The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (19 page)

When Momolo returned from Rome, he decided to confront Cesare Lepori. It must have been hard for Momolo to control his emotions when he entered the Lepori store, for at the time he too believed that the young grocer was responsible for the tragedy that had befallen him. When Lepori saw Momolo come in, three months after the police siege outside the Mortara home, he must have been tense himself, for by this time he knew that Anna Morisi had identified him as the instigator of the baptism.

The best account we have of what followed comes from an unexpected source: a retired judge, a Catholic, Carlo Maggi, who lived in the neighborhood. On October 6, Maggi appeared before a Bologna notary who had been hired by Momolo to transcribe and certify his account. The testimony was then submitted to Cardinal Antonelli for the Pope’s consideration. Momolo had high hopes that once the Pontiff heard the true story, he would order Edgardo freed.

Maggi explained:

As I often stop by the café Genio in via San Felice, which is frequented by a number of Jews, including Signor Momolo Mortara, I have had various
occasions to speak to him, especially about his little son. That was the boy who was taken from him a few months ago as a result of a governmental order, because he was baptized. I had also spoken with Mortara in this connection about the opinion that had taken hold as a result of the allegations made by a certain Nina [Nina being Anna Morisi’s nickname], formerly his servant, about a certain Signor Cesare Lepori, a grocer with a store in Via Vetturini. She had said that he was the one who had urged her and taught her to administer the sacrament of baptism to his son, teaching her how to give it since she told Lepori that she did not know how to do it herself.

Our discussions had been left at this point when, on Tuesday, the fifth of this month, I stopped by the café in question at eight o’clock to have breakfast. Signor Mortara came in to tell me something like the following: “Haven’t you heard? Last Saturday I went to Lepori’s store. When Cesare saw me, after greeting me, he asked what was up with my servant Nina, and I told him that I’d rather not hear her name mentioned, and that it would be better for him as well, after she had so compromised him in public opinion by saying that he had gotten her to baptize the boy and taught her how to do it. At this, he replied that it was a lie, because never, ever had Lepori spoken to that young woman about it.”

After hearing this account, I told Mortara that I found it hard to believe … that Lepori could so categorically deny something that was so widely known as a result of what Nina said.

To convince the retired jurist, Momolo invited him to accompany him to Lepori’s store, to see for himself. Momolo was planning to go there anyway to pick up a written statement that Lepori had promised to prepare for him.

And so around 8:30 a.m., I went with Mortara to Lepori’s store, where we found him with his father and their clerk, and I heard Mortara ask Cesare Lepori if he had prepared the letter that they had talked about the previous Saturday. But Lepori replied that, after getting some advice, he had decided not to write such a letter, because a private document like that would have no value. However, he added, he was ready to testify legally before any Authority, wherever he was called, and repeat all that he had told Mortara the previous Saturday. I heard him add these words: “I never spoke with Nina of your little boy, much less did I ever suggest baptizing him.”

The grocer went on to add, Maggi recounted, that he was hardly in a position to teach the girl how to baptize someone, as he was not sure how to do it himself.

“What I told you Saturday [Lepori continued], I repeat now, and I’ll repeat forever, because as a man of honor I can only tell the unvarnished truth. I’m sorry, Mortara, that I wasn’t called earlier and interrogated about all this, as it seems only natural to me they should’ve done if Nina told them I was the one who urged her and taught her what she claimed, because if they’d talked to me, they’d have known long ago what I’m telling you now … in the presence of this Signore [here Lepori pointed to Maggi], and I’ll testify to the same thing tomorrow. There’s just one thing that surprises me, dear Mortara: If it’s true that Nina said what they say she did, how come until now not a single official has come to look for me?”

The retired judge ended his account by saying that as he left the grocer behind, he realized that his earlier skepticism was unjustified; Lepori was telling the truth.
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Maggi’s testimony was rushed to Rome, where, on October 11, Scazzocchio had it certified by a Roman notary before taking it to Cardinal Antonelli for presentation to the Pope. The cover letter, prepared on Momolo’s behalf, urged Pius IX to read the brief, for it proved that Morisi had lied about the baptism.
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But the attack on the young woman’s credibility went well beyond this assault. She was portrayed not only as a liar but as a slut and a thief as well.

A few days before the Bologna notary welcomed the former judge to his office for deposition, his study was crowded with women less accustomed to such surroundings. The Mortaras and their allies in Bologna had heard titters and whisperings about Anna Morisi, insistent rumors about her sexual behavior, rumors that if true might discredit her in the eyes of the Church, or so the Jews hoped. As a result, members of the family and their friends began asking neighbors if they had seen or heard anything of Anna’s secret sex life. They asked those who might be supposed to know the most, women who were part of the network of servants in the area, women who met each day in the hallways and in the streets on the way to the market, exchanging gossip about their bosses, their neighbors, and one another.

Momolo and Marianna themselves knew something about the subject, for after Anna had worked for them for three years, in early 1855, they discovered that she was pregnant. Such pregnancies of unmarried servants were far from uncommon in Bologna at the time; indeed, they were something of an occupational hazard. The young servants often found themselves alone in the city, their families at a distance in the hinterland, and they became the prey of an assortment of young and not-so-young men, the married and the unmarried, those who seduced them with promises of marriage and those who simply
raped them. Among the common sources of pregnancy were the sexual advances of employers themselves or, often, their sons.

In Bologna, as throughout most of Italy, there was a remedy for the desperate situation in which such unmarried pregnant women found themselves: the local foundling home. Established several centuries earlier, and known to all as the “Bastardini,” Bologna’s foundling home took in the newborn children of unmarried women and thereby rescued the women’s honor and saved their families from disgrace. Great secrecy surrounded the depositing of children at the
ospizio,
for only through such secrecy could a woman’s honor be guarded. The babies were brought to the Bastardini not by their mothers, who were eager to hide their identities, but by the midwives who had delivered them.

Not only were unmarried women encouraged to abandon their babies at the foundling home in these years; they were required to do so. In the view of the officials of the Papal States, keeping such a child would both expose the woman’s family to dishonor, and ensure the young woman herself a future life of sin. Nor were these the only unsavory consequences, for the sight of an unmarried woman with her baby would give rise to public scandal. The very thought of a child growing up in the home of an unmarried mother was indecent. And so once the babies were deposited at the foundling home, efforts were made to place them with wet nurses in the countryside.
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Like other young women in her position, Anna Morisi had been loath to return to her family in San Giovanni in Persiceto, where the suspicious eyes of neighbors would certainly look for the telltale belly bulging from her loose-fitting dress. She could not, of course, remain through the time of her delivery with the Mortara family, for the children could not be exposed to such a sight, nor would it be right for the neighbors to see the Mortaras keeping as a servant a woman of lost virtue.

Rather than simply firing her, as many other employers would have done, Momolo and Marianna arranged to have Anna sent to a midwife’s home for the last four months of her pregnancy. They paid all the expenses for her lodging and the delivery itself. To protect her reputation—and their own, since they had promised to take her back once the baby was born and delivered to the foundling home—they told neighbors and friends that the girl had become ill and had returned to her parents to recuperate.

By September 1858, the Mortaras were no longer interested in protecting Anna’s reputation—quite the contrary. They found they did not have to look far to find women eager to tell tales of the most scandalous behavior.

From September 30 to October 1, the Bologna notary recorded the statements of eight women and one man about Anna Morisi. Their reports were, like Maggi’s, sent on to Scazzocchio in Rome, where they too were notarized
once more and forwarded, with a cover letter, to Pope Pius IX. It is unlikely that the good Pope had ever before gotten his hands on such lurid descriptions of female sexuality.

The cover letter to the Pope got right to the point: “Momolo Mortara genuflects at the feet of the August Throne of Your Holiness, having just obtained documents … relative to Morisi’s immoral behavior.” He was sending this material, he wrote, so that the Pope could judge for himself “how much faith he should accord to the word of a woman who is so notoriously depraved.” He concluded with the plea “Do not hesitate any longer, oh Holy Father, in issuing the judgment we have long yearned for, giving peace to the heartbroken family … relieving the fears of 10,000 Jews who are loyal and peaceful subjects of Your Holiness.”
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The witnesses from Bologna were asked to address two points. One regarded the morality of Anna Morisi, the other the matter of just how sick Edgardo was at the time he was presumably baptized. The Mortaras were interested in the latter point because they had learned that, in the absence of parental consent, Catholics were permitted to baptize a Jewish child only if there was strong reason to believe that he was about to die. In such a case, canon law held, the importance of allowing a soul to go to heaven outweighed the customary commitment to parental (and especially paternal) authority over children. The Mortaras had already gotten an affidavit from their family doctor, Pasquale Saragoni, who had taken care of Edgardo during his illness, stating that the boy had never been in any danger of dying. Dated July 31, 1858, it characterized the illness the boy had when he was a year old as simply a run-of-the-mill childhood infection. The doctor’s statement, too, was sent on to the Secretary of State and the Pope. Saragoni also testified that at the time that Anna Morisi said she performed the baptism of the sick child, she herself was very ill and confined to bed. The Mortaras sought to bolster this testimony through the use of other witnesses, aware that the word of Saragoni, a well-known anticleric and longtime opponent of papal rule, was not likely to weigh very heavily on the scales of justice of the Papal States.
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The testimony sent in to the Pope ranged widely, from vague secondhand reports to graphic firsthand descriptions. All the depositions were made by Catholics. No doubt these would carry more weight, and indeed testimony from Jews was not legally admissible against Christians in the Papal States.

Maria Capelli, a widow aged 44, was asked to testify about the severity of Edgardo’s illness in 1852. That she was called at all reflects the Mortaras’ desperation, for her knowledge was entirely secondhand, based on what she had been told by her mother, who had worked as a daytime servant for Marianna Mortara’s parents. “I’ve known the Jewish couple Signor Momolo and Marianna very well for several years,” she said.

I know that around six years ago, when the Mortaras lived in via Vetturini, one of their little sons, Edgardo if I’m not mistaken, had one of those childhood illnesses. My mother, who I lived with and who returned every night from the Padovani home to sleep at our place, told me about it. In the same way, I learned that the Mortaras’ servant was quite sick at that time and had to stay in bed. In addition to hearing from my mother, who’s now dead, that the Mortaras’ son’s illness wasn’t serious, I never heard it said that he became any sicker, much less that he was ever in danger of death. In fact, his little illness ended within just a few days.

Following this testimony, another woman, who had known the Mortaras since Edgardo was a baby, told her story. Sixty-year-old Ippolita Zacchini began by saying that she, too, had known the Mortaras since they lived on via Vetturini. She was at the time working as the servant for the family of Solomon Ravenna, Jewish friends of the Mortaras who lived on the same street. In fact, Solomon, aged 57 in 1852 and practically a generation older than 33-year-old Marianna, had also recently moved to Bologna from Modena’s ghetto, with his wife and 17-year-old son.

Because the two families were so friendly and lived so close together, Ippolita testified, she was constantly being sent on errands to the Mortara home. So it was not surprising, she said, when one summer day five or six years ago, the Ravennas told her to go over to the Mortara home and stay there for three or four days to help them out, since the Mortaras’ servant, a certain Nina Morisi, was, for three or four days, so sick that she had to stay in bed. She continued:

I remember clearly that at the same time the Mortaras’ little child, Edgardo, who was then about one or two years old, was also sick, with some kind of illness that children get, so that I had to help his mother take care of him.… But while the child’s illness lasted four or five days, and his parents were distressed by it, because they were extremely loving of all their children, and they called some doctors, including, I recall, Dr. Saragoni, the child was never in any danger of dying. In fact, I remember Dr. Saragoni being asked about it by the boy’s mother, and he laughed and told her it was nothing, just one of those things that children get.