The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, page 20
In Bologna, meanwhile, L’osservatore bolognese had already run three articles on the Mortara case in the course of the month. The last of these, in late October, began by responding to a recent attack aimed at it by the Parisian Journal des Débats. The Bologna Catholic paper disputed the Journal’s report of a Church-induced climate of anti-Semitism in the city. The French paper had cited, among other episodes, a weekly puppet show in Bologna’s central piazza in which the marionettes were regularly made to mouth “words of hate against the Jews.”
Along with two other French papers, the Journal was also denounced for its relentless hostility toward the Pope and his authority. According to L’osservatore bolognese, the “chorus masters of modern rationalism” were nothing but a bunch of hypocrites who ignored the facts in order to wage their “disloyal and implacable war against truth and against Catholicism.” The Mortaras were being used cynically: “Here we have the philanthropists, the humanitarians, who don’t hesitate to exploit the anxieties of a mother and an entire family in order to wound, once more, that Church of which they claim with such hypocrisy to be the devoted and reverent sons.”
For the Bologna Catholic paper, there was no room for debate or for criticism. It was a simple matter of facts and of knowing the divinely ordained laws of the Church, the laws of religion. The boy had been baptized, and “we hope that no one wants to deny the fact that baptism makes a person Christian.” Admittedly, taking her child away might have been distressing for the poor mother, but all possible care had been taken to make the move as painless as possible. L’osservatore bolognese went on to report the “moving details” the paper had received about the trip, recounting yet another version of the miraculous conversion along the way. The story concluded: “From letters from Rome, we learn that now, as always, the boy is extremely pleased by his situation, and that he shows a lively intelligence and the most obedient and gentle temperament.” Amidst this happiness, only one thought pained him, “the thought of seeing his parents and his siblings remain as Jews.” “But I will pray to the Lord,” the boy said, “that He shine His grace on them as well so that they too become Christians.”10
Meanwhile, the other Bologna weekly close to the Church, Il vero amico, reiterated the argument that Momolo and Marianna were angry about their son’s removal only because it meant seeing “one of their offspring pass from Judaism to the true human Religion of Christ.” The paper also argued—taking up another Civiltà Cattolica theme—that if the journalists of France, Germany, and England were “raising their voices against the Pontiff, screaming injustice, kidnapping, and tyranny,” this was hardly surprising, “since currently the newspapers of Europe are in good part in the hands of the Jews.”11
An avalanche of articles in the Italian Catholic press defended the Pope and castigated the Church’s enemies, who were accused of ignorance—probably willful—of the teachings of Jesus and the duties of religion. These denunciations grew out of a religious vision of the Jews that made the attacks on the Holy See on behalf of the Jewish family seem especially noisome. The advantage to the boy of being Catholic, rather than remaining Jewish, seemed so obvious—and the desire of any Christian to want to return him to the Jews so preposterous—that words could hardly express their outrage.
A good example is provided by the Genoa daily Il Cattolico, whose articles were written primarily by priests committed to defending the Pope’s temporal power. Together with L’armonia della religione colla civiltà, Il Cattolico struggled mightily in the heart of the beast, for Genoa was part of the kingdom of Sardinia. From its first item on the Mortara case, in August 1858, through the end of that year, Il Cattolico devoted over a score of articles to the polemic.
Typical was a piece it published at the beginning of December. The correspondent pointed out that, by keeping Edgardo, the Pope was not only serving the boy’s spiritual interest but benefiting him materially as well. Once the child had completed his education—all paid for by the Church—he could aspire to any of the careers and honors available in the Papal States, from which, he noted, Edgardo would as a Jew have been excluded. The article continued:
Whoever among us gives a little serious thought to the matter, compares the condition of a Jew—without a true Church, without a King, and without a country, dispersed and always a foreigner wherever he lives on the face of the earth, and moreover, infamous for the ugly stain with which the killers of Christ are marked—[whoever] compares this reviled man with a Roman citizen, who has as his country the most civil nation in the world, Italy, and who can occupy the most splendid civil and ecclesiastical offices of the eternal city, will immediately understand how great is this temporal advantage that the Pope is obtaining for the Mortara boy.
It was clear to Il Cattolico that all the hand-wringing about the injustice done to the boy was but a smokescreen for what truly motivated the protests. How could the rabble-rousers be taken seriously when it was the wretched Jews whom they were championing? “The libertines are making the devil of a noise, and have said, and keep repeating, with apparent seriousness, that all of the European Powers are sending strong letters of protest to the Pope to get him to give the Mortara boy back to his parents.” This must be a joke: “Imagine, people! The European Powers taking so much trouble for a Jew, who doesn’t matter one whit to them! This is a tale to tell children some winter night by the fire! Yet many of these rags have tried to pass it off as the absolute truth.”12
Jews were beyond the pale of civilization, because civilization was based on Christianity. As outsiders, they were dangerous, for they did not feel bound to the laws of morality that governed Christians. They felt no obligations to anyone other than their fellow Jews, and they showed no pity for their Christian victims.
Charges of ritual murder in some ways epitomized the Catholic view of the Jews. Under the heading “The Horrendous Murder of a Child,” Il Cattolico in January 1859 made no bones about the link between the commotion caused by the Mortara protests and their decision to run a breathless report of a new, terrifying example of Jewish villainy. “In the month of August,” the Genoan paper began its report,
while the libertine press was creating such an uproar against the Pope because of the case of the Mortara boy, the most horrendous assassination of a Christian boy was being committed by a Jew in Folkchany, a Moldo-Wallachian city [now in Romania]. So goes the world. The Pope arranges for a Jewish boy who had become a Christian to be brought up, with every possible care, in a Catholic boarding school, and they raise the roof. A Jew kills a Christian boy in the most horrible way, and the liberals, we are certain, will not have a single word to say about it.
One day in early August, according to the story, a woman from Folkchany set out on a trip with her 4-year-old son. As she was about to cross the nearby border into Moldavia, she saw that the child was tired and told him to go home, while she continued on her journey. When she returned, after dark, her little boy was nowhere to be found. Nervous and fearful, she told her husband, and the two of them searched without success, finally notifying the police. For five days they found no sign of the child.
Near the border crossing where the mother had last seen her son was a tavern run by a Jew. They suspected that it was he who had taken the child, eager to use the little Christian’s blood to make matzah, the unleavened bread baked by Jews for Passover. (The belief that Jews used Christian blood to make their matzah was a centuries-old theme, linked to the recurring accusation that Judaism required the ritual murder of Christians.13 In the case in question here, quite aside from the monstrous absurdity of the charge in general, the fact that Passover occurs in early spring, not August, apparently made no impression on the Jews’ accusers.) The man denied ever having seen the boy, and initially they could find no proof that he had. But finally the police found the evidence they were looking for. Search dogs began scratching the ground not far from the tavern and soon uncovered the child’s blood-soaked cadaver. He had been horribly mutilated. “They counted more than 120 wounds on the little body of the poor martyr, and they saw that thorns had been driven into his head and reeds thrust under his fingernails.” Since the blood was still fresh, they realized that he had been tortured for five days. The signs were clear: “The type of torture was too much like that of Our Lord for them to be fooled about the intentions of the murderer or murderers.”
When word of what had happened spread, the irate population of Folkchany rose up, and an angry crowd marched on the homes of the city’s Jews to rid themselves once and for all of the evil in their midst. “From fifteen to twenty Jews were killed in this uprising, and it was only by the energetic intervention of the authorities that things didn’t get further out of hand.” The police arrested the Jews who looked most suspicious, and they began their investigations. But the Jews made sure that there would be no evidence against them: “All the Jews took the part of their coreligionists. In a few days they had raised 600,000 francs to be used to buy witnesses and to squelch suspicions. The Judaic gold produced its intended effect: it was declared that there was no sufficient proof.” The imprisoned Jews were freed.14
The story was reported, in much the same form, in Catholic papers throughout Europe, including L’Univers in France. Two months later, the editor of the French Archives Israélites published a response. It was true, he wrote, that a little boy had been brutally murdered in the Moldavian town, and it was true that the population rose up, stirred by reports that the Jews had tortured and killed him for his blood, and sacked the Jewish homes of Folkchany, murdering a number of Jews before the police belatedly arrived. What L’Univers and the other papers failed to report, however, was that investigators had discovered that the boy had been killed by his uncle, who was currently awaiting trial in Bucharest.15
The notion that Jews regularly captured Christian children in order to drain their blood was widespread in Italy at the time and, while rejected by the small liberal elite, was firmly rooted in the general population, nourished by parish priests, Lenten sermons, and the Catholic press. Two years before Edgardo was taken from Bologna, for example, a Jewish merchant in a small northeastern Italian town was arrested, accused of abducting a 23-year-old Christian servant and of having drained much of her blood for religious purposes. Miraculously, the woman survived to report the crime in the most lurid detail. Indeed, the striking parallels between the story she told and the folk stories prevalent in Europe in the nineteenth century about Dracula-like vampires inevitably raise the question for us of the relation between the two myths. In this case, the Jew’s trial revealed that the young woman—no doubt drawing on a combination of these legends—had invented the hair-raising story in order to divert suspicion after she had robbed her employers’ home and fled with the loot.16
The Church’s role in fostering the ritual-murder charge continued long after the Mortara affair. Thirty-five years after the Civiltà Cattolica published its influential defense of the taking of Edgardo, for example, it returned to the sanguinary theme in a series of articles about the Jews. “There is no point here in wasting time and words to make clear what everyone already knows—that is, that the Jews are always engaged in harrying and robbing the Christians. Rather, we intend to prove something that many people do not know, and that others find difficult to believe and even try to deny. We refer here to the mystery of the blood.” The Jesuit journal went on at gory length to establish the irrefutable proof that the Jews had always made a practice of seizing unsuspecting Christians and taking their blood.17
The campaign against the Jews continued, in these later years of the nineteenth century, to be equated by the Church with its battle against liberalism. The liberals’ defense of the Jews as having equal rights, and even worse, their doctrine that the state should recognize no religion as superior to another, directly contradicted Church dogma.
In an 1886 article, the Civiltà Cattolica took up this theme in characteristic fashion. Under the headline “On Jewish Persecution of Christianity,” it set out to demonstrate that “Christians have never persecuted Jews, as the Jews and the Judaized liberals and Freemasons continue to assert falsely, but rather the Jews have always persecuted Christians.”18 A half-dozen years later, the Jesuit journal was still defending the Church’s treatment of the Jews as a people in need of special surveillance and restrictions. “What,” it asked, “have been the consequences of the emancipation of the Jews in all those countries that have given it? Two, both of them clear, palpable, and doleful: a remorseless, pitiless war against the Christian religion, and especially against Catholicism, and then an unbridled arrogance in usury, monopolies, and a series of thefts of all sorts, to the damage of the very people who gave them their civil liberty.” The picture that Civiltà Cattolica painted of the Jews was not a pretty one: “For Judaism, brotherhood and peace were and are merely a pretext to be used to prepare—through the extermination of Christianity, if it were possible, and the enfeebling of the Christian nations—for their Messianic kingdom, the dream that the Talmud prophesies for them.”19
To understand the Catholic reaction to criticism of the Church’s treatment of Edgardo Mortara, one must keep in mind this basic attitude toward the Jews and its deep roots in Christian theology. When L’armonia ran its first article on the controversy, in August 1858, not only did the author try to link the protests to the antireligious, bomb-throwing revolutionaries—hence the title of the article, “The Jew of Bologna and the Bombs of Giuseppe Mazzini”—but he tapped into this view that it was the Jews who persecuted Christians, not the reverse. “Isn’t it ridiculous in the extreme for an Italian and Catholic government [the Kingdom of Sardinia] to take up the cause of a Jew against the Government of the Head of the Church when it should instead be appealing to the foreign powers for aid against that wicked sect that, while trying to subvert the other governments, also continuously undermines the government that tolerates and nourishes it?”20
Six weeks later, the Turinese Catholic weekly, returning to the controversy over the Mortara case, defended the Church by arguing that from the most ancient times to the present, popes had always done all they could do to protect the Jews. Yet, the author pointed out, “We must not forget the great wrongs and the true infamies that have stained the Jews’ reputation, and the disorders they have caused by the hatred that burns in them against Christianity.”21
By the time Edgardo was taken to Rome, this centuries-old Church view of the Jews, although still influential, had not entirely withstood the onslaught of the new currents of thought sweeping Europe. One sign of this, of course, was Pius IX’s own reforms at the beginning of his papacy, loosening the restrictions under which Rome’s Jews lived. But by 1858, Church leaders saw defense of their traditional position on the Jews as an integral part of their more general fight against the liberal and revolutionary threat that faced them. The Jews, small in number as they were, represented a centerpiece of the ideological underpinnings of the Papal States: the need to protect the supremacy of the Church, and the folly of an ideology that treated all religions as equal and thus required a separation between Church and state.
Antonio Gramsci, no friend of the Church, writing from his Fascist jail cell in the 1930s, reflected on the use that the Church had made of the Jews in its battle against the liberal threat. He recounted how, in 1848, when a Jew who had participated in the protests in Turin returned to his hometown, reactionaries spread the tale that he had murdered a Christian child for ritual purposes, leading the peasants to march on the town’s small ghetto and sack it. Gramsci concluded: “The reactionaries and the clerics wanted to make it seem as though the liberal innovations of 1848 were an invention of the Jews.” To this observation, the imprisoned Communist leader added a note: “I must reconstruct the history of the Mortara boy, which had such a clamorous echo in the polemics against clericalism.”22
If some in the Church in Italy thought that taking Edgardo and keeping him in the Catechumens were wrong, they kept their opinions to themselves. The Catholic press was unanimous in its support for the Vatican position and merciless in attacking those who criticized it. It was time to unite behind the Pope, not a time to show signs of weakness to the enemy.
Elsewhere in Catholic Europe, a few Church voices were raised in protest. The most significant was that of an obscure French priest, l’abbé Delacouture, whose letters denouncing what the Church had done were given wide circulation in the European press. His writings enraged the Pope’s supporters, for he argued, as a priest, that the Vatican had violated the basic principles on which Catholicism rested.
Delacouture’s writings on the Mortara case were published in late 1858 in a French pamphlet, and soon thereafter translated into Italian. What prompted him to speak out, he wrote, was the arrogance and presumption of the defenders of the pontifical government in arguing that no true Catholic could hold a contrary view. He would not, he said, allow the enemies of the Catholic faith to believe that the principles being espoused in support of the “kidnapping” of Edgardo were those of Catholicism. It was his task to show the contrary, for if the position of the Pope’s supporters was allowed to stand, it would have grave consequences for the Church. “Is there anything in the world,” asked Delacouture, “that could make so hateful a religion that is so holy and so beneficial, as does the fact of which we speak?”23
