The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (12 page)

Inspiring stories of Jews’ seeing the light and entering the House of the Catechumens despite their families’ desperate attempts to stop them were regularly published in booklet form, together with loving descriptions of the magnificent baptismal rites that followed. The great pride with which the Church broadcast news of the baptism of Jews continued right up to the time of Edgardo’s abduction.
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The news column of the most influential of all Catholic journals of the time,
Civiltà Cattolica,
bubbled with enthusiasm in reporting news of the most recent conversions, wherever they occurred. The names changed, but the story stayed the same.

For example, on the Saturday before Easter 1853, a young Jewish woman from Galicia was baptized by a cardinal at the Lateran church in Rome, with her godmother, Princess Torlonia, at her side. When still a little girl, the convert-to-be had had a vision in which she saw two temples. One was adorned with beautiful towers, a place of magnificence; the other lay in ruins. The interpretation was clear, reported the Jesuit journal: the first was the Vatican, the second the Synagogue. The woman heard a voice invite her to
worship in the splendid temple. Her mother, learning of this vision, did everything in her power to persuade the girl to put it out of her mind. Although a marriage was arranged for her and she had children, she could not forget her vision. Secretly, she began to learn all she could about Christianity.

When at last she could resist the spiritual pull of the Church no longer, the woman fled with her little son, making her way first to Constantinople and then toward Rome. After countless hardships and dangers, she finally approached the Holy City, where, miraculously, she saw before her an exact replica of the beautiful temple of her vision: it was St. Peter’s basilica. After years of torment, the Jew had finally found peace.
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For Jewish women, the standard Church conversion narrative tells of an early supernatural visitation in which they discover their true Christian vocation, and their subsequent fear of paternal violence should their yearnings be discovered. Such was the case in an 1856
Civiltà Cattolica
account occasioned by the baptism of two Jewish sisters, aged 20 and 22, performed by the Bishop of Ascoli in the city’s cathedral. When the Bishop first heard of their desire to convert, the journal recounted, he examined them carefully and assured himself of their sincerity. He took great care in arranging their transfer from home to the convent, for he was aware of the mortal dangers they faced if their family found out. After a heroic escape to the convent, the girls wrote their mother to tell her what had happened. A howl of protest arose in the Jewish community. Meanwhile, the priest who had first heard of the girls’ secret desire to become Christian received a letter from their younger cousin, who confided her own “thirst for the baptismal water” and her despair that, in the wake of her cousins’ escape, she was too carefully guarded to get away herself. But, it being God’s will, the young woman found a way to escape her family’s clutches and joined her cousins at the convent.

“The three Jewesses,” the
Civiltà Cattolica
story reported, “had long practiced acts of our religion in their homes, such as reciting the Paternoster, the Ave Maria, the Credo. They said the crown of the Virgin, and they made Novenas in preparation for the feasts honoring Mary.” One day the father of one of the girls discovered her wearing a Carmine scapular around her neck and carrying a little book of Christian doctrine, prompting him to assault her with “blows and worse.” When, finally, the day came and the Bishop administered the Eucharist to the three young women, not only were they weeping, but many among the large crowd of government officers, nobles, and others were moved to tears as well.
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While the predominant Church narrative of Jewish female conversion tells of supernatural visitations and spiritual awakenings, men were more likely to be moved by the brain than the heart. Typical of such accounts is one from 1856, told on the occasion of the baptism, in the chapel of the Rome
House of the Catechumens, of Alessandro Cagli, the son of a rabbi of the northeastern city of Udine. The young man’s path toward conversion had begun six years earlier, when, as a result of his studies, he began to have doubts about the religion into which he had been born. The more he studied, the journal reported, the more he realized Judaism’s many inadequacies, from its lack of a priesthood to its preoccupation with the quibblings of the rabbis rather than devotion to the laws of Moses. But what convinced him above all was the “inexplicable disdain, unless there had been a divine curse, for a people that has riches, that has brains, that has civil virtues.” He left Udine and went to Padua to study mathematics at the university. There he began to attend mass and to speak out in defense of the truth of the Christian religion. Finally, he made his way to the House of the Catechumens in Rome and the road to salvation.
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If the dominant Catholic narrative of Jewish baptism was of a few inspired Jews seeing the light and bravely facing the most terrible threats and abuse in order to embrace the true religion, the Jewish narrative was quite another matter. In the ghetto dwellers’ view, the adults who freely entered the House of the Catechumens were traitors, the unfortunate misfits and evil schemers who sadly afflict any community. Their motives, far from spiritual, were crassly material. The shower of jewels and fine clothes, the attention paid by cardinals and nobles, were seen, in this very different light, as a story not of spiritual uplift but of the most degraded spiritual prostitution. This narrative had the dual advantage of suggesting that only the most immoral and untrustworthy Jews would enter the Catechumens, and, further, that no Jew could truly believe Christianity to be superior to the faith of his ancestors.
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Directors of the Catechumens, and the bishops and cardinals who had responsibility over them, were well aware that such ulterior motives lurked in the minds of at least some of their Jewish candidates. At times, clergymen invested considerable energies in determining the sincerity of Jews seeking conversion, for the sincere desire to become Christian was a requirement for adult baptism.
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Yet the Church’s desire for Jewish converts was so great, the feeling of religious triumph in the conversion so glorious, and the superiority of Christianity over Judaism so self-evident, that there was considerable temptation to accept any Jew who came to the Catechumens door.

The Church did have remedies in the case of Jews who exploited its benevolence. In Bologna in 1624, Moses Israel, who came from Salonica, across the Adriatic, was baptized by the Archbishop and given a reward. A year later he returned to the Ottoman Empire, where he went back to his old ways, living once more as a Jew. Unhappy there, after twelve months he went to Rome, where he again presented himself for baptism, this time under a different name. Shortly thereafter, he and another convert made their way back to Ottoman territories, where both rejoined the Jewish community. When
Moses Israel later traveled to Vicenza, in northeast Italy, and was baptized a third time, his reward was a license to beg. Soon thereafter, in 1636—he was still only 40 years old—a fellow convert denounced him, and he was arrested. Moses said in his own defense that he had returned to Jewish communities only in order to put into practice what he had learned at the Catechumens and to do all he could to convert the Jews. As for his multiple conversions, he said that he had no idea there was anything wrong with receiving the blessings of baptism more than once. The authorities, however, took a dim view, and the thrice-baptized Jew was condemned to spend seven years in the galleys.
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One of the reasons for the intense revulsion felt by Italy’s Jews toward their brethren who freely entered the House of the Catechumens was the use to which the Church put such converts. For who was better equipped than the convert, who had been raised in the ghetto and given a Jewish education, to show the Jews the error of their ways and to convince them of the proper path to salvation?

Among the measures instituted in the Counter-Reformation was the requirement that Jews attend sermons aimed at their conversion. There was no more hated practice in the ghettoes. In Rome, by the end of the sixteenth century, every Saturday afternoon, on a rotating basis, groups of the Holy City’s Jews were required to march outside the walls of the ghetto to a nearby church or hall, amidst the taunts of the surrounding population. Papal police checked names off a list and punished those who failed to attend. When church authorities learned that the Jews were squeezing wax into their ears, and those of their children, in preparation for their Saturday-afternoon ordeal, the police were ordered to begin inspecting the Jews’ ears as they passed through the church doors.
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The satanic mass is structured as an inversion of the Catholic mass; the
predica coatta
was likewise an inversion of the sacred rites of the Jews. On the Sabbath, the rabbi at the morning services would comment on the portion of the Holy Scriptures scheduled to be read that day. Following lunch, at 3 p.m., the Jews would be marched to the nearby church to hear a priest use the very same portion of the Torah as the basis for his own sermon, turning the rabbinical commentary upside down.

This is where the convert came in, particularly one who had a solid Jewish education, a man able to cite the sacred passages in the original Hebrew. The ghetto dwellers sat murmuring their disgust as the gesticulating former Jew, with great gusto, expostulated on the falsity of their religious beliefs and urged them to see the light. The less-than-appreciative audience was well aware that their former coreligionist’s salary, as well as the costs of the police guard, was billed to the Jews of the ghetto, as were the costs of the House of the Catechumens.
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Cases of children brought to the Catechumens by force, as Edgardo was,
made a great impact on the Jews of Italy, but most converts came on their own. The children who entered were, for the most part, merely following their parents. Jewish women were more resistant to the lure of conversion than were Jewish men, and in cases where husbands came to the Catechumens without their wives, conflicts over the fate of their children were common, although always resolved in favor of the man.

Like other pontiffs, Benedict XIV, a mid-eighteenth-century pope, and a former Archbishop of Bologna, paid special attention to the workings of Rome’s Catechumens. The conversion of the Jews was a great good, but the process had to be carefully regulated. In particular, the widespread popular belief that spiritual rewards accrued to anyone who baptized a Jew led, he knew, to many abuses. One of these was brought to his attention in 1746.

A Catholic man, Antonio Viviani, made his way into Rome’s ghetto and came upon the home of Perla Misani, whose three daughters, the eldest of whom was 9, and son, aged 12, were there alone. Viviani took some of the water he had brought with him and sprinkled it over the oldest girl’s head while reciting the baptismal formula. He repeated the procedure with the two other girls but ran out of water before he got to the boy. The three girls were then taken to Rome’s Catechumens, the mother left with but one child, her son.

Viviani’s actions were unquestionably illegal, for Church policy was clear: Jewish children under the care of their parents should not be baptized without parental consent, unless there was clear evidence that they were about to die. The bishop who reported the matter to the Pope informed him of the measures that were taken to punish Viviani. Yet, however illicit the baptisms were, in the Church’s view they were still valid. The three girls were now Christian and could not be returned to their Jewish mother in the ghetto.
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Jews who entered the Catechumens of their own free will and later changed their minds were allowed to leave before they were baptized. But the atmosphere of the Catechumens did not encourage such backsliding. The success of the operation depended on keeping kin and other Jews away from the neophyte, and the Church repeatedly issued orders prohibiting Jews from coming anywhere near the House of the Catechumens. A 1705 edict prescribed three lashes and a heavy fine for any Jew who approached within sixty yards of the building or who, even from a greater distance, attempted to catch the attention of someone looking out of a window. Such provisions were still in force in the mid-nineteenth century. Shortly before Edgardo entered Rome’s Catechumens, a Jew standing outside the building was arrested while gazing at a new convert who was standing at a window.
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When Edgardo was deposited by Brigadier Agostini at the door of the Catechumens, he entered a world wholly new to him, a world mysterious to the Jews outside. Unlike the adults who were admitted there, he had not come
to be prepared for baptism, for he had already been baptized. But, like those others, he was there to bridge the gap between two worlds, to enter as a Jew and leave as a Catholic. The Rector had the task of instructing the 6-year-old in his new religion and, in so doing, giving him a new identity. When Edgardo’s presence in the Catechumens began drawing such unwelcome public attention, and the very right of the Church to claim him came under merciless attack, the Rector’s work became all the more pressing.

A document from the mid-eighteenth century offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the House of the Catechumens, including some of the methods used to convert Jews. Written by Anna Del Monte, a young Jewish woman of the Roman ghetto, just after her release from the Catechumens, it tells of the twelve days she spent there.