The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, page 1
Acclaim for DAVID I. KERTZER’s
The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara
“Fascinating … full of rich material.… Kertzer has unearthed an evocative and unjustly forgotten episode of history.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“A gripping, vivid and well-documented rendering. A highly readable work that is dramatic, moving and informative, as interesting to general readers as it will no doubt prove to historians.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“David Kertzer tells a riveting tale, with great mastery of the sources.”
—The New York Review of Books
“David Kertzer’s account of this extraordinary but largely forgotten moment in history is told with verve. Sounding much like a conventional thriller writer, Kertzer combines a gripping yarn with a detailed historical reconstruction.”
—Financial Times
“A spellbinding and intelligent book. The story itself is utterly compelling, but it is entirely Kertzer’s skill as a historian and a writer that allows him to maintain the suspense.… Deftly constructed.”
—Toronto Globe and Mail
“I read the book, all of it, cover to cover, nonstop, gasping, amazed. What an important and spectacular work! (With the narrative pace of a gripping novel.) One of the most impressive reading nights of my life.”
—Cynthia Ozick
“A scrupulously researched, elegantly written narrative that deftly combines the tale of one family’s anguished and fruitless efforts to reclaim their child and the stirring saga of the Risorgimento.”
—The Jerusalem Report
DAVID I. KERTZER
The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara
David I. Kertzer was born in 1948 in New York City. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986, he has twice been awarded, in 1985 and 1990, the Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies for the best work on Italian history. He is currently Paul Dupee, Jr., University Professor of Social Science and a professor of anthropology and history at Brown University. He and his family live in Providence.
ALSO BY DAVID I. KERTZER
Politics and Symbols:
The Italian Communist Party
and the Fall of Communism
Sacrificed for Honor:
Italian Infant Abandonment
and the Politics of Reproductive Control
Ritual, Politics, and Power
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JULY 1998
Copyright © 1997 by David I. Kertzer
Maps copyright © 1997 by David Lindroth, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1997.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Kertzer, David I.
The kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara / by David I. Kertzer.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Mortara, Pio, d. 1940. 2. Jews—Italy—Bologna—Conversion to Christianity—History—19th century. 3. Converts from Judaism—Italy—Bologna—Biography.
I. Title.
DS135.I9M595 1997
945′.004924—dc21 96-39159
eISBN: 978-0-307-48671-4
Random House Web address: www.randomhouse.com
v3.1_r2
To my father, Morris Norman Kertzer,
and to my daughter, Molly Emilia Kertzer,
with love and appreciation
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Map
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
1 The Knock at the Door
2 Jews in the Land of the Popes
3 Defending the Faith
4 Days of Desperation
5 The Mezuzah and the Cross—Edgardo’s Trip to Rome
6 The House of the Catechumens
7 An Old Father and a New
8 Pope Pius IX
9 The Pope Denounced
10 A Servant’s Sex Life
11 Drama at Alatri
12 Meeting Mother
13 The International Protests Spread
14 The Church Strikes Back
15 A Matter of Principle
16 Sir Moses Goes to Rome
17 Uprising in Bologna
18 The Inquisitor’s Arrest
19 The Case Against the Inquisitor
20 The Inquisitor’s Trial
21 Defending the Inquisitor
22 The Rites of Rulers
23 New Hopes for Freeing Edgardo
24 Edgardo’s Escape
25 A Death in Florence
26 Momolo’s Trial
Epilogue
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Archival Sources and Abbreviations
Bibliography
Maps will be found opposite the title page
and on this page and this page
PROLOGUE
IT WAS the end of an era. Regimes that had lasted for centuries were about to be swept away. On the Italian peninsula, the old world of papal power and traditional authority uneasily faced the disparate progeny of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the champions of modern industry, science, and commerce. The proud warriors of the old and the new viewed each other warily, in mutual incomprehension. Each side waved its own flags, intoned its own verities, worshipped its own icons, sang praises to its heroes, and heaped scorn on its enemies. Revolutionaries dreamed of utopic futures, far different from the oppressive present; liberals envisioned a new political order, based on constitutional rule; and even conservatives began to wonder whether the old order could stand much longer. New gods were being born, new objects of adulation. In Italy, out of the patchwork of duchies, grand duchy, Bourbon and Savoyard kingdoms, Austrian outposts, and the pontifical state itself, a new nation-state was soon to take shape whose boundaries were as yet unknown and whose nature was as yet unimagined. Subjects would soon become citizens. Yet for the mass of illiterate peasants, nothing much would seem to change.
Nowhere in the West was the chasm between the old world and the new so wide as in the lands of the pope-king. Where else, indeed, could rule by divine right be so well entrenched, so well justified ideologically, so spectacularly elaborated ritually? The Pope had been a worldly prince, a ruler of his subjects, for many centuries, and the contours of his domain in 1858—stretching from Rome in a crescent sweeping northeastward around the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and up to the second city of the Papal States, Bologna, in the north—were much the same as they had been three and a half centuries before. The Pope ruled his state because that was what God willed. The revolutionary notions that people should choose their own rulers, that they should be free to think what it pleased them to think, believe what they chose to believe—these were not simply wrongheaded but heretical, the devil’s work, the excrescences of Freemasons and other enemies of God and religion. The world was as God had ordained it. Progress was heresy.
But while the pontifical state still stood in 1858, it had not survived the previous seven decades unbattered. When French soldiers streamed down the Italian peninsula in 1796–97, the Papal States were gobbled up; in the years that followed, two popes were driven from Rome into humiliating exile, and Church property was auctioned off to the highest bidder, swelling Napoleon’s coffers. Although with Napoleon’s collapse Pope Pius VII returned to the Holy City in 1814 and the Papal States were restored, what had once appeared so solid—a product of the divine order of things—now seemed terribly fragile. Conspiracies against the Pope’s worldly rule sprouted; revolts broke out. At midcentury another pope was forced to flee Rome, this time fearful of murderous mobs, and had to rely on foreign armies to restore his rule and then protect him from his own mutinous subjects.
Among those subjects—though, for the most part, far from mutinous—were the Jews, “the Pope’s Jews.” Having lived in Italy since before there were any Christians, they nonetheless could not shake off their status as outsiders, petitioners for the privilege of being allowed to remain where they were. Few in number—fewer than fifteen thousand in all the Papal States1—they were high in the clergy’s consciousness, occupying a central, if unenviable, position in Catholic theology: they were the killers of Christ, whose continued wretched existence served as a valuable reminder to the faithful, but who would one day see the light and become part of the true religion, helping to hasten the Redeemer’s return. Since the sixteenth century, the popes had confined them to ghettoes to limit the contagion. No Christian was allowed in their homes; theirs was a society apart. Still, life in the ghetto had its joys and consolations. There the Jews had a rich communal life, their own institutions, their own synagogues, rabbis, and leaders, their own quarrels and triumphs, their own divinely ordained rites that structured each day of their lives and each season of the year.
But the Jews, too, saw a new world come into view as French troops, spreading the secular trinity of liberté, égalité, fraternité, swept through the continent, hauled down the ghetto gates, and burned them in a purificatory blaze for popular edification. In the soldiers’ wake, sometime
The events chronicled here, which together form a strangely forgotten chapter in the battle that spelled the end of the old regime, began in the porticoed city of Bologna, indeed in the very heart of its medieval center of cobbled streets and piazzas, in 1858. In Rome, Pope Pius IX sat on St. Peter’s throne as French troops patrolled the Eternal City. Two of the three most powerful men in Bologna were cardinals: the Archbishop, the city’s spiritual leader, and the Cardinal Legate, representing the papal government, the civil ruler. The third was a military man, an Austrian general, whose troops (along with the French forces in Rome) ensured that the tottering papal government did not fall.
Directly across the street from the general’s headquarters stood Bologna’s justly famous Dominican church, San Domenico, where Saint Dominic himself died and where his bones are to this day reverently encased. There lived the Inquisitor, charged by the Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome with combating heresy and defending the faith. Among his tasks was ensuring that the restrictions imposed on the Jews were obeyed.
For two centuries, Bologna’s inquisitors had had little reason to worry about the Jews, for in 1593 the Pope had expelled all nine hundred of them from the city and its surrounding territories. In the wake of the French occupation of the 1790s, a few adventurous Jews made their way back, but once the Papal States were restored, their status again became tenuous, their right to live in the city less than clear. Yet, by 1858 close to two hundred of them lived in Bologna, merchants for the most part, carving out a comfortable niche for their families. Given Church authorities’ mixed feelings about their presence in the formerly forbidden city, the Jews had no desire to call attention to themselves, and so had neither synagogue nor rabbi.
Like many of these Jews, immigrants from the ghettoes of other cities, Momolo Mortara and Marianna Padovani Mortara had moved to Bologna from the nearby duchy of Modena. They lived with their children and their Catholic servant in a building in the center of the city. Their obscurity was about to come to a painful end.
CHAPTER 1
The Knock at the Door
THE KNOCK CAME at nightfall. It was Wednesday, June 23, 1858. Anna Facchini, a 23-year-old servant, descended a flight of stairs from the Mortara apartment to open the building’s outer door. Before her stood a uniformed police officer and a second, middle-aged man of martial bearing.1
“Is this the home of Signor Momolo Mortara?” asked Marshal Lucidi.
Yes, Anna responded, but Signor Mortara was not there. He had gone out with his oldest son.
As the men turned away, she closed the door and returned to the apartment to report the unsettling encounter to her employer, Marianna Mortara. Marianna sat at the living room table, busily stitching, along with her twin 11-year-old daughters, Ernesta and Erminia. Her five younger children, Augusto, aged 10, Arnoldo, 9, Edgardo, 6, Ercole, 4, and Imelda, born just six months before, were already asleep. Marianna, a nervous sort anyway, wished that her husband were home.
A few minutes later, she heard sounds of feet climbing the back stairs, which could be reached through her neighbor’s apartment. Marianna stopped her stitching and listened carefully. The knocking on the door confirmed her fears. She approached the door and, without touching it, asked who was there.
“It’s the police,” a voice said. “Let us in.”
Marianna, hoping though not really believing that the policemen had simply made a mistake, told them what she prayed they did not know: they were at the back door of the same apartment they had visited just a few minutes before.
“It doesn’t matter, Signora. We are police and we want to come in. Don’t worry; we wish you no harm.”
Marianna opened the door and let the two men in. She did not notice the rest of the papal police detail, some of whom remained on the nearby stairs while others lingered on the street below.
Pietro Lucidi, marshal in the papal carabinieri and head of the police detail, entered, with Brigadier Giuseppe Agostini, in civilian clothes, following him in. The sight of the military police of the Papal States coming inexplicably in the night filled Marianna with dread.
The Marshal, not at all happy about the mission before him, and seeing that the woman was already distraught, tried to calm her. Pulling a small sheet of paper from his jacket, he told her he needed to get certain clarifications about her family and asked her to list the names of everyone in the household, beginning with her husband and herself, and proceeding through all her children, from oldest to youngest. Marianna began to shake.
Walking home beneath Bologna’s famous porticoes with Riccardo, his 13-year-old son, that pleasant June evening, Momolo was surprised to find police milling around his outside door. He hurried up to his apartment and discovered the police officer and the other strange man talking to his frightened wife.
As Momolo entered the apartment, Marianna exclaimed, “Just listen to what these men want with our family!”
Marshal Lucidi now saw that his worst fears about his mission would be realized, but felt even so a certain relief at now being able to deal with Momolo, who was, after all, a man. Again he stated that he had been given the task of determining just who was in the Mortara household. Momolo, unable to get any explanation for this ominous inquiry, proceeded to name himself, his wife, and each of his eight children.
The Marshal checked all these names on his little list. Having noted all ten members of the family, he announced that he would now like to see each of the children. His request turned Marianna’s fright to terror.
Momolo pointed out Riccardo, Ernesta, and Erminia, who had gathered round their parents, but pleaded that his other children were asleep and should be left alone.
Moved, perhaps, but undeterred, the Marshal remained firm. Eventually the Mortaras led the two policemen through the door into their own bedroom, with the three oldest children and the servant trailing them in. There, on a sofa-bed, slept 6-year-old Edgardo. His parents did not yet know that on the list the Marshal had brought with him, Edgardo’s name was underlined.
Lucidi told Anna to take the rest of the children out of the room. Once they had left, he turned back to Momolo and said, “Signor Mortara, I am sorry to inform you that you are the victim of betrayal.”
“What betrayal?” asked Marianna.
“Your son Edgardo has been baptized,” Lucidi responded, “and I have been ordered to take him with me.”
Marianna’s shrieks echoed through the building, prompting the policemen stationed outside to scurry into the bedroom. The older Mortara children, terrified, sneaked back in as well. Weeping hysterically, Marianna threw herself into Edgardo’s bed and clutched the somnolent boy to her.
“If you want my son, you’ll have to kill me first!”
“There must be some mistake,” Momolo said. “My son was never baptized.… Who says Edgardo was baptized? Who says he has to be taken?”
“I am only acting according to orders,” pleaded the Marshal. “I’m just following the Inquisitor’s orders.”
Lucidi despaired as the situation seemed to be slipping out of control. In his own report, he later wrote: “I hardly know how to describe the effect of that fatal announcement. I can assure you that I would have a thousand times preferred to be exposed to much more serious dangers in performing my duties than to have to witness such a painful scene.”
With Marianna wailing from Edgardo’s bed, Momolo insisting that it was all a horrible mistake, and the children crying, Lucidi scarcely knew what to do. Both parents got down on their knees before the discomfited Marshal, begging him in the name of humanity not to take their child from them. Bending a bit (and no doubt thinking this was all the Inquisitor’s fault anyway), Lucidi offered to let Momolo accompany his son to see the Inquisitor at the nearby Convent of San Domenico.
Momolo refused, afraid to let Edgardo into the Inquisitor’s hands.
Lucidi recalled: “While I waited for the desperate mother and father, overcome by a terrible agony, to return to reason so that the matter could be brought to its inevitable conclusion, various people began to arrive, either on their own or because they had been called there.”
