The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara

Acclaim for
DAVID I. KERTZER’
s
The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara

“Fascinating … full of rich material.… Kertzer has unearthed an evocative and unjustly forgotten episode of history.”

—
The Washington Post Book World

“A gripping, vivid and well-documented rendering. A highly readable work that is dramatic, moving and informative, as interesting to general readers as it will no doubt prove to historians.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

“David Kertzer tells a riveting tale, with great mastery of the sources.”

—
The New York Review of Books

“David Kertzer’s account of this extraordinary but largely forgotten moment in history is told with verve. Sounding much like a conventional thriller writer, Kertzer combines a gripping yarn with a detailed historical reconstruction.”

—
Financial Times

“A spellbinding and intelligent book. The story itself is utterly compelling, but it is entirely Kertzer’s skill as a historian and a writer that allows him to maintain the suspense.… Deftly constructed.”

—
Toronto Globe and Mail

“I read the book, all of it, cover to cover, nonstop, gasping, amazed. What an important and spectacular work! (With the narrative pace of a gripping novel.) One of the most impressive reading nights of my life.”

—
Cynthia Ozick

“A scrupulously researched, elegantly written narrative that deftly combines the tale of one family’s anguished and fruitless efforts to reclaim their child and the stirring saga of the Risorgimento.”

—
The Jerusalem Report

DAVID I. KERTZER
The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara

David I. Kertzer was born in 1948 in New York City. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986, he has twice been awarded, in 1985 and 1990, the Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies for the best work on Italian history. He is currently Paul Dupee, Jr., University Professor of Social Science and a professor of anthropology and history at Brown University. He and his family live in Providence.

ALSO BY DAVID I. KERTZER

Politics and Symbols:
The Italian Communist Party
and the Fall of Communism

Sacrificed for Honor:
Italian Infant Abandonment
and the Politics of Reproductive Control

Ritual, Politics, and Power

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JULY 1998

Copyright © 1997 by David I. Kertzer
Maps copyright © 1997 by David Lindroth, Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1997.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Kertzer, David I.
The kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara / by David I. Kertzer.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Mortara, Pio, d. 1940. 2. Jews—Italy—Bologna—Conversion to Christianity—History—19th century. 3. Converts from Judaism—Italy—Bologna—Biography.
I. Title.
DS135.I9M595  1997
945′.004924—dc21  96-39159

eISBN: 978-0-307-48671-4

Random House Web address:
www.randomhouse.com

v3.1_r2

To my father, Morris Norman Kertzer,
and to my daughter, Molly Emilia Kertzer,
with love and appreciation

CONTENTS

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Map

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

  1   The Knock at the Door

  2   Jews in the Land of the Popes

  3   Defending the Faith

  4   Days of Desperation

  5   The Mezuzah and the Cross—Edgardo’s Trip to Rome

  6   The House of the Catechumens

  7   An Old Father and a New

  8   Pope Pius IX

  9   The Pope Denounced

10   A Servant’s Sex Life

11   Drama at Alatri

12   Meeting Mother

13   The International Protests Spread

14   The Church Strikes Back

15   A Matter of Principle

16   Sir Moses Goes to Rome

17   Uprising in Bologna

18   The Inquisitor’s Arrest

19   The Case Against the Inquisitor

20   The Inquisitor’s Trial

21   Defending the Inquisitor

22   The Rites of Rulers

23   New Hopes for Freeing Edgardo

24   Edgardo’s Escape

25   A Death in Florence

26   Momolo’s Trial

Epilogue

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Notes

Archival Sources and Abbreviations

Bibliography

Maps will be found opposite the title page
and on
this page
and
this page

PROLOGUE

I
T WAS
the end of an era. Regimes that had lasted for centuries were about to be swept away. On the Italian peninsula, the old world of papal power and traditional authority uneasily faced the disparate progeny of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the champions of modern industry, science, and commerce. The proud warriors of the old and the new viewed each other warily, in mutual incomprehension. Each side waved its own flags, intoned its own verities, worshipped its own icons, sang praises to its heroes, and heaped scorn on its enemies. Revolutionaries dreamed of utopic futures, far different from the oppressive present; liberals envisioned a new political order, based on constitutional rule; and even conservatives began to wonder whether the old order could stand much longer. New gods were being born, new objects of adulation. In Italy, out of the patchwork of duchies, grand duchy, Bourbon and Savoyard kingdoms, Austrian outposts, and the pontifical state itself, a new nation-state was soon to take shape whose boundaries were as yet unknown and whose nature was as yet unimagined. Subjects would soon become citizens. Yet for the mass of illiterate peasants, nothing much would seem to change.

Nowhere in the West was the chasm between the old world and the new so wide as in the lands of the pope-king. Where else, indeed, could rule by divine right be so well entrenched, so well justified ideologically, so spectacularly elaborated ritually? The Pope had been a worldly prince, a ruler of his subjects, for many centuries, and the contours of his domain in 1858—stretching from Rome in a crescent sweeping northeastward around the Grand Duchy of Tuscany and up to the second city of the Papal States, Bologna, in the north—were much the same as they had been three and a half
centuries before. The Pope ruled his state because that was what God willed. The revolutionary notions that people should choose their own rulers, that they should be free to think what it pleased them to think, believe what they chose to believe—these were not simply wrongheaded but heretical, the devil’s work, the excrescences of Freemasons and other enemies of God and religion. The world was as God had ordained it. Progress was heresy.

But while the pontifical state still stood in 1858, it had not survived the previous seven decades unbattered. When French soldiers streamed down the Italian peninsula in 1796–97, the Papal States were gobbled up; in the years that followed, two popes were driven from Rome into humiliating exile, and Church property was auctioned off to the highest bidder, swelling Napoleon’s coffers. Although with Napoleon’s collapse Pope Pius VII returned to the Holy City in 1814 and the Papal States were restored, what had once appeared so solid—a product of the divine order of things—now seemed terribly fragile. Conspiracies against the Pope’s worldly rule sprouted; revolts broke out. At midcentury another pope was forced to flee Rome, this time fearful of murderous mobs, and had to rely on foreign armies to restore his rule and then protect him from his own mutinous subjects.

Among those subjects—though, for the most part, far from mutinous—were the Jews, “the Pope’s Jews.” Having lived in Italy since before there were any Christians, they nonetheless could not shake off their status as outsiders, petitioners for the privilege of being allowed to remain where they were. Few in number—fewer than fifteen thousand in all the Papal States
¹
—they were high in the clergy’s consciousness, occupying a central, if unenviable, position in Catholic theology: they were the killers of Christ, whose continued wretched existence served as a valuable reminder to the faithful, but who would one day see the light and become part of the true religion, helping to hasten the Redeemer’s return. Since the sixteenth century, the popes had confined them to ghettoes to limit the contagion. No Christian was allowed in their homes; theirs was a society apart. Still, life in the ghetto had its joys and consolations. There the Jews had a rich communal life, their own institutions, their own synagogues, rabbis, and leaders, their own quarrels and triumphs, their own divinely ordained rites that structured each day of their lives and each season of the year.

But the Jews, too, saw a new world come into view as French troops, spreading the secular trinity of
liberté, égalité, fraternité,
swept through the continent, hauled down the ghetto gates, and burned them in a purificatory blaze for popular edification. In the soldiers’ wake, sometimes with Christian neighbors looking ominously on, the Jews—some exhilarated, others terrified—began to take their first halting steps out of a world that was the only one they and their ancestors had ever known.

The events chronicled here, which together form a strangely forgotten chapter in the battle that spelled the end of the old regime, began in the porticoed city of Bologna, indeed in the very heart of its medieval center of cobbled streets and piazzas, in 1858. In Rome, Pope Pius IX sat on St. Peter’s throne as French troops patrolled the Eternal City. Two of the three most powerful men in Bologna were cardinals: the Archbishop, the city’s spiritual leader, and the Cardinal Legate, representing the papal government, the civil ruler. The third was a military man, an Austrian general, whose troops (along with the French forces in Rome) ensured that the tottering papal government did not fall.

Directly across the street from the general’s headquarters stood Bologna’s justly famous Dominican church, San Domenico, where Saint Dominic himself died and where his bones are to this day reverently encased. There lived the Inquisitor, charged by the Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome with combating heresy and defending the faith. Among his tasks was ensuring that the restrictions imposed on the Jews were obeyed.

For two centuries, Bologna’s inquisitors had had little reason to worry about the Jews, for in 1593 the Pope had expelled all nine hundred of them from the city and its surrounding territories. In the wake of the French occupation of the 1790s, a few adventurous Jews made their way back, but once the Papal States were restored, their status again became tenuous, their right to live in the city less than clear. Yet, by 1858 close to two hundred of them lived in Bologna, merchants for the most part, carving out a comfortable niche for their families. Given Church authorities’ mixed feelings about their presence in the formerly forbidden city, the Jews had no desire to call attention to themselves, and so had neither synagogue nor rabbi.