter 1983, when hewas in Chicago . Such editing might also have excised such an entry as : `10 January(1979) : letters to Douglas Allen, Gallimard . 11 January : letters to Al . Zub, N .Catauy, G, Anca, Sorin [Alexandrescu] . . . (IV :2) .

It is difficult to evaluate the complete journal. Some of it will be interesting tohistorians of fiction, some to historians of great men, most of it will be interesting tostudents of the study of religions . Whether the latter will find anything really excitingis debatable .

TERENCE THOMASThe Open University in Wales

Robert Chazan, Daggers of Faith, Thirteenth-century Christian Missionizing andJewish Response . Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1989, vii &226 pp., $51 .00 . ISBN 0 520 06297 3 .

In the 13th-century a new and vigorous campaign was launched to convert bothMuslims andJews to Christianity . For the first time, Christians made determined effortsto master the literature of the target faiths . In the case ofJudaism, this meant acquiringdetailed knowledge of the two voluminous Talmudim with their commentaries, and theMidrashim. By the Augustinian compromise, Judaism had long been a `licit' faith, andthe question is whether it was now intended that this statue should be revoked .

Robert Chazan shows that, chiefly under the direction of the Dominican leaderRaymund de Penyaforte, missionary activity assumed a new seriousness, in the sensethat far more resources of time and money were put into it than in previous centuries .The first attempt to use Jewish rabbinic texts to prove Christian truth (in the sameway as Old Testament texts had always been used) was in the Barcelona Disputationof 1263. But the arguments of Paul Christian there were unsophisticated comparedwith the armoury of subtle argumentation deployed by Raymund Martini in his PugioFidei, which he completed around 1278 . While the Jewish spokesman at Barcelona,Rabbi Moses ben Nahman (Nahmanides) could afford to use a bantering tone inrefuting the arguments of his opponent, Martini's arguments demanded a moreserious response . Chazan gives a valuable summary of the Jewish counter-argumentas found particularly in the work of Solomon ibn Adret (Rashba) and also in the workof Meir ben Simon of Narbonne and Mordechai ben Joseph of Avignon, here pub-lished and translated for the first time . Yet he also shows that the strategy initiated byPenyaforte and refined by Martini proved unsuccessful in gaining converts, and wassupplanted on the whole (though not entirely) by the different approach of RaymundLull, arguing from first principles rather than through rabbinic citations .

Chazan argues (as against Jeremy Cohen, in his The Friars and the Jews, 1982) thatthere was no fundamental change of approach in all this . Judaism remained `licit',but the duty to convert became a campaign rather than a sporadic endeavour . Thisnew seriousness, Chazan argues, arose from increased cultural confidence combinedwith a sense of insecurity caused by the encroachments of heresy and awareness ofMuslim power. Neither Cohen nor Chazan, however, considers sufficiently the apoca-lypticism of the 13th-century as a factor in the increased missionary activity .

An unfortunate misunderstanding arises in Chazan's comments on an interpret-ation of my own. In my Judaism on Trial (1982) I offered a solution to the problem ofwhy Nahmanides, at the Barcelona Disputation, apparently said that he knew of noother Messianic claimant in history apart from Jesus . The term `apart from' isambiguous in Hebrew as well as in English ; it can mean `except', or, as here, `in