The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, page 8
Momolo set out. According to a friend, he was in a sad state, his spirit broken, his once boundless energy drained.
While Rome’s Jewish leaders wanted to handle all dealings with the papal authorities in their own way, the Jews of Bologna favored a more aggressive approach. Their end-of-July letter proposed a multipronged strategy. The first involved Momolo’s activities once he reached Rome. The second, they proposed, should be a unified effort by all the Jewish communities of the Papal States, calling on the Pope to act in order to “relieve thousands of the state’s most peaceful and obedient subjects from anxieties that are worse than having to fear for their lives and their possessions.” It was the third, however, that brought Momolo’s Bolognese kin and friends into active conflict with Scazzocchio and his colleagues, for the letter called for mobilizing “the most eminent foreign Jews to interest European public opinion, nations, and governments in the case.”
The same day that this letter was written, another was sent to Rome’s Università Israelitica, this one from Crescenzo Bondi, a Roman Jew who happened to be on a business trip in Senigallia, a town of twenty-four thousand in the central Adriatic region of the Papal States. Bondi reported on a meeting held there the previous day, a gathering of representatives from all the major Jewish communities of the area—Ancona, Urbino, Pesaro, and Senigallia—who had come to meet with Angelo Moscato, Marianna’s brother-in-law. Moscato briefed them on the latest events and urged them to join a fund-raising campaign for the Mortaras. Knowing that this news would be poorly received in Rome, Bondi asked his Roman brethren to be understanding of their friends from Bologna, who were gripped by a desperate need for action and had organized the fund-raising campaign “without first consulting our Community, as it was their duty to do.”
Rome’s Jewish community could boast of being Europe’s oldest, for Jews had lived there continuously for two millennia. Its location at the center of power in the Papal States and, indeed, at the center of world Christendom gave it a certain pride of place among the Jews of Italy—an honor, however, that came at a high price. Rome’s Jews keenly felt the might of the Pope and the Church hierarchy, and their very proximity to ecclesiastical power meant they came under greater scrutiny than Jews elsewhere.
Rome’s Jews had their own unhappy memories, which the news from Bologna once more brought to mind. One of the most searing was a story told to them by their parents and grandparents, the story of the dramatic confrontation that took place on the evening of December 9, 1783, when the ghetto gate, already shut for the night, was unexpectedly opened. A coach, with a large police escort, rolled in. Residents rushed to put on their yellow hats, which by law they had to wear at all times, as the carriage rolled across the cobblestones and stopped in the center of the ghetto. Out from the coach came two government officials, who demanded to see the rabbis and lay leaders of the community.
When the surprised ghetto leaders made their way to the carriage, the reason for the visit was explained. The men were looking for two orphans, a boy aged 11 and his sister, aged 7, who lived with their grandmother. They were to be taken to the House of the Catechumens to be prepared for baptism.
Alarmed and indignant, the Jewish leaders demanded an explanation and were told what had happened. Decades earlier, a great-aunt of the children had left the ghetto, converted, and married a Catholic man. Her son, a cousin of the children’s father, was now a grown man. He had decided that his long-lost kin should enjoy the benefits of conversion and had asked the authorities to arrange for their baptism.
The armed escort was ordered to locate the children and seize them. By that time, the family had received word of the uninvited visitors, and the children were nowhere to be found.
The efforts to squirrel them away, however, proved of little avail. The police were ordered to grab whatever children they could and to hold them as hostages until the two youngsters were relinquished. Scores of children were rounded up. There was little for the Jews to do but fetch the two siblings from their hiding place. The carriage carrying the befuddled youngsters rumbled back across the cobblestones, and the ghetto gate thudded shut behind them.
Nor was this the end of the matter. When the Roman police chief heard of the Jews’ insolence, he ordered an armed force into the ghetto, and sixty young Jewish men were hauled off and thrown, in chains, into dungeons. It took more than four months for the Jewish community to come up with the payment demanded for the men’s release. The two children, meanwhile, were baptized, never again to set foot in the ghetto.4
Such encounters had taught the leaders of Rome’s ghetto to tread gingerly in dealing with the Church, especially when questions of doctrine were at stake. Nor were the memories of their vulnerability all so old. Only nine years before the Mortara abduction, in the wake of the retaking of Rome by French troops in 1849, the Jews were accused of having purchased holy objects stolen from Roman churches in the previous year of upheaval. Soldiers invaded the ghetto one evening, locked the Jews in their homes for three days and nights, and went house to house ransacking their belongings in search of the stolen goods. Frustrated at not finding any of the loot they were looking for, the soldiers carried off the Jews’ own golden sacred objects to compensate them for their efforts.5
Despite such experiences, Rome’s Jews felt grateful to Pope Pius IX for relieving them of some of the most irksome and degrading restrictions that had been imposed on them. Shortly after becoming pope, he had eliminated the predica coatta, the centuries-old requirement that Jews attend a Saturday sermon, given by a priest, aimed at demonstrating the evils of Judaism and the joys of conversion. Pius IX had also ordered the ghetto gates to be torn down, despite lively opposition from the Roman plebes.
Yet the Jews of Rome still lived almost entirely in the old ghetto and were still bound by many restrictions. Of all the major Jewish communities in Italy in 1858, Rome’s was the poorest, and visitors to the ghetto were appalled by the conditions they found. A Spanish traveler, Emilio Castelar, no friend of papal rule himself, has left a graphic—although somewhat overdrawn—picture of the sight that met him when he visited the ghetto in the 1860s. He began by putting the place into context, for, he wrote, aside from the beautiful Saint Peter’s Square, Rome “is a filthy city.… Mounds of garbage lie at every street corner.… The Tiber is truly an open sewer; its sickly yellow waters give the appearance of an immense vomit of bile.”
But amidst the general squalor, Castelar reported, Rome’s ghetto was in a category of its own. As one entered, “one’s feet sink into a soft layer of excrement, which seems to be the droppings of a pig or a hippopotamus. Half-naked children, covered with scabs of filth which resemble a leper’s gangrenous sores, slither everywhere. A few old people, with wrinkled, jaundiced skin, white hair, glassy eyes, emaciated, with sinister smiles, stand guard by the doors to the houses, which seem to be true rat holes. And from each of those dens wafts a fetid smell.”6
Complaints that Rome’s Jews lived in squalid conditions, and that the Church was to blame for this, were dismissed as rank anti-Catholic propaganda by Church defenders. In a typical apologia of the 1860s, a biographer of Pius IX argued that there was no place in the world where the Jews suffered less than in Rome. Now that the good pope had opened the ghetto gates, the only reason that the Jews still lived there, he wrote, was “their own spirit of exclusion and separation.” He continued: “If the ghetto in the past was dirty and disgusting, if even today it is unhealthy, that is certainly not the fault of the popes.” In this account and thousands of others, the Church fathers were portrayed as having done the Jews a great favor by putting them in the ghetto, for this was the only way to protect them from the people’s ire. “The Jews lived happily and peacefully in Rome, their property, their safety, and their beliefs effectively protected.”7
Viewing life through lenses so different that they saw entirely different worlds, the Church faithful and the Jews were ever perched on the brink of conflict. Where matters of Church religious teachings were in question, and where the most basic of all tenets—the superiority of Christianity and the divine protection enjoyed by the baptized—were at issue, the stage was set for a confrontation that, historically, the Jews could not win.
In the Mortara case, this clash of two realities meant the construction of two narratives, two stories. The Jewish narrative, embraced not only by the Jews but by other opponents of the temporal power of the Roman Church as well, told of a loving family brought to ruin by the papal regime’s religious fanaticism. In this account, papal police tore a desperate little boy from his helpless father’s arms, forcing the child, despite his heartbreaking pleas to be returned to his parents, to journey alone to an unknown fate. While the boy plays a major role in the drama, his parents play just as big a part, for they are the major victims of the piece.
When the first protests on behalf of the Mortara family began to make their way out of the ghetto, Church defenders sought to deflate the tale of the kidnapped child and stricken parents by offering a very different account of what had happened. In the Church narrative, the parents’ role was secondary. The focus was entirely on Edgardo himself. The story was not one of kidnap, the classic tale of evil outsiders arriving in the night with overpowering force to abduct a child from his loving parents. It was, rather, a heartwarming story of redemption, an inspiring tale of the divinely ordained salvation of a boy who until then had been consigned to a life of error and a hereafter of eternal damnation. Plucked from the clutches of evil and granted the joys of eternal happiness, the child had been bestowed a place at the side of the most holy and revered leader in all the world, the Pope himself.
Yet, if Edgardo had been blessed by the miracle that was the hallmark of baptism, there should be some sign. It was, after all, 1858, the year in which the apparition of Mary first appeared at Lourdes. God would surely signal His pleasure.
When Scazzocchio asked the Mortaras in July to send details of how Edgardo had behaved when he was being taken away, it was in response to the first Church reports that God indeed had sent a sign, one so dramatic that it bordered on the miraculous. A preternatural change, it was said, had come over the little boy on his trip to Rome, a trip that quickly began to take on the mythic quality of a voyage from error to enlightenment. He left Bologna a Jew; he arrived in Rome a few days later a devout Catholic.
Although Scazzocchio was aware of these reports in July, the first accounts in the Catholic press did not appear until the fall. In a long story published in L’osservatore bolognese, the newspaper founded by Archbishop Viale-Prelà to defend the faith in the battle against the liberals, lavish attention was devoted to the boy’s miraculous transformation en route. The article began by telling of Edgardo’s capture: “We can assure our readers,” the paper reported, “that in carrying out the orders received from Rome, no violence was employed, and it was all carried out with gentleness, solely through the use of persuasion.” True, on first hearing the news that Edgardo was to be taken from them, his parents were upset, but his mother was finally convinced by her husband to leave her son, and Edgardo himself “got into the carriage that awaited him tranquilly and serenely.”
The paper excitedly revealed “touching details” from eyewitnesses about the subsequent trip to Rome. Two devout women had accompanied the boy, and gave him a prayer book to read. “He read those prayers with great pleasure, and each time the subject of the Christian religion came up in conversation, he paid great attention. Indeed, he often asked questions on particular points of our faith, showing such great interest that it was clear how important it was to him to know the truths of our holy religion.” Nor was this all. “Whenever the carriage stopped in any town or city, the first thing that he asked was to be taken to the church, and when he entered he remained there at length, showing the greatest respect and the most moving devotion.”8
Scazzocchio urged Momolo to provide him with some ammunition to counter the damage being done by these inspirational stories of a boy going contentedly with the papal police and finding divine enlightenment on the road to Rome. After finally meeting with his son in the House of the Catechumens in Rome in August, Momolo prepared his own account, which he sent to the Pope.
Momolo’s short document recounts that when, in the presence of the Rector of the Catechumens, he spoke to his son about what had happened, Edgardo “recalled the surprise and the immense shock he felt when he heard that the carabinieri were looking for him in order to take him with them.” And the Rector, reported Momolo, had learned from Edgardo that he feared the reason why the police wanted to take him away from his family was so that they could cut off his head.
Momolo also gave a very different account of his son’s journey to Rome than the one being broadcast to the Church faithful. In the place of demands to visit churches were pleas for his mezuzah:
Edgardo added that when he was led away he was sobbing and asked for his father and mother. All along the way he repeatedly asked the person accompanying him for his mezuzah, which he normally wore around his neck as a symbol of the Jewish religion. But in its place the man offered him a kind of medallion, to be used in the same way. Edgardo, though, refused it, until finally the man assured him that it was just the same as the object he had asked for. Throughout the trip, the man tried to calm him with the promise that his parents were but a short distance behind them. When he got to Rome and discovered this was not true, he changed the favorable opinion he had had of the man, an opinion based on the sweet and wheedling manner the man had used with him throughout the journey.9
The source for the Church’s account of Edgardo’s trip was Giuseppe Agostini, the police officer who had taken him from Bologna to Rome. When Cardinal Antonelli received Momolo Mortara’s very different account, and learned that it was being distributed to sympathetic newspapers throughout Europe, he asked Brigadier Agostini to prepare his own written report.
Dated November 2, the document was written four months after the disputed journey. Agostini’s description of the scene at the house when he and Lucidi arrived and announced their mission jibed with that of the Mortaras themselves. It was, he reported, an extremely moving scene, an excruciating sight of desolation. The boy’s parents, and especially his mother, had been “consumed with tears, protesting.” He wrote: “It looked as though they would not give him up regardless of the amount of force used.”
The brigadier reported that the following day, during the twenty-four-hour reprieve, he had returned to San Domenico to get further instructions from the Inquisitor. There Father Feletti gave him two French medallions of the Blessed Immaculate Virgin, with images of Mary on one side and of Jesus on the cross on the other. Agostini was told that, if at all possible, he should place one of them around the neck of the “new Christian” once they were on their way to Rome.
Agostini did not report on the final scene at the Mortara home (the “house of the Jew,” as the brigadier called it) but skips in his account to five days into his journey with Edgardo, in the small city of Fossombrone, when, early in the morning, as the boy was getting dressed, Agostini first showed him one of the medallions the Inquisitor had given him:
I gently asked him to put it around his neck, and to kiss it, while I did the same with mine. At first, he showed repugnance, saying that his mother didn’t want him to kiss the Cross. But, using all the tenderness I could, I told the child that he was now passing from blindness to the sight of Divine things, the true light, and that he was not an Unbeliever but part of the Christian Religion. Finally yielding, he kissed the medallion and put it around his neck.
Agostini took Edgardo by the hand and led the boy to the cathedral of Fossombrone, where, the brigadier reported, he kindly urged Edgardo to go in. “At first, he stubbornly refused,” Agostini recalled, “but seeing the other gendarmes going in to Mass, he entered as well.” It was then that the miracle occurred. No sooner was the child inside the church—the first time in his life he had been in one—when, “thanks to the Heavenly wonders, there was an instantaneous change. Getting down on his knees, he took part quietly in the Divine Sacrifice, listening with interest to the explanations” that Agostini gave him. The Brigadier’s first thought was to teach the boy how to make the sign of the cross. Having accomplished this, he then taught him how to recite the Ave Maria.
The transformation was indeed a thing of wonder: “From that time he showed the strongest desire to visit the other churches there. After lunch, while visiting one of them, he couldn’t take his eyes off a painting showing the passion of the Redeemer,” and so Agostini explained it to him. From that moment, the brigadier claimed, Edgardo “forgot his parents, and as we continued on our journey, at every stop the first thing he asked was to visit the House of God, where he would make the sign of the cross with the holy water and recite the Ave Maria that he had just learned.”
When they reached Spoleto, Agostini reported, he took Edgardo to a church, where, after having him genuflect, he had the boy recite the Paternoster. A priest at the church, learning of the boy’s stirring story, took him to the vestry, where, with great kindness, he gave him a scapular of the Holy Mary and put it around his neck, making him kiss it repeatedly. For the rest of the trip, the visits to churches continued, until the moment when Edgardo, the neophyte, was delivered to the Catechumens in Rome.
For Brigadier Agostini, who had already been given a bonus payment by Father Feletti in gratitude for his excellent work and his inspiring story, the request that he prepare a report of his experiences for Cardinal Antonelli, the Secretary of State, was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make his voice heard at the highest levels of Church and state. Agostini’s report of his remarkable success undoubtedly made the Cardinal very happy, but just how much of it the Cardinal—known within Church circles for his lack of religious conviction—actually believed is hard to tell.
