The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, page 18
Count Minerva describes the Duke’s difficult meeting with Pius IX, affording Cavour an excellent view of the Pope’s attitude toward the Mortara case: “The Holy Father said that he was sorry about what had happened and was even more pained by the impossibility of ordering Mortara returned to his family, for to return the boy would be repugnant to his conscience. He was truly persuaded that the baptism was valid and that, given this fact, he could not permit a Christian to be raised in the Jewish religion.” The Pope informed the Ambassador that he was having a document drafted which laid out the theological bases for the decision and that it would soon be available. Minerva concluded his report to Cavour by observing that the Mortara case had poisoned relations between France and the Vatican. The Pope’s refusal to bend had been taken as a great affront by the French.2
On the same day, in a separate, confidential letter to Cavour, the Piedmontese emissary added a dramatic detail. He had spoken with Gramont following the duke’s stormy session with Cardinal Antonelli and before he had seen the Pope. Gramont had made a startling suggestion: “The Duke de Gramont’s irritation over the case of the Jew Mortara has reached the boiling point in the last few days. Walking with me, he asked me if, should the boy be put on a boat to Genoa, there would be any difficulty in accepting him there.” Genoa was part of the kingdom of Sardinia. The plan was to seize Edgardo by force—not in itself a difficult matter for the Ambassador, given that it was French troops who patrolled the streets of Rome—and send him to the safety of the one part of Italy where Jews were free. Count Minerva, although surprised that Gramont would be considering such a move, assured him that arrangements could be made to receive the child in Genoa. The Ambassador said that after kidnapping Edgardo, he would have him put on a French steamship. “He urged me, however, to maintain the most absolute silence so that the element of surprise could be kept and thus play a bad trick on the priests.” Minerva concluded his letter, “I don’t know whether after his audience with the Pope he was still of the same idea.”3
When, two weeks later, Minerva again encountered the French ambassador, the subject of the kidnapping came up, but the Duke had by then calmed down, his enthusiasm no doubt cooled by his government’s alarm upon hearing of his plan. He told Minerva, however, that the reason he had abandoned it was that, while it would liberate the Jewish child, “it would not save the principle.” Yet Gramont persisted in his belief that, given the Pope’s obstinacy, the only way to get Edgardo back was to kidnap him. Indeed, in a conversation with Minerva in mid-November, the Duke criticized the “imbecility of the Jews,” who, instead of going around complaining about the Mortara boy’s situation and expecting someone else to help, should “at this very moment be arranging for him to escape.” Cavour’s emissary thought this unkind and unrealistic: “What could these poor unfortunates do unless the French police were willing to lend them a little help?”4
In fact, the idea of kidnapping Edgardo had occurred to the Jews as well, and various plans were hatched, at least in the safety of private conversations. Not long after the Duke de Gramont asked ruefully why the Jews themselves were not organizing a rescue party, one of his Jewish countrymen issued a call for the Jews to do just that. In the December 10 issue of Archives Israélites, a letter was published under the heading “Moyen d’opérer la délivrance du jeune martyr” (How to free the young martyr). “Let’s promise,” the take-charge author wrote, “a prize of twenty thousand francs to anyone who manages to abduct the Mortara boy and lead him to a safe place, whether in Piedmont, or in France, or any other country that has an honest government.” He offered to start the fund with his own donation of twenty francs but added expansively that if the twenty-thousand-franc figure seemed too small, “let’s double it!” His letter went into considerable detail as to how the fund would be administered (the Rothschild family would once again come to the Jews’ aid), how it would be raised (not only by Jews worldwide but by outraged Catholics as well), and how the prize would be awarded. The only details it failed to explore were just who was going to do the kidnapping and how.5
Meanwhile, the benefit of the Mortara controversy for Cavour and the Italian unification movement was becoming even clearer. In a letter to Cavour sent from Paris on November 21, the Marquis of Villamarina, ambassador of the kingdom of Sardinia in France, reported how much indignation the incident had provoked there, turning French public opinion against the pontifical state. The French Emperor, Cavour was told, continued to take a great interest in the case and had branded the Church’s action an outrageous violation of both civil and natural law.
In the Marquis’s description of Gramont’s tense meeting with the Pope, the link between the Mortara case and the events that were about to alter the political map of Italy was made clear. Gramont told Pius IX of the loud chorus of complaints in France aimed at the Holy See as a result of its handling of the affair. The Pope responded that he, too, had recently been hearing some disturbing reports regarding France. The Pontiff went on: “I would greatly appreciate it if you could help me, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, to put to rest the rumors that are circulating in my states, rumors that have been accompanied, as well, by pieces of information that my agents have been picking up, in which all of Emperor Napoleon’s intrigues in Italy have been exposed.”
Just what those plans were the Pope then recounted to the discomfited Duke. The secret French goal, said the Pope, was “to chase the Austrians from Lombardy and Veneto and, through universal suffrage, let the people themselves select the institutions and the king of their choice. The Roman Legations would be joined to this new Kingdom of Italy.” Pius IX accused the French of planning to go even further than this and annex other portions of the Papal States to Piedmont, including the kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the duchies—Tuscany, Modena, Parma—leaving the Pope to rule only the city of Rome.
“Monsieur de Gramont,” the Sardinian ambassador wrote Cavour, “appeared astonished by this outburst by the Pope and sought to calm him down and assure him that there was not a single word of truth in the whole account.” The Pope, skeptical of the Duke’s assurances, directed him to convey his comments to the Emperor and to report back with Napoleon’s response.6
Count Cavour’s reply to Ambassador Villamarina in Paris similarly reflects the curious interweaving of concern over the Mortara affair with the momentous political events that were about to unfold in Italy. (Cavour, like Villamarina, wrote in French. Although he was the architect of Italian unification, the man responsible for expelling foreigners and creating an Italian nation, Cavour never felt entirely comfortable with the Italian language and, indeed, addressed his own parliament in French, not Italian. All this, to be sure, was natural enough in Piedmont, whose royal court and high society had until very recently seen France, rather than Italy, as their main cultural point of reference.)
“The news that you send me,” he responded, “is of the utmost gravity.” What Villamarina had written about what was going on in Rome, Cavour wrote, corresponded perfectly with what he had heard from other sources. Passing on to Villamarina news of Gramont’s plan to kidnap Edgardo and smuggle him out to Piedmont, he wrote of the French ambassador: “He confided it to Minerva, to whom I gave the order to back it, although leaving to him the major part of the arrangements.” Cavour, then, had approved the plan himself. “Gramont,” he wrote, “later hesitated and has probably given up the idea, on orders from Paris.”
Although Napoleon no doubt thought that his enraged ambassador in Rome had gone too far in cooking up the kidnapping plan, in Cavour’s view, “the Emperor has been delighted by the Mortara affair, as he is with everything that can compromise the Pope in the eyes of Europe and among moderate Catholics.” The case would give Napoleon a freer hand in whittling away the Papal States: “The more difficult it will be for the Pope to make his weight felt against him, the easier it will be for him to impose the sacrifices necessary for the reorganization of Italy.”
Cavour spelled out for his ambassador to France the stance they should take with Napoleon III. They should remind him of the intransigence that the Pope showed in rejecting Gramont’s pleas on behalf of the Mortara family “and conclude by arguing that the Pope’s conduct shows the absolute impossibility of his conserving temporal power beyond the walls of Rome.”7
As the liberal and anticlerical newspapers throughout Europe kept up the drumbeat of criticism aimed at the Vatican over the Mortara affair, and the French ambassador to Rome renewed his protests, Cardinal Antonelli’s diplomatic pouch filled with updates by nuncios from all parts of the continent, reporting the troubling signs of a new wave of antipapal sentiment. In January 1859, the nuncio in Paris wrote Antonelli to report that the French emperor and his ministers were still unhappy about the Mortara affair, although, he added, “without the least reason.”8 A series of letters to the Secretary of State from the apostolic nuncio in Madrid likewise reported disturbing developments in Spain, a country that had virtually no Jewish population at all.
To a letter dated the first of December, 1858, the nuncio appended copies of recent Spanish newspaper stories on the Mortara case. Of particular concern was the fact that the Diario Spagniol, a paper close to the government, had published a piece that referred to the taking of the boy as “a kidnapping and a crime.” The nuncio went directly to the Minister of State and to the Minister of Internal Affairs to protest the outrage, berating them for their “neglect in not preventing such scandalous abuses of the periodical press.” He found the ministers agreeable, and they assured him that it would not happen again. But the nuncio did not stop there. He arranged for two Church-friendly newspapers to run stories lambasting the Diario for publishing the critical piece. The result of these efforts, he reported with considerable satisfaction, was publication of an apology by the paper in the previous day’s edition. Unfortunately, the nuncio wrote, he had found no way of “repressing the impertinence of the other newspaper, El Clamor, which has always been less than devoted to the Holy See.”9
In the Netherlands, the Vatican had to deal with a less cooperative government. On November 8, Count Du Chastel, the Dutch emissary to Rome, sent a letter to Cardinal Antonelli on behalf of his government. He wrote:
The Mortara affair, which has created such a stir over the last several months in Europe, has not failed to make an equally distressing impression on the people of the Low Countries, where a substantial number of Jews live, distinguishing themselves by their private and civic virtues. The events of Bologna have greatly upset the High Commission of Dutch Jews, which, following the example of their counterparts in England, France, and Sardinia, petitioned the Dutch Government with the request that it interest itself in this affair and work, through its good offices, to obtain a favorable solution for the Mortara family.
Remarking that his government had no wish to become involved in the internal affairs of another state, the Count nonetheless wanted to let the pontifical government know how offended Dutch public opinion was. He concluded with the hope that “the Holy See, in its great wisdom, is able to prevent in the future the recurrence of similar actions, which, in strongly stirring popular passions, result in the growth of unfavorable impressions of the Holy See.”10
The Secretary of State must have been especially concerned about this letter on behalf of the King of the Low Countries, for he wrote an unusually long reply. He complained that the Dutch were doing just what they themselves recognized that they had no right to do—namely, interfering in the internal affairs of another state. The matter, Antonelli informed them, involved “an essentially and exclusively religious fact, and therefore is naturally a matter to be handled by the Ecclesiastical Authority, which may not be interfered with by secular bodies.” The plea was therefore improper: “As the nature of the case is entirely religious, involving the Sacrament of baptism administered to a child, with all the consequences that flow from it, so too are the reasons that prevent the Supreme Head of the Church from taking action of the kind requested by the Jewish parents of the baptized boy.” As for the Count’s argument that the case was making a bad impression on his countrymen, Antonelli responded: “Whatever the impression made on those who either do not want to or do not know how to see the case in its proper light, the Holy See remains confident that it has acted according to the unchanging maxims of the Catholic Church, from which no human reason would ever allow it to shrink.”11
Across the Atlantic, the case was nourishing a new sense of national solidarity among the Jews of the United States. Although, at 150,000 strong, there were many more Jews in the U.S. than in Italy, France, or England, most American Jews were immigrants, and they had as yet little in the way of national organization. Even the three major English-language Jewish newspapers were local products, efforts of particularly influential rabbis in New York, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia.
Word of the Mortara affair came to American Jews indirectly, for neither the Università Israelitica of Rome nor the much more modest Jewish community of Bologna had direct links to their transatlantic brethren. A number of the leading American rabbis, however, were notified by a letter sent in September from Sir Moses Montefiore, head of the Board of Deputies of the British Jewish community. Interest quickly spread.
Only a minority of American Jews came from Roman Catholic countries, but the Mortara abduction represented for them all that was wrong with the Old World, a painful reminder of the oppression they had escaped. These sentiments were nourished not only by the American ideology of freedom and equality but by less salubrious forces as well. In the America of 1858, many took a dim view of Roman Catholicism. Catholic immigrants from Ireland and elsewhere were vilified and derided, and the Pope was painted as the devil incarnate. Ironically, the Jews, who shared much the same fate as the Catholic immigrants of the time at the hands of the overwhelmingly Protestant majority, were overjoyed to find such widespread popular support for their campaign against the Pope.
Beginning in mid-September, the major American Jewish papers carried story after story on the Mortara case. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise of Cincinnati—one of the founders of Reform Judaism in the United States and editor of one of the major Jewish newspapers—wrote in tones of which American anti-Catholics of the time could be proud:
The facts are, Edgar Mortara never was baptized, the Pope and his numerous, soul-less lackeys never cared whether that boy is a Christian or a Jew. It was not nor is it now the object of the papal officers to make Edgar a Christian, in order that he be saved in the Romish style, or because a few drops of water were sprinkled on him and an unknown woman said a few words over the unconscious child. Some petty priest or schoolmaster of an illiterate Catholic congregation may believe such nonsense, and prompt his flock to subscribe to the doctrine. But the chief movers in all those things are not so foolish.… One must have grown up in the midst of the Catholic clergy to know how much they preach and how little they believe; how severe and strict they are in all religious matters before the illiterate, and how they make light of the whole concern when they find an intelligent and confidential man. Hence Rome’s object is not and can not be the religion of a boy, not religion per se.… We may venture to say, if that nurse was brought before a court of justice in this country, any of our lawyers with a little cross-examination could make the woman tell, that she is the hired tool of some priest, who is himself the tool of his superior, and who again may be the blind tool of a Jesuit, who in his turn is the instrument of the inquisition, which sacred office is the handmaid of the Pope, who again is the subject of the Jesuits.…12
While the Jews living in the Papal States had to grovel before the terrifying power of the Pope, those in the United States clearly found no difficulty in going to the other extreme.
How much this scathing anti-Catholicism had roots in the European Jewish communities from which Wise and the other Jews came, and how much they picked up from their Protestant neighbors in the land of the free, is an intriguing question. Yet one of the ironies of Wise’s diatribe is how closely it mirrors the image of the Jews found in the Catholic press. While the Pope’s defenders viewed the motives of those calling for Edgardo’s release as ignoble, and argued that the boy’s parents themselves were moved by anti-Church rancor rather than parental devotion, in Wise’s rendering, it is the Pope and his clerical colleagues who dissemble, driven not by any true religious belief but by the most corrupt and insincere of motives.
Throughout the country, Jewish communities organized meetings to decide what action to take, and from New York to San Francisco, public protest rallies were held. In Boston, where anti-Catholic sentiment flourished, two synagogues held a joint meeting to consider what to do, and a four-member committee read its resolution to much applause. Going a step beyond Rabbi Wise, they specifically appealed for solidarity with Protestants who shared their view of the “Prince of Darkness”:
We hear with astonishment and deep sorrow that the most odious act that ever emanated from the Prince of Darkness was recently perpetrated in the dominions of Pio Nono, the Pope of Rome.… This abominable outrage not only affects the Jew, but it equally concerns the Christian who is not of the Catholic creed, as what they (the Inquisition) dared in defiance of every principle of moral justice, inflict one day on the Jew, they may and will repeat on a future day to the detriment of the Protestants residing within the limits of their unprincipled power. The history of these incarnate fiends, written in the blood of millions of victims, fully justifies such conclusion.13
