The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, page 14
In the last paragraph of his letter, Rothschild asked the Secretary of State’s pardon for taking the liberty to write him on such a matter. He had decided to write, he explained, because he had “received various letters from different parts of the continent, in addition to communications from some of my most cherished friends,” and as a result “felt the duty to make this appeal to Your Eminence to let you know how great the anxiety and interest are that have been caused by this fact.”15
Shortly after receiving this letter, Antonelli prepared his guarded response. The facts of which Rothschild wrote, he replied, were “not unknown to me.… I would have truly wished, on my part, to be able to reciprocate the faith that you have placed in me, but, dealing as this does with a matter that does not regard my ministry, and that is in itself extremely delicate, I am not in a position to take an interest in the affair that is consonant with your desire.” The Cardinal added, “Here it may be opportune to observe that, if the voice of nature is powerful, even more powerful are the sacred duties of religion.”16
As word of the abduction of Edgardo spread farther through Europe and across the ocean to the United States, as committees of Jews throughout the West organized protests and raised funds, and as an increasing number of foreign governments made their disapproval known, the Pope stood firm. For Pius IX, it was a matter of principle.
Meanwhile, since their forays into ecclesiastical law and papal precedent had gotten them nowhere, Momolo and his friends in Bologna decided to try a different approach. If the Church would not concede that a baptized child could be returned to Jewish parents, what if it could be shown that the child had not, in fact, ever been baptized?
CHAPTER 10
A Servant’s Sex Life
AFTER RECEIVING the panicked plea from his brothers-in-law in mid-September to hurry back to Bologna to rescue his business and his wife, Momolo made one last appeal to the Pope before departing. Its tone reveals his despair.
Dated September 19 and addressed directly to the Pope, it begins:
Momolo Mortara, genuflecting before the feet of Your Holiness, declares that from the day in which his son was taken from him, he has seen nothing but one misery pile up upon another. The disorder in which he left his business in Bologna, increased frightfully by his long absence, has finally brought about its complete ruin. He has been urgently recalled there, not only because of his wife’s failing health, but due to the above-mentioned business catastrophe. As he leaves the best part of himself [i.e., his son] in Rome and weeps in desolation, he dares to beg Your Holiness, with a wish from deep in his heart, that—given the great charity for which you are known—you relieve their great anguish even before he returns to the capital, and restore to those who have lost everything at least the sacred sweetness of family.1
Once he returned to Bologna and found that his wife was not in as bad shape as he had feared, Momolo tried to resuscitate his business but found it impossible to concentrate on anything other than getting Edgardo back. A series of Momolo’s letters to Rome in the last days of September tells of his frenzied activity as he and his Jewish support group in Bologna orchestrated the drive to win the boy’s release.
In a September 27 letter to Scazzocchio, Momolo spoke of how busy he had been getting various certificates and depositions needed to bolster his case. Having heard, to his distress, that Scazzocchio was being refused permission to visit Edgardo in his absence, Momolo appended a plea to be taken to Cardinal Antonelli, asking the Secretary of State to intervene so that he could continue to receive news of his son.
In his second letter of the day, Momolo reported that he would soon send Scazzocchio documents that would shed new light on Anna Morisi. Momolo also relayed word of a disturbing new development: he had received a letter from a Jew in Livorno reporting a conversation the man had had with a friend in Rome (such was the nature of Italy’s Jewish network). According to the report, Momolo wrote, “a renewed baptism had just been administered to my beloved Edgardo.” He urged Scazzocchio to investigate the report and, should it be true, to lodge a formal protest.
Momolo had more promising news to relate on the international front. He had just learned that forty of Germany’s most prominent rabbis had sent a collective protest to the Pope in behalf of the Mortara family. Ten days earlier, in response to a request for more details from England, his Bologna friends had sent out a full account of the case. The world was taking an ever-greater interest in the Jewish boy from Bologna.
Momolo’s letter concluded by reminding Scazzocchio to visit Edgardo regularly and to send him reports of how his son was doing. But in Rome, the Università Israelitica secretary was not having much luck. On September 29, Scazzocchio wrote a letter of protest to Enrico Sarra, Rector of the Catechumens, complaining of the humiliating treatment he had received and reporting the disturbing rumors that Edgardo had been recently baptized in the House of the Catechumens.
On the twenty-third of the month, Scazzocchio recalled, he had gone to the Catechumens, following Momolo’s request, to see Edgardo. When he had knocked at the door, the Rector had come to the window and informed him that as a result of a new order he had received, he was not permitted to allow any Jew entrance. “I write to you,” Scazzocchio informed the Rector, “not feeling that I deserve to suffer the humiliation of once again being turned away, a feeling reinforced by the fact that Signor Mortara, before returning home, reached an agreement with you that, in his absence, I would be able to come there to see his son and give him news of the boy from time to time.”
Scazzocchio then turned to the other, even more troubling matter. “Signor Mortara writes me that he heard in Bologna that his son has recently been baptized according to the regular rite. As much as this report seems to me to be unbelievable, and as much as I was about to reply to that unhappy father to this effect, nonetheless, in order to carry out his request that I ask you directly, I beg you to give me confirmation of this so that I can relieve the poor soul from such painful doubt.”2 In fact, there seems not to have been any such baptism performed in these first few months in the Catechumens, despite the rumors that were flying around among Italy’s Jews.
The certificates that Momolo was gathering, and in which he placed so much hope, were aimed at disputing the facts on which the Inquisitor and the other Church authorities based their case. At the center of the story was the servant Anna Morisi. She was the only witness to the baptism. It was on the basis of her account alone that Father Feletti had ordered Edgardo seized. Momolo now set about doing everything he could to undermine her credibility, investigating any parts of her story about the baptism that could be checked and trying to show that she was of such poor moral character that she could not be believed.
A key figure in Morisi’s story was Cesare Lepori, the neighborhood grocer. It was he, she said, who had first suggested that she baptize the sick child and who had then told her how to do it. From his obscurity as a small-time grocer, Lepori suddenly found himself attracting unwelcome attention from far beyond Bologna. Indeed, throughout the Papal States, observers were blaming the whole disaster on him.3
In 1858, Cesare Lepori was 34 years old and lived near the Mortaras with his wife, their 4-year-old daughter, Maria, his 32-year-old unmarried brother, Raffaele, and his widowed father, Franco, age 72. All were born in Bologna, and they were well known in the area, running a family grocery store together with Cesare’s older brother, Antonio, who lived nearby with his second wife and two children.4
When Momolo returned from Rome, he decided to confront Cesare Lepori. It must have been hard for Momolo to control his emotions when he entered the Lepori store, for at the time he too believed that the young grocer was responsible for the tragedy that had befallen him. When Lepori saw Momolo come in, three months after the police siege outside the Mortara home, he must have been tense himself, for by this time he knew that Anna Morisi had identified him as the instigator of the baptism.
The best account we have of what followed comes from an unexpected source: a retired judge, a Catholic, Carlo Maggi, who lived in the neighborhood. On October 6, Maggi appeared before a Bologna notary who had been hired by Momolo to transcribe and certify his account. The testimony was then submitted to Cardinal Antonelli for the Pope’s consideration. Momolo had high hopes that once the Pontiff heard the true story, he would order Edgardo freed.
Maggi explained:
As I often stop by the café Genio in via San Felice, which is frequented by a number of Jews, including Signor Momolo Mortara, I have had various occasions to speak to him, especially about his little son. That was the boy who was taken from him a few months ago as a result of a governmental order, because he was baptized. I had also spoken with Mortara in this connection about the opinion that had taken hold as a result of the allegations made by a certain Nina [Nina being Anna Morisi’s nickname], formerly his servant, about a certain Signor Cesare Lepori, a grocer with a store in Via Vetturini. She had said that he was the one who had urged her and taught her to administer the sacrament of baptism to his son, teaching her how to give it since she told Lepori that she did not know how to do it herself.
Our discussions had been left at this point when, on Tuesday, the fifth of this month, I stopped by the café in question at eight o’clock to have breakfast. Signor Mortara came in to tell me something like the following: “Haven’t you heard? Last Saturday I went to Lepori’s store. When Cesare saw me, after greeting me, he asked what was up with my servant Nina, and I told him that I’d rather not hear her name mentioned, and that it would be better for him as well, after she had so compromised him in public opinion by saying that he had gotten her to baptize the boy and taught her how to do it. At this, he replied that it was a lie, because never, ever had Lepori spoken to that young woman about it.”
After hearing this account, I told Mortara that I found it hard to believe … that Lepori could so categorically deny something that was so widely known as a result of what Nina said.
To convince the retired jurist, Momolo invited him to accompany him to Lepori’s store, to see for himself. Momolo was planning to go there anyway to pick up a written statement that Lepori had promised to prepare for him.
And so around 8:30 a.m., I went with Mortara to Lepori’s store, where we found him with his father and their clerk, and I heard Mortara ask Cesare Lepori if he had prepared the letter that they had talked about the previous Saturday. But Lepori replied that, after getting some advice, he had decided not to write such a letter, because a private document like that would have no value. However, he added, he was ready to testify legally before any Authority, wherever he was called, and repeat all that he had told Mortara the previous Saturday. I heard him add these words: “I never spoke with Nina of your little boy, much less did I ever suggest baptizing him.”
The grocer went on to add, Maggi recounted, that he was hardly in a position to teach the girl how to baptize someone, as he was not sure how to do it himself.
“What I told you Saturday [Lepori continued], I repeat now, and I’ll repeat forever, because as a man of honor I can only tell the unvarnished truth. I’m sorry, Mortara, that I wasn’t called earlier and interrogated about all this, as it seems only natural to me they should’ve done if Nina told them I was the one who urged her and taught her what she claimed, because if they’d talked to me, they’d have known long ago what I’m telling you now … in the presence of this Signore [here Lepori pointed to Maggi], and I’ll testify to the same thing tomorrow. There’s just one thing that surprises me, dear Mortara: If it’s true that Nina said what they say she did, how come until now not a single official has come to look for me?”
The retired judge ended his account by saying that as he left the grocer behind, he realized that his earlier skepticism was unjustified; Lepori was telling the truth.5
Maggi’s testimony was rushed to Rome, where, on October 11, Scazzocchio had it certified by a Roman notary before taking it to Cardinal Antonelli for presentation to the Pope. The cover letter, prepared on Momolo’s behalf, urged Pius IX to read the brief, for it proved that Morisi had lied about the baptism.6 But the attack on the young woman’s credibility went well beyond this assault. She was portrayed not only as a liar but as a slut and a thief as well.
A few days before the Bologna notary welcomed the former judge to his office for deposition, his study was crowded with women less accustomed to such surroundings. The Mortaras and their allies in Bologna had heard titters and whisperings about Anna Morisi, insistent rumors about her sexual behavior, rumors that if true might discredit her in the eyes of the Church, or so the Jews hoped. As a result, members of the family and their friends began asking neighbors if they had seen or heard anything of Anna’s secret sex life. They asked those who might be supposed to know the most, women who were part of the network of servants in the area, women who met each day in the hallways and in the streets on the way to the market, exchanging gossip about their bosses, their neighbors, and one another.
Momolo and Marianna themselves knew something about the subject, for after Anna had worked for them for three years, in early 1855, they discovered that she was pregnant. Such pregnancies of unmarried servants were far from uncommon in Bologna at the time; indeed, they were something of an occupational hazard. The young servants often found themselves alone in the city, their families at a distance in the hinterland, and they became the prey of an assortment of young and not-so-young men, the married and the unmarried, those who seduced them with promises of marriage and those who simply raped them. Among the common sources of pregnancy were the sexual advances of employers themselves or, often, their sons.
In Bologna, as throughout most of Italy, there was a remedy for the desperate situation in which such unmarried pregnant women found themselves: the local foundling home. Established several centuries earlier, and known to all as the “Bastardini,” Bologna’s foundling home took in the newborn children of unmarried women and thereby rescued the women’s honor and saved their families from disgrace. Great secrecy surrounded the depositing of children at the ospizio, for only through such secrecy could a woman’s honor be guarded. The babies were brought to the Bastardini not by their mothers, who were eager to hide their identities, but by the midwives who had delivered them.
Not only were unmarried women encouraged to abandon their babies at the foundling home in these years; they were required to do so. In the view of the officials of the Papal States, keeping such a child would both expose the woman’s family to dishonor, and ensure the young woman herself a future life of sin. Nor were these the only unsavory consequences, for the sight of an unmarried woman with her baby would give rise to public scandal. The very thought of a child growing up in the home of an unmarried mother was indecent. And so once the babies were deposited at the foundling home, efforts were made to place them with wet nurses in the countryside.7
Like other young women in her position, Anna Morisi had been loath to return to her family in San Giovanni in Persiceto, where the suspicious eyes of neighbors would certainly look for the telltale belly bulging from her loose-fitting dress. She could not, of course, remain through the time of her delivery with the Mortara family, for the children could not be exposed to such a sight, nor would it be right for the neighbors to see the Mortaras keeping as a servant a woman of lost virtue.
Rather than simply firing her, as many other employers would have done, Momolo and Marianna arranged to have Anna sent to a midwife’s home for the last four months of her pregnancy. They paid all the expenses for her lodging and the delivery itself. To protect her reputation—and their own, since they had promised to take her back once the baby was born and delivered to the foundling home—they told neighbors and friends that the girl had become ill and had returned to her parents to recuperate.
By September 1858, the Mortaras were no longer interested in protecting Anna’s reputation—quite the contrary. They found they did not have to look far to find women eager to tell tales of the most scandalous behavior.
From September 30 to October 1, the Bologna notary recorded the statements of eight women and one man about Anna Morisi. Their reports were, like Maggi’s, sent on to Scazzocchio in Rome, where they too were notarized once more and forwarded, with a cover letter, to Pope Pius IX. It is unlikely that the good Pope had ever before gotten his hands on such lurid descriptions of female sexuality.
The cover letter to the Pope got right to the point: “Momolo Mortara genuflects at the feet of the August Throne of Your Holiness, having just obtained documents … relative to Morisi’s immoral behavior.” He was sending this material, he wrote, so that the Pope could judge for himself “how much faith he should accord to the word of a woman who is so notoriously depraved.” He concluded with the plea “Do not hesitate any longer, oh Holy Father, in issuing the judgment we have long yearned for, giving peace to the heartbroken family … relieving the fears of 10,000 Jews who are loyal and peaceful subjects of Your Holiness.”8
The witnesses from Bologna were asked to address two points. One regarded the morality of Anna Morisi, the other the matter of just how sick Edgardo was at the time he was presumably baptized. The Mortaras were interested in the latter point because they had learned that, in the absence of parental consent, Catholics were permitted to baptize a Jewish child only if there was strong reason to believe that he was about to die. In such a case, canon law held, the importance of allowing a soul to go to heaven outweighed the customary commitment to parental (and especially paternal) authority over children. The Mortaras had already gotten an affidavit from their family doctor, Pasquale Saragoni, who had taken care of Edgardo during his illness, stating that the boy had never been in any danger of dying. Dated July 31, 1858, it characterized the illness the boy had when he was a year old as simply a run-of-the-mill childhood infection. The doctor’s statement, too, was sent on to the Secretary of State and the Pope. Saragoni also testified that at the time that Anna Morisi said she performed the baptism of the sick child, she herself was very ill and confined to bed. The Mortaras sought to bolster this testimony through the use of other witnesses, aware that the word of Saragoni, a well-known anticleric and longtime opponent of papal rule, was not likely to weigh very heavily on the scales of justice of the Papal States.9
