The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, page 13
The chain of events that led the boy to Rome’s Catechumens began when Father Feletti, Bologna’s Inquisitor, heard reports that a Christian servant had secretly baptized a Jewish child in the city. Following well-worn Inquisition procedures, Feletti had written, on October 26, 1857, to the Commissioner of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Rome, Cardinal De Ferrari, for permission to proceed with an inquiry. On November 9, the Cardinal replied, in a letter reporting the results of the session of the Holy Office at which the case was discussed:
“Your letter of 26 October, relative to the baptism conferred on the young Hebrew boy, has been taken into consideration today and your suggestion to proceed with prudence has been approved. As we know that you have the wisdom to carry out the required interrogation … you are therefore given permission to proceed. It is with determination that I tell you to go ahead with this matter.”1
With this authorization from Rome, Father Feletti summoned Anna Morisi to San Domenico. The written test of her interrogation, prepared by his secretary, was then sent back to the Holy Office in Rome with a request to proceed with the taking of the child. The Holy Office’s letter of response to Father Feletti, reporting its final recommendation, was apparently burned by the Inquisitor when, a year after Edgardo was seized, the Cardinal Legate was driven from Bologna and the papal regime was overthrown.
As pope, Pius IX was titular head of the Holy Office of the Inquisition and occasionally attended its meetings. In major cases, the Pope was consulted before a decision was reached. But at the time it came to the Holy Office, the Mortara case was likely viewed as little more than routine, the application of principles and procedures long enshrined in the workings of the Inquisition. Since the case involved a family living in the Papal States, there was no question about the Inquisitor’s ability to carry out whatever action was deemed appropriate. If the Pope attended either of the meetings of the Holy Office where the Mortara case was discussed, or if he was informed about it in advance, we do not know.2
In the subsequent controversy, played out in the press throughout Europe, the question of whether the Pope had approved the initial decision was debated, as was the question of whether, if he had heard about it only after the fact, he thought that the Holy Office and Bologna’s inquisitor had acted wisely. The matter was not merely one of idle speculation or curiosity: for the Mortaras and the other Jews championing their cause, their belief that the Pope had known nothing about the inquisitorial order, and was shocked when he learned of it, was central to their confidence that the child would be returned. Momolo Mortara was certainly of this opinion, at least in the first months after Edgardo was taken: the kindly pope, he believed, had surely been horrified to learn what had happened in Bologna and, once fully informed, would see that all was set right again.
The strongest evidence in support of Momolo’s belief comes from a letter written by the Marquis of Villamarina, the kingdom of Sardinia’s ambassador in Paris, to Count Cavour in Turin on November 21, 1858. The Marquis described the stormy audience that the French ambassador to the Holy See, the Duke de Gramont, had with the Pope a few weeks earlier. At that meeting, the Duke warned the Pope that his refusal to release Edgardo to his family would have dire diplomatic consequences. Villamarina reported, based on his sources, that the Pope “was very upset about the incident, which he greatly regretted and which for all the world he would have wished to avoid. It is the fault, he said, of the careless zeal of Cardinal Viale-Prelà.” To this, the Pope, according to Villamarina, added, “but now there is nothing that can be done; I can only do what the institutions of the Church force me to.”3
There are good reasons for doubting the accuracy of this account. Throughout the controversy over the abduction, the Pope never wavered in his belief in the righteousness of the cause he was championing. Everything we know about his worldview suggests that, unlike his Secretary of State, Pius IX saw the decision to take Edgardo from his Jewish family as a sacred obligation. In his meeting with the French ambassador, the Pope may have expressed a kind of generic regret that the incident had occurred, and Gramont could have interpreted this to mean the Pope would have acted differently had he known in advance of the inquisitional order to seize Edgardo. And the Pope may well have mentioned the rigor with which Cardinal Viale-Prelà was directing his new archdiocese, leading the French ambassador to make another faulty inference. But Viale-Prelà’s missionizing efforts were fully in harmony with Pius IX’s battle against liberalism.4
We get a better insight into the Pope’s thinking from a letter he received almost the same day as his meeting with the French ambassador. The author respectfully asked the Pope to return Edgardo to his family. Pius IX scribbled his reaction at the bottom of the page: “aberrations of a Catholic … who doesn’t know his catechism.”5
Within a few weeks of Edgardo’s abduction, the campaign organized by the Jews of Bologna was beginning to find a receptive audience beyond Italy’s small and beleaguered Jewish community. In the past, neither governments nor non-Jews had shown any interest in the problems Jews of other countries faced as they dealt with the power of the Church.6 But in 1858 the international situation was dramatically changed. The debate over the continuing temporal power of the papacy, and hence the wisdom of a theocratic state in the middle of Europe, was reaching a fevered pitch. A panoply of forces, from the conservative King Victor Emmanuel II and his prime minister, Count Cavour, in Piedmont to the revolutionary nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini, in exile in London, were doing all they could to undermine the credibility of papal rule. And the spread of Enlightenment ideas of freedom of religion and separation of church and state was increasingly swaying public opinion, albeit an opinion that was largely confined to a literate elite.
Yet these efforts on the part of Bologna’s Jews to involve the governments of Europe and the United States in the affair, aimed at pressuring the Vatican to give the child up, made the leaders of Rome’s Università Israelitica nervous. And the efforts to drum up public criticism of the Holy See in the popular press horrified them. While the Roman Jewish community leaders concentrated on preparing their respectful petition to the Vatican, elsewhere Mortara champions worked to ignite a conflagration of international indignation and protest aimed at forcing the Pope to release Edgardo.
One of the milestones in triggering an international protest movement came in early August, when an emergency meeting of representatives from all the Jewish communities of the kingdom of Sardinia was held in the city of Alessandria, in Piedmont. The delegates, enjoying the benefits of the 1848 statutes that had emancipated the Jews, were incensed by the conditions in which their brethren in the Papal States were still forced to live. Viewing the seizure of Edgardo as an affront to Jews everywhere, a symbol of degradation that they would tolerate no more, and having no faith that the Pope would return Edgardo on his own, they sought help not only from their own government but from others as well.
A letter they sent to the Jewish communities of England and France began by noting how appropriate it was that the call they were issuing came from the Jews of the kingdom of Sardinia, the only Jews in Italy who were free to speak their minds. It continued: “It is for this reason that all the main Jewish communities in the Sardinian states join together in protesting, through the press, against the barbarous act committed in Bologna.” They called on their French and English brethren to “regard it as their sacred duty to appeal to their own respective governments” and expressed the hope that the resulting intervention would, once and for all, prevent “the authorities in Rome and in any other place from disturbing, without punishment, the well-being and peace of Jewish families, in the name of a religion that claims to be founded on the solid principles of humanity and fraternal charity.”7
On receiving this letter, the organization of French Jewish communities prepared a plea to the Emperor, Napoleon III: “The Central Consistory of French Jews implores Your Majesty to come to the aid of a foreign family, victim of an odious violence which took place two months ago in the shadow of our glorious flag and before the eyes of our brave soldiers.” Praising the Emperor as the champion of the oppressed and the weak, the French Jews called on him to act. Although the matter regarded foreigners, they argued, the fact that the boy was held in Rome, which was defended by French troops, meant that the Emperor himself was implicated.8
Napoleon III had, in fact, already received reports of the Mortara case from his cousin Marquis Gioacchino Pepoli, who lived in Bologna. Unbeknownst to the Jews of Bologna, Piedmont, or France, the kidnapping may have already had an impact on Napoleon III, and on the course of world events, that was beyond their imagination.
Two years earlier, at the Congress of Paris, Count Cavour had lobbied to extend the territory of the kingdom of Sardinia, partly at the expense of the Austrians and their allied duchies and partly at the expense of the Papal States. The kingdom of Sardinia could not itself annex any of these lands without outside help, both political and military. The French emperor was sympathetic to the Italian cause, although reluctant to take any bold action in its favor, not only because of his fear of the consequences of war with Austria, but because of the widespread support for the pope’s temporal rule among his own Catholic population and members of the French parliament.
Napoleon III, repulsed by the anachronistic character of papal government, had unsuccessfully tried to persuade the Pope to modernize his state. News of the seizure of the Jewish child from Bologna, and of the boy’s captivity in Rome, enraged him. It was especially galling because the Pope’s ability to hold the child in Rome depended on the protection offered by French soldiers.
In the view of Roger Aubert, it was the Mortara affair that drove the Emperor over the brink, turning him against the pontifical state. Not only did it confirm his own belief in the anachronism of papal rule, but it weakened the French public’s enthusiasm for the temporal power of the pope, giving him a freer hand to act. On July 21, 1858, less than a month after Edgardo’s abduction, Napoleon III held a secret meeting in Plombières with Cavour. It was a fateful encounter. Together they hatched a plan to drive the Austrians out of Italy and, at the same time, to annex three-quarters of the Papal States, including Bologna and the rest of Romagna, to the kingdom of Sardinia.9 In less than a year, the plan would be put into effect.
The hopes of the Mortara family, and of the Jews who anxiously followed the efforts made to win Edgardo’s return, rested heavily on France and, in particular, on the French emperor. Not only did they see France as having special influence with the Vatican because of the role played by French troops, but they also thought the French, heirs to the Enlightenment and the Revolution, would be sympathetic to their argument of the superiority of natural law and paternal rights to religious authority.10 The Piedmontese Jews who gathered in August in Alessandria also had faith that their own government, the kingdom of Sardinia, would be sympathetic to the Mortaras’ plight. Yet they realized that their government had little influence on the Pope, who, indeed, viewed the designs of King Victor Emmanuel II and Count Cavour with the greatest suspicion. By contrast, Napoleon III was a man the Pope could ill afford to offend.
While Momolo Mortara was in Rome for his first visits with his son, Sabatino Scazzocchio and others of the Università Israelitica helped prepare a letter for him to sign to be sent to the Duke de Gramont, the French ambassador to the Holy See. The document is especially interesting because it represents an exception to the Roman Jews’ general reluctance to involve foreign governments in Jewish affairs. However, it was in line with their commitment to quiet diplomacy—out of the public eye and, above all, out of the newspapers—and aimed at enlisting the help of a government friendly to the Vatican.
The letter to Gramont reported that, the previous day, September 7, the Jews had submitted a new brief to Cardinal Antonelli for transmission to Pius IX. It consisted of extracts of the opinions of prominent Church authorities of the past, adduced to support Edgardo’s release. Accompanying the brief was a new request that the boy be freed. In the letter to the Duke, in which copies of both documents were enclosed, Momolo argued that the return of his son accorded with the rulings of past Church authorities. These rulings demonstrate, he claimed, that the “alleged baptism of my son should be declared void and he should be returned to his family, who for more than two months now have suffered a most cruel anguish.”
Momolo’s letter to the French ambassador marked a new phase in his efforts to get his son back. It came the day after Cardinal Antonelli had received the petition on which Momolo had pinned such great hopes, the capstone of the plan of action championed by Scazzocchio and Rome’s Università Israelitica. The Cardinal’s negative reaction on receiving the petitions, Momolo told the Ambassador, “has made me despair of the utility of my supplications.… Although he received the documents we presented with his accustomed kindness, His Eminence let it be known that nothing could change a decision that had already been delayed, nor annul an act that was considered valid.” Knowing of the French interest in his case, and despairing at the failure of their direct supplications to the Vatican, Momolo wanted to bring the Ambassador up to date, hoping that the French could succeed where the Jews had failed.11
The Mortaras’ drive to enlist foreign help not only was aimed at spurring governments to action but involved another, more traditional approach as well. When intercession with the Pope was needed, Italy’s Jews were in the habit of turning to the Rothschild family for help. The Rothschilds, whose banking empire stretched throughout much of Europe and whose members oversaw operations in Austria, Germany, France, England, the kingdom of Naples, and beyond, were, for the Vatican, Jews of a special stripe. Long plagued by financial troubles, the Vatican had, over the years, often turned to the Jewish bankers for loans to keep the government afloat or to launch new projects. It was an arrangement that, while suiting both sides financially, was mutually embarrassing. For the leaders of world Catholicism to rely on Jewish bankers while preventing Jews in their own domain from owning property or engaging in professions was humiliating. And given the Catholic theology of God’s punishment of the Jews and His coronation of the Roman Church, the Holy See’s need to turn to Jews to stave off bankruptcy risked undermining the faith as well. For the Jewish bankers, the problem was different. By offering loans needed to keep the wheels of the ecclesiastical state turning, they appeared to be enriching themselves at the expense of their fellow Jews, propping up a regime that oppressed them.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the Rothschild family were justifying their loans to the Vatican by assuming the role of benevolent intercessors for the Jews with the Holy See. Michele Viale-Prelà, Bologna’s archbishop, had himself been involved in such an episode back in February 1847 while serving as papal nuncio in Vienna. It was shortly after Pius IX had become pope. Baron Solomon Rothschild presented Viale-Prelà with a request for the new pontiff, listing in great detail the hardships faced by the Jews in Rome. Rothschild complained in particular about the confinement of the Jews in the ghetto, the ban on possession of property outside the ghetto, the prohibition on the exercise of the professions and of many other occupations, the annual carnival rites of degradation, the heavy annual special levies they were subjected to, their exclusion from Rome’s hospitals, the obligation of attending forced conversionary sermons (by then just four times a year), and other such burdens. Viale-Prelà, requested by Rothschild to do all he could to win a favorable hearing from the Pope, confided in a letter to Cardinal Gizzi, the secretary of state of the Papal States at the time, his lack of sympathy for the request. However, he did send it on to Rome, and it apparently had some effect, for only a few days later Gizzi told Viale-Prelà that the Pope had decided to do away with the public carnival ritual for the Jews, and that a number of the other Rothschild requests, including the ending of the forced enclosure in the ghetto, would soon be granted.12
Three years later, following the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, the Vatican entered negotiations with James Rothschild, head of the French branch of the banking family, for a large loan. On that occasion as well, the Rothschilds took the opportunity to request improvements in the conditions in which the Pope’s Jews lived. Pius IX, however, was no longer in a mood to hear of such concessions and took no action.13
Feeling otherwise powerless before the might of the Vatican, the Jews of the Papal States saw the Rothschilds as their champions before the Holy See. The Mortaras—along with Jews everywhere interested in their cause—looked anxiously to the Rothschild family to intercede for them.
They did not need to wait long. On July 17, barely three weeks after Edgardo was taken, James Rothschild wrote to Secretary of State Antonelli from Paris: “During my trip to Rome, I often had the opportunity to appreciate your sense of justice and kindness, so that today I have no fear in calling on them on behalf of Monsieur Mortara, a Jewish storekeeper who lives in Bologna.” After briefly recounting to Antonelli how Momolo had seen his 6-year-old son taken from him by force “under the pretext that he had been baptized,” Rothschild went on to tell of the failure of Momolo’s efforts to gain his son’s release, his despair, and “the illness of his wife, who has become practically insane as a result.” Rothschild concluded by expressing his hope that Antonelli would support the “unhappy father” in his attempts to win back his son.14
A month later, on August 24, the English branch of the Rothschild family weighed in, as Lionel Rothschild wrote his own plea to Antonelli. Having just that year become the first Jew to serve in the British parliament, Lionel Rothschild was a man to be reckoned with.
Unlike James, Lionel Rothschild had never met Cardinal Antonelli. After recounting his somewhat confused understanding of what had happened, Rothschild wrote: “I am certain that this fact can only be an abuse of power or a miscalculated excess of zeal which was not known by the government of the Papal States, since Your Eminence’s reputation for justice is, for me, a guarantee that a procedure such as this, which has thrown an entire family into despair, would not be tolerated.” Rothschild called on Cardinal Antonelli to launch an investigation and then take appropriate action to redress the injustice.
