The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (18 page)

Momolo’s letter to the French ambassador marked a new phase in his efforts to get his son back. It came the day after Cardinal Antonelli had received the petition on which Momolo had pinned such great hopes, the capstone of the plan of action championed by Scazzocchio and Rome’s Università Israelitica. The Cardinal’s negative reaction on receiving the petitions, Momolo told the Ambassador, “has made me despair of the utility of my supplications.… Although he received the documents we presented with his accustomed kindness, His Eminence let it be known that nothing could change a decision that had already been delayed, nor annul an act that was considered valid.” Knowing of the French interest in his case, and despairing at the failure of their direct supplications to the Vatican, Momolo wanted to bring the Ambassador up to date, hoping that the French could succeed where the Jews had failed.
¹¹

The Mortaras’ drive to enlist foreign help not only was aimed at spurring governments to action but involved another, more traditional approach as well. When intercession with the Pope was needed, Italy’s Jews were in the habit of turning to the Rothschild family for help. The Rothschilds, whose banking empire stretched throughout much of Europe and whose members oversaw operations in Austria, Germany, France, England, the kingdom of Naples, and beyond, were, for the Vatican, Jews of a special stripe. Long plagued by financial troubles, the Vatican had, over the years, often turned to the Jewish bankers for loans to keep the government afloat or to launch new projects. It was an arrangement that, while suiting both sides financially, was mutually embarrassing. For the leaders of world Catholicism to rely on Jewish bankers while preventing Jews in their own domain from owning property or engaging in professions was humiliating. And given the Catholic theology of God’s punishment of the Jews and His coronation of the Roman Church, the Holy See’s need to turn to Jews to stave off bankruptcy risked undermining the faith as well. For the Jewish bankers, the problem was different. By offering loans needed to keep the wheels of the ecclesiastical state turning, they appeared to be enriching themselves at the expense of their fellow Jews, propping up a regime that oppressed them.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the Rothschild family were justifying their loans to the Vatican by assuming the role of benevolent intercessors for the Jews with the Holy See. Michele Viale-Prelà, Bologna’s archbishop, had
himself been involved in such an episode back in February 1847 while serving as papal nuncio in Vienna. It was shortly after Pius IX had become pope. Baron Solomon Rothschild presented Viale-Prelà with a request for the new pontiff, listing in great detail the hardships faced by the Jews in Rome. Rothschild complained in particular about the confinement of the Jews in the ghetto, the ban on possession of property outside the ghetto, the prohibition on the exercise of the professions and of many other occupations, the annual carnival rites of degradation, the heavy annual special levies they were subjected to, their exclusion from Rome’s hospitals, the obligation of attending forced conversionary sermons (by then just four times a year), and other such burdens. Viale-Prelà, requested by Rothschild to do all he could to win a favorable hearing from the Pope, confided in a letter to Cardinal Gizzi, the secretary of state of the Papal States at the time, his lack of sympathy for the request. However, he did send it on to Rome, and it apparently had some effect, for only a few days later Gizzi told Viale-Prelà that the Pope had decided to do away with the public carnival ritual for the Jews, and that a number of the other Rothschild requests, including the ending of the forced enclosure in the ghetto, would soon be granted.
¹²

Three years later, following the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, the Vatican entered negotiations with James Rothschild, head of the French branch of the banking family, for a large loan. On that occasion as well, the Rothschilds took the opportunity to request improvements in the conditions in which the Pope’s Jews lived. Pius IX, however, was no longer in a mood to hear of such concessions and took no action.
¹³

Feeling otherwise powerless before the might of the Vatican, the Jews of the Papal States saw the Rothschilds as their champions before the Holy See. The Mortaras—along with Jews everywhere interested in their cause—looked anxiously to the Rothschild family to intercede for them.

They did not need to wait long. On July 17, barely three weeks after Edgardo was taken, James Rothschild wrote to Secretary of State Antonelli from Paris: “During my trip to Rome, I often had the opportunity to appreciate your sense of justice and kindness, so that today I have no fear in calling on them on behalf of Monsieur Mortara, a Jewish storekeeper who lives in Bologna.” After briefly recounting to Antonelli how Momolo had seen his 6-year-old son taken from him by force “under the pretext that he had been baptized,” Rothschild went on to tell of the failure of Momolo’s efforts to gain his son’s release, his despair, and “the illness of his wife, who has become practically insane as a result.” Rothschild concluded by expressing his hope that Antonelli would support the “unhappy father” in his attempts to win back his son.
¹⁴

A month later, on August 24, the English branch of the Rothschild family
weighed in, as Lionel Rothschild wrote his own plea to Antonelli. Having just that year become the first Jew to serve in the British parliament, Lionel Rothschild was a man to be reckoned with.

Unlike James, Lionel Rothschild had never met Cardinal Antonelli. After recounting his somewhat confused understanding of what had happened, Rothschild wrote: “I am certain that this fact can only be an abuse of power or a miscalculated excess of zeal which was not known by the government of the Papal States, since Your Eminence’s reputation for justice is, for me, a guarantee that a procedure such as this, which has thrown an entire family into despair, would not be tolerated.” Rothschild called on Cardinal Antonelli to launch an investigation and then take appropriate action to redress the injustice.

In the last paragraph of his letter, Rothschild asked the Secretary of State’s pardon for taking the liberty to write him on such a matter. He had decided to write, he explained, because he had “received various letters from different parts of the continent, in addition to communications from some of my most cherished friends,” and as a result “felt the duty to make this appeal to Your Eminence to let you know how great the anxiety and interest are that have been caused by this fact.”
¹⁵

Shortly after receiving this letter, Antonelli prepared his guarded response. The facts of which Rothschild wrote, he replied, were “not unknown to me.… I would have truly wished, on my part, to be able to reciprocate the faith that you have placed in me, but, dealing as this does with a matter that does not regard my ministry, and that is in itself extremely delicate, I am not in a position to take an interest in the affair that is consonant with your desire.” The Cardinal added, “Here it may be opportune to observe that, if the voice of nature is powerful, even more powerful are the sacred duties of religion.”
¹⁶

As word of the abduction of Edgardo spread farther through Europe and across the ocean to the United States, as committees of Jews throughout the West organized protests and raised funds, and as an increasing number of foreign governments made their disapproval known, the Pope stood firm. For Pius IX, it was a matter of principle.

Meanwhile, since their forays into ecclesiastical law and papal precedent had gotten them nowhere, Momolo and his friends in Bologna decided to try a different approach. If the Church would not concede that a baptized child could be returned to Jewish parents, what if it could be shown that the child had not, in fact, ever been baptized?

CHAPTER 10
A Servant’s Sex Life

A
FTER RECEIVING
the panicked plea from his brothers-in-law in mid-September to hurry back to Bologna to rescue his business and his wife, Momolo made one last appeal to the Pope before departing. Its tone reveals his despair.

Dated September 19 and addressed directly to the Pope, it begins:

Momolo Mortara, genuflecting before the feet of Your Holiness, declares that from the day in which his son was taken from him, he has seen nothing but one misery pile up upon another. The disorder in which he left his business in Bologna, increased frightfully by his long absence, has finally brought about its complete ruin. He has been urgently recalled there, not only because of his wife’s failing health, but due to the above-mentioned business catastrophe. As he leaves the best part of himself [i.e., his son] in Rome and weeps in desolation, he dares to beg Your Holiness, with a wish from deep in his heart, that—given the great charity for which you are known—you relieve their great anguish even before he returns to the capital, and restore to those who have lost everything at least the sacred sweetness of family.
¹

Once he returned to Bologna and found that his wife was not in as bad shape as he had feared, Momolo tried to resuscitate his business but found it impossible to concentrate on anything other than getting Edgardo back. A series of Momolo’s letters to Rome in the last days of September tells of his frenzied activity as he and his Jewish support group in Bologna orchestrated the drive to win the boy’s release.

In a September 27 letter to Scazzocchio, Momolo spoke of how busy he had been getting various certificates and depositions needed to bolster his case. Having heard, to his distress, that Scazzocchio was being refused permission to visit Edgardo in his absence, Momolo appended a plea to be taken to Cardinal Antonelli, asking the Secretary of State to intervene so that he could continue to receive news of his son.

In his second letter of the day, Momolo reported that he would soon send Scazzocchio documents that would shed new light on Anna Morisi. Momolo also relayed word of a disturbing new development: he had received a letter from a Jew in Livorno reporting a conversation the man had had with a friend in Rome (such was the nature of Italy’s Jewish network). According to the report, Momolo wrote, “a renewed baptism had just been administered to my beloved Edgardo.” He urged Scazzocchio to investigate the report and, should it be true, to lodge a formal protest.

Momolo had more promising news to relate on the international front. He had just learned that forty of Germany’s most prominent rabbis had sent a collective protest to the Pope in behalf of the Mortara family. Ten days earlier, in response to a request for more details from England, his Bologna friends had sent out a full account of the case. The world was taking an ever-greater interest in the Jewish boy from Bologna.

Momolo’s letter concluded by reminding Scazzocchio to visit Edgardo regularly and to send him reports of how his son was doing. But in Rome, the Università Israelitica secretary was not having much luck. On September 29, Scazzocchio wrote a letter of protest to Enrico Sarra, Rector of the Catechumens, complaining of the humiliating treatment he had received and reporting the disturbing rumors that Edgardo had been recently baptized in the House of the Catechumens.

On the twenty-third of the month, Scazzocchio recalled, he had gone to the Catechumens, following Momolo’s request, to see Edgardo. When he had knocked at the door, the Rector had come to the window and informed him that as a result of a new order he had received, he was not permitted to allow any Jew entrance. “I write to you,” Scazzocchio informed the Rector, “not feeling that I deserve to suffer the humiliation of once again being turned away, a feeling reinforced by the fact that Signor Mortara, before returning home, reached an agreement with you that, in his absence, I would be able to come there to see his son and give him news of the boy from time to time.”

Scazzocchio then turned to the other, even more troubling matter. “Signor Mortara writes me that he heard in Bologna that his son has recently been baptized according to the regular rite. As much as this report seems to me to be unbelievable, and as much as I was about to reply to that unhappy father to this effect, nonetheless, in order to carry out his request that I ask you directly, I beg you to give me confirmation of this so that I can relieve the
poor soul from such painful doubt.”
²
In fact, there seems not to have been any such baptism performed in these first few months in the Catechumens, despite the rumors that were flying around among Italy’s Jews.

The certificates that Momolo was gathering, and in which he placed so much hope, were aimed at disputing the facts on which the Inquisitor and the other Church authorities based their case. At the center of the story was the servant Anna Morisi. She was the only witness to the baptism. It was on the basis of her account alone that Father Feletti had ordered Edgardo seized. Momolo now set about doing everything he could to undermine her credibility, investigating any parts of her story about the baptism that could be checked and trying to show that she was of such poor moral character that she could not be believed.

A key figure in Morisi’s story was Cesare Lepori, the neighborhood grocer. It was he, she said, who had first suggested that she baptize the sick child and who had then told her how to do it. From his obscurity as a small-time grocer, Lepori suddenly found himself attracting unwelcome attention from far beyond Bologna. Indeed, throughout the Papal States, observers were blaming the whole disaster on him.
³

In 1858, Cesare Lepori was 34 years old and lived near the Mortaras with his wife, their 4-year-old daughter, Maria, his 32-year-old unmarried brother, Raffaele, and his widowed father, Franco, age 72. All were born in Bologna, and they were well known in the area, running a family grocery store together with Cesare’s older brother, Antonio, who lived nearby with his second wife and two children.
⁴