The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (13 page)

Anna’s ordeal began one Sunday afternoon, just after the end of Passover, when a squad of papal police burst into her home and marched her to a waiting wagon, which took her directly to the House of the Catechumens. There the Prioress met her and showed her to a small room, locking the door as she left.

Anna had been turned in by a recently baptized Jew, Sabbato Coen, who wanted to marry her. Sabbato had informed the Catechumens authorities that Anna was pledged to be his wife—a claim hotly denied by Anna and her family—and that she had confided in him a desire to follow his example and convert. This was enough for an order to be given to seize her. The law of the Inquisition allowed the director of the Catechumens twelve days in such circumstances to determine the true desires of a potential neophyte. At the end of the period, should they persist in their desire to remain Jews, they were allowed to leave, although it was considered a sad day for the Church.

During the twelve days of her confinement, Anna was kept isolated in her room, where she was visited by a succession of priests, recent converts, and nuns, who prayed for her soul and beseeched her to open her heart and see the true light. In all, thirty-eight different people came to plead with her, preaching a total of eighty hours at her side.

The Father Preacher, the man responsible for convincing her to accept baptism, was himself a Jewish convert, and Anna described the hours he spent with her as pure torment. Disheveled and poorly dressed, he had an unnatural glint in his eyes, a man transported to a higher realm. “He had,” she wrote, “such an ugly and frightening appearance that he seemed a demon descended from Hell.” When neither his ardent prayers nor his threats of keeping her locked up for good seemed to help, he began to flagellate himself while decrying the devil within her.

Anna Del Monte’s narrative is a classic tale of passage through Hell, of crazed priests and powerless Jewish victims. Her account of her last night in the Catechumens has all the elements of a heroic drama, a testing of faith and
a triumph of virtue. She had survived twelve days of intense pressure to convert, clinging proudly to her religion, but it appeared that all would be lost:

At nine at night I again saw the Father Preacher come in with the Prioress, and when I saw him I began to shiver from head to toe. He launched into his speech: “My daughter, you see how many times I have come to visit you for the good of your body, and for the health of your soul. I had to go to tell the Cardinal of your stubbornness, and he asked me to return to you, because today is the twelfth day, the day on which your conversion is assured. If my own efforts are not enough to convince you to declare yourself a good Catholic, the Cardinal will come in person with the order of the Holy Pontiff himself to give you the Baptismal water.”

At these words my breath was taken away, but somehow, aided by His Divine Majesty, I replied that they could do what they wished, but I wanted to die as I was born. At these words he became as enraged as a lion and ordered the Prioress to go get the object they had talked about, and in fact she left, and in a little while came back carrying a large crucifix, which he put on my bed while he howled like a dog.

And then, crying and shouting, he again took the water and sprinkled it on the bed, and on my face and my back, telling me: “The time has come when you must convert to our true faith; tonight you will see this cross come to you in your dreams, so I leave it with you in your bed.” Then the Prioress told me: “If you are invited to embrace our Catholic faith tonight, as must be, remember that I will be sleeping just below you. All you have to do is bang your shoe or your slipper, whatever the hour, and I will come and embrace you like my daughter, such has been my love for you from the first day you arrived here. So, my daughter, don’t disappoint me. I leave this Crucifix to keep you company, and I hope that you will unite with it and become Catholic as I am.”

At these words my heart burst and I began to cry, and I started to shout at her: “It will never be; you can leave me with this piece of wood and put it on top of me, but this is no way to convince me. If it’s true that you love me like a daughter, you mustn’t do this to me.” Seeing me cry like that, out of God’s mercy she took it away, and then the Preacher began yet again to sprinkle his usual water all over the place, the bed, my face, invoking endless names of saints. He said: “You will see that tonight the saints that I have named will appear here, and they will make you call the Prioress, who will see your spontaneous conversion.” And after three hours or more of preaching he finally left, in bad humor, leaving me more dead than alive, and so full of fear that it seemed to me that the earth would open up and swallow me.

The following day Anna Del Monte was allowed to leave the Catechumens. In the ghetto it was a day for rejoicing.
¹⁵

CHAPTER 7
An Old Father and a New

M
OMOLO
M
ORTARA
was 41 years old when he journeyed to Rome. In the years since he and Marianna had moved to Bologna from Reggio, he had established a business in upholstery supplies, selling both wholesale and retail out of a storefront in his home in via Lame in the center of town. His circle of friends in Bologna was limited largely to other Jewish immigrants from nearby cities, families also involved in commerce, although he occasionally spent evenings in a neighborhood cafe, where he met other, non-Jewish men. A historian of the turn of the century, basing his comments on the testimony of Momolo’s son Augusto, writes that all who knew Momolo were fond of him, that he enjoyed great popularity in the neighborhood.
¹
But other evidence suggests that Momolo was a rather formal man. The year after his son was taken, one of Momolo’s Jewish friends from Bologna described him as “a man very honest but rather ill at ease.”
²

As a child, Momolo had received a good Jewish education. He learned to write in Hebrew as well as Italian, and sprinkled his speech, at least when speaking with fellow Jews, with Hebrew terms. Yet he was clearly among the category of better-off Jews whose lives had been altered by the deep currents of the Risorgimento, a man who had happily left many of the old ways of the ghetto behind. Momolo was a youth of 15 in 1831 when the Carbonari-inspired revolt drove the Duke from his duchy and ushered in a brief, exhilarating, but also threatening time of new ideas of equality and individual rights. The cycles of emancipation of the Jews, followed by the reimposition of the old restrictions, shook the closed world in which Momolo’s ancestors had dwelled, and led him and his friends to a much more secular worldview.
³

Marianna’s story is much the same. If anything, in Modena, capital of the
duchy, the repeated threats to the old regime and the old ways of thinking were felt more acutely. Her uncle Angelo had no sooner gotten to Bologna when he was swept up in the revolt against papal power and elected to the city council that took control when the Cardinal Legate fled. When the papal regime again fell a decade later, Angelo was once more a candidate to the city council, winning election not only in 1859 but repeatedly thereafter over the next fifteen years. And when the new government took power, it turned to him, as a banker, to help broker loans to pay its expenses. Clearly these were Jews leading very different lives from those of their ancestors, living in a city with neither a synagogue nor a rabbi, something that in the past would have been unthinkable.

An intriguing glimpse into Momolo and Marianna’s embrace of the new secular era comes from the names they selected for their children. A trip to the historical archives of the Reggio Jewish community reveals the names chosen by the various Mortara families who lived in Reggio’s ghetto in the years before Napoleon: Mazel-tov, Rachele, Isach, Giuditta, Abram, Salomone, Sara, Jacob. Momolo’s own parents had given him the name Salomone David; Momolo was a later nickname. His brothers were named Moses Aaron and Abram. Is there any significance in the names that Momolo and Marianna chose for their own children: Riccardo, Erminia, Ernesta, Augusto, Arnoldo, Aristide, Edgardo, Ercole, and Imelda? Of the eight, not one was biblical, not one a traditional name for an Italian Jew.

Yet when Marshal Lucidi and Brigadier Agostini arrived at the Mortara home on the night of June 23, they had come because Momolo and Marianna were Jews. The Mortaras’ attempts to blend in, to embrace the new universalistic ethic, had run up against the reality of an old regime that may have been on its last legs but was still standing. The effect of being treated as Jews was to turn them inward, to their family and their fellow Jews. Not only did the Jews of Bologna become their principal, in fact their only, local social support group, but their attempts to recapture Edgardo in Rome turned them to their fellow Jews in the capital city and to the Jewish network that stretched not only across the Papal States but well beyond.

It had taken Momolo over a month from the time Edgardo was seized to make the trip to Rome, a lapse that, as we saw from Scazzocchio’s letter of late July, lessened the impact of the image that the Jews wanted to convey: that of a distraught father grievously wounded by the loss of his son.

Yet the delay was not due to any lack of desire to see his son, for Momolo would have done anything to get him back. Other obstacles had slowed him down. Not until early July did he learn where Edgardo had been taken, and he had labored through the first days of July drafting pleas to the Inquisitor, the Secretary of State, and the Pope. Preparing petitions to the latter two was not a
simple matter, both because, as Momolo was advised, he had to cite relevant canon law and Church precedents if he was to have any chance of being successful, and because the right channels had to be used if the appeal was to be received at all. It had become clear to Momolo and his Bologna friends that, as Jews, to approach the Pope, they would have to go through Rome’s Jewish community. Their contacts in the capital meanwhile urged them to work on the Bologna side of the case, gathering evidence to strengthen their appeal: from Edgardo’s birth certificate to the discovery of just who it was who had baptized the boy. Momolo also had to cope with his traumatized family, including his wife, who, in the wake of her son’s abduction, had returned to her kin in Modena.

Although overwhelmed and depressed by the misfortune that had befallen him, Momolo arrived in Rome hopeful. As he later testified, he had set out on his journey “in the firm belief that justice would be done to me.” Since Jews were not allowed to fix their eyes on the House of the Catechumens, still less knock on its door and expect to be admitted, Momolo’s first step was to see the Secretary of State, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli. The Cardinal received him graciously, although Momolo, the small merchant from Reggio, a man conscious of rank and proper form, must have been intimidated by the magisterial surroundings.

Antonelli had, a few weeks before, received Momolo’s request to bring the appeal to the Pope’s attention. Initially, as in other cases of the kind over the centuries, the appeal from a bereaved Jewish family was given little attention, and indeed no effort was initially made even to respond to it. But as the European press began to seize on the case as an example of the barbaric nature of papal rule, the Secretary of State’s attitude toward the case shifted. The matter could no longer be ignored, for any further weakening of the Papal States’ diplomatic position could be calamitous. His meeting with Momolo was arranged through the offices of Rome’s Jewish community, and by the time Momolo appeared, the Cardinal was well briefed on the affair. He promised Momolo that he would bring the matter up with the Pope but suggested that Momolo prepare an additional written document setting down all the facts of the case and the legal basis of his request that Edgardo should be returned to him.

The Cardinal granted Momolo’s request that he be allowed to see his son regularly during his stay in Rome. Momolo may not have fully appreciated his good fortune. While a single visit by a family member and a representative of the Jewish community to the neophyte at the Catechumens was, by this time, often allowed, it was unheard of for a Jewish family member to be granted permission for regular visits. It was the first inkling that the case would have an impact on the Church that, in the past, would have been unimaginable.
The Cardinal was clearly more concerned with limiting the potential diplomatic damage to the Church than he was with upholding the long-standing rules sealing neophytes off from their families.

When Momolo left his meeting, he had reason to be pleased. The Secretary of State had treated him well, had explained to him what he could do to make his plea to the Pope more effective, had promised to convey the plea to the Pontiff, and had given him unprecedented access to his son.

The strength of Cardinal Antonelli’s concern about the publicity given the case was evident in an episode that took place when Momolo returned for the third time to see Edgardo. At the Catechumens door, a sister heard Momolo’s knock and came out to meet him. Seeing a Jew who was insisting on seeing his son, she chased him away, slamming the door. The following day, when Scazzocchio was working at the Jewish community office in the ghetto, he was startled to see two priests ushered in, one of whom he knew: Enrico Sarra, Rector of the Catechumens. The Rector had come to offer his apologies for the reception Momolo had received the previous day, explaining that the sister who had greeted him had just happened to be visiting the Catechumens and was unaware of the situation. Canon Sarra invited Momolo to return soon for another visit.

Scazzocchio had, by this time, become deeply enmeshed in the Mortara case. He seemed to have time for little else. When the Secretary of State advised that a fuller brief should be prepared to justify Edgardo’s release, Scazzocchio felt that this was a task for him to undertake, for the Bologna Jews were clearly out of their league.