The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (3 page)

It was a terrible night for Momolo and Marianna: “Both of the policemen stayed in our bedroom, with the guard changing from time to time with others replacing them. You can imagine how we passed that night. Our little son, though he didn’t understand what was happening, slept fitfully, shaking with sobs every now and then, with the soldiers at his side.”

The only hope left to the family was finding someone in a position to overrule the Inquisitor and vacate his order. There were only two men in Bologna who, in the view of the men of the Mortara and Padovani families, might have such power: the Cardinal Legate, Giuseppe Milesi, and the city’s famous but controversial archbishop, Michele Cardinal Viale-Prelà. Encouraged by the diplomatic success enjoyed by Marianna’s brother-in-law and uncle the night before at San Domenico, Momolo and Marianna asked them to undertake this new mission. In midmorning, on June 24, they set out.

They did not have far to go. Indeed, Angelo Moscato had been sitting practically in the shadow of the imposing building in which the Cardinal Legate worked when, the previous evening, the breathless Riccardo had brought the news about Edgardo.

The hulking government palace, the old Palazzo Comunale, loomed over the city’s central square, the Piazza Maggiore. Opened as the center of government in 1336 and built up further over the next two hundred years, it was as much a fortress as an administrative center. Its opening had coincided with the completion of the vast, imposing wall that surrounded the city, a
wall nine meters in height that made a lopsided circle seventy-six hundred meters around the old city. Each night the great gates closed their portals to protect the city’s inhabitants (and rulers) from their enemies. When the palace and the outer wall were built, Bologna was an autonomous city-state, battling, among others, papal forces that sought to subdue it. It was a struggle that the city ultimately lost, and with the triumphal entry of Pope Julius II into Bologna in 1506, the city and its territories were annexed to the Pontifical State.

Giuseppe Milesi Pironi Ferretti had come to Bologna just two months earlier, having at age 41 been simultaneously named a cardinal and appointed legate to the province of Bologna. Arriving to take up his new duties in Bologna on the evening of April 30, 1858, he was met with due ceremony as he made his way to his offices and apartment in the government building. The resident Austrian troops sounded an artillery salute.

Not everyone in Bologna, however, was pleased about the Cardinal Legate’s arrival, for hostility against papal rule, and against the Austrian troops who for years had enforced it, pervaded the city. Enrico Bottrigari, one of those Bolognesi influenced by the ideas of the Risorgimento, the national unification movement that one day in the not very distant future would help drive Milesi out of the city, described the Cardinal Legate’s arrival:

“Hardly had he arrived in his quarters when the senior senator of Bologna came to pay his respects in diplomatic style, followed by many noble personages and citizens, the usual ones who bow before power! Those who have seen him say that the new legate, at first sight anyway, has the appearance of a man cold as ice, a person graced with little intelligence.”
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The Inquisitor had given both Cardinal Milesi and the Archbishop advance notice of the planned seizure of the Jewish child. When Angelo Padovani and Angelo Moscato reached the gate of the Cardinal Legate’s headquarters, they were told that His Eminence was not in Bologna. There was little they could do but try to find the one other person they believed could help them: Bologna’s archbishop, the redoubtable Michele Viale-Prelà.

Once again, they did not have far to go, for the archdiocesan headquarters, connected to the cathedral of San Pietro, was no more than a stone’s throw from the government palace. The two Jews were not optimistic, for in the brief time that the famous cardinal had been in Bologna, he had developed a reputation as the leader of the Church movement against liberalism, a crusader for religious purification and morality, a friend of the Inquisition, and a steadfast warrior in the battle to protect the Pope’s position as a temporal ruler.

The previous night, when the Mortara family and their friends in Bologna’s tiny Jewish community had gathered at their home, desperately
casting about for a way to prevent the police from taking Edgardo, Sanguinetti had suggested that they try to bribe someone in the Church hierarchy. The idea was not shocking to them, for it was an approach that Italian Jews over the past centuries had occasionally used with success, even with popes. However, no one thought Viale-Prelà was the sort to be bought off.

As it happened, Padovani and Moscato would not even have the chance to try, for they received the same reception at the Archbishop’s as they had at the Cardinal Legate’s: they were told that the Archbishop was on a trip outside Bologna and would not be available that day.
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The priest with whom they spoke, upon hearing what lay behind their pressing request to see the Archbishop, threw up his hands and told them he had no idea what they could do.

It was noon by now and time was running out. Angelo Moscato gave up: “Seeing that all hope was lost, we decided to let things take their unhappy course. I decided not to return to the Mortara home, for it would have only made me more bitter.”

At the Mortara apartment, the tension was unbearable. Marianna’s sister, Rosina, arrived in midmorning and found Marianna still clutching Edgardo, sobbing. As Rosina moved to comfort Edgardo, he gave his aunt a kiss and, gesturing toward the policemen who remained ever at his side, told her simply, “They want to take me away.”

Rosina did the only thing she could think of to help. She took her other nieces and nephews back to her home to join her own six children. “I didn’t want them to see their mother in such a state any longer,” she said.

While Rosina took the children away, the men gathered in the apartment decided that something had to be done about Marianna herself. She had spent all night in Edgardo’s sofa-bed with him in her arms and still would not let go of him. They feared what would happen if she were home when the carabinieri came that night to tear her son from her grip. And they were worried, too, about little Imelda, whose hungry cries were being ignored by her preoccupied mother.

Momolo explained: “As the day passed, amidst anxiety and fear, seeing my wife in a deplorable state, indeed driven almost insane, I decided it was best if she were taken from the house so that she wouldn’t be made to see the separation, for the sight would have killed her.” The Mortaras’ 52-year-old friend Giuseppe Vitta, a fellow Jew from Reggio who lived near the Mortaras in Bologna, offered to take Marianna to his own apartment, where his wife was waiting. Vitta, along with Momolo and Marianna’s brother, spent two hours trying to convince her that it would be best if she left: there was nothing she could do there, and Imelda’s health depended on her getting away.

Finally, Marianna relented, but as Vitta waited for her she found it hard to stop kissing Edgardo. The men had to carry her out of the building and into
the closed carriage, for her strength had left her. As they took her out, she cried so pitiably, said the family’s servant, that it broke the hearts of all who heard her. Indeed, during the short trip to the Vitta home, Marianna’s wails were so piercing that, although the carriage was covered, the unsettling noise brought people throughout the neighborhood hurrying to their windows.

Momolo had one last hope: the Inquisitor. Only he could call a halt to the looming disaster. Accompanied by Marianna’s brother Angelo, Mortara set out for San Domenico.

At five o’clock, the two men arrived at the convent and were ushered into the Inquisitor’s rooms. Momolo, in a loud but unsteady voice, declared that there had surely been some mistake about the supposed baptism of his son, and asked Father Feletti to tell him what grounds he had for thinking that the child had been baptized. The Inquisitor would not respond directly. The rules of the Holy Tribunal had been scrupulously followed, he said, and there was no point in asking for any further explanation. When Momolo begged for another delay, Father Feletti told him it would serve no purpose.

Momolo should not worry, the Inquisitor said, for his son would be treated well; indeed, little Edgardo would be under the protection of the Pope himself. He suggested that Momolo prepare some clothes for the boy; he would send someone to pick them up. Having a nasty scene when the police took Edgardo away, the Inquisitor warned, would benefit no one.

When Momolo returned home, he realized that time had run out on him. The house had emptied. Marianna and baby Imelda had been taken to the Vitta home; the rest of the children were with their aunt. Other relatives and friends had found the Mortara home too painful to endure and so remained at home, awaiting word of what was to come. Aside from the two policemen, who would not even allow Edgardo to go to the lavatory by himself, there remained only Momolo, his brother-in-law Angelo, and Giuseppe Vitta, back after having delivered Marianna to his wife’s care.

Marshal Lucidi had meanwhile prepared carefully for the child’s departure. Brigadier Agostini, Lucidi’s silent companion of the night before, was assigned the task of driving Edgardo away, and for this had been given the best coach the Bologna police possessed. Lucidi came in a separate carriage, with a supporting police contingent. He arrived at the apartment at about eight o’clock. Accompanied by a number of his men, he climbed the stairs. In the apartment, Momolo held Edgardo in his arms; the boy remained calm, perhaps not comprehending what was about to happen. When Lucidi took Edgardo from his father’s trembling arms, tears flowed from the eyes of the two policemen who had been guarding the boy.

Vitta ran desperately down the stairs first, followed by the policemen, and then a stricken Momolo. The sight of his son being carried off, draped from
the policeman’s shoulders, drained Momolo of his little remaining strength, and as he followed Edgardo he fell in a dead faint. As the boy was passed to Brigadier Agostini in the carriage, Vitta tried to calm him. “Don’t worry,” he said, “your father and I will follow you in another carriage.” Vitta assumed, as did the rest of the Mortara family, that Edgardo’s ride would be a short one, that his destination lay within the city walls. In this they were mistaken.

On the sidewalk, the frantic Vitta spied a Catholic neighbor, Antonio Facchini, a 31-year-old merchant, who happened to be passing by. Facchini tells of the startling encounter:

As I was walking down via Lame, I found a carriage standing in front of the house that the Mortaras were then living in, and I saw a policeman stationed at the door. I was stupefied by this, all the more so when I heard shouts coming from the stairs from someone, and then I saw another person rushing out of the door calling to me, “Come! Come see, Facchini! what a pathetic picture!” It was the Jew Vitta, a friend of mine. When I asked him what was going on, he told me to come in. I went into the building with him, and saw at midstairs a policeman who was coming down with a boy in his arms, and just behind him, out cold and lying across the stairs, the Jew Mortara.… We rushed to help him, and carried him into his home, where we put him down on a sofa.

When Vitta explained what had happened, Facchini became enraged, and rushed to spread the word at the nearby Caffè del Commercio. There, he said later, “if I’d only found a couple of dozen of my friends, I would’ve tried to follow the carriage, stop it, and take the boy so that he could be given back to his poor parents.” Whether this was simply braggadocio on Facchini’s part, we do not know.

CHAPTER 2
Jews in the Land
of the Popes

B
ologna la grassa, Bologna la dotta
—Bologna the fat, Bologna the learned. Second only to Rome itself in population and social, political, and economic importance, Bologna had never been fully digested by the Papal States. The site of booming international commerce even before it was enveloped by the papal forces in the early sixteenth century, and home of Europe’s oldest university—whose thousands of students from throughout the continent were hiring their own professors and running the school until the clerics took charge—Bologna, and not Rome, was the site Charles V chose for his consecration as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 1530.

At the time Charles received Pope Clement VII’s blessing in the massive San Petronio basilica on the Piazza Maggiore, Bologna had a bustling Jewish community, immersed in the city’s famed trade and commerce. Eleven synagogues dotted the central quarter, where most of the city’s eight hundred Jews lived. Hebrew book printers and famed Jewish scholars complemented Bologna’s reputation as a center of learning.

The sixteenth century, however, was not kind to Italy’s Jews. The Roman Church, besieged farther north in Europe by Lutherans, Calvinists, and other heretical reformers, counterattacked. The campaign to enforce orthodoxy had as one of its victims the Jews, long an anomaly in Christian Europe.

For Bologna’s Jews, the result was catastrophic. In 1553, their Hebrew books, including hundreds of copies of the sacred Talmud, were publicly
burned by orders of the Pope and the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Three years later, the Jews were told to move to a single, walled-in zone, in the shadow of Bologna’s famed two towers. The 1555 papal decree calling for the confinement of the Jews,
Cum nimis absurdum,
grew out of basic Church theology: “It is absurd and utterly unacceptable that the Jews, who due to their own guilt were condemned by God to eternal slavery, can, with the excuse of being protected by Christian love and thus tolerated living in our midst, show such ingratitude toward the Christians.” No more would the Jews be allowed to mingle with the Christians; they were to be shut up into ghettoes.
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