The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (32 page)

This would not be Montefiore’s first such voyage as the champion of the Jews in the palaces of the world’s rulers. By the time of Edgardo’s abduction, Sir Moses had developed a reputation as the court of last resort for Jews around the world who suffered from persecution, a man willing to travel to all corners of the world on behalf of his less fortunate brethren. For Italian Jews, there was special cause for pride, for Montefiore’s ancestors were from Livorno; his paternal grandparents had emigrated to England in the mid-eighteenth century. Indeed, he himself had been born in Livorno in 1784, while his parents were visiting the city.
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An observant Jew and no friend of those religious reformers then trying to alter Jewish rites to better fit with modern times, Montefiore was part of the elite of Britain’s small Jewish community, a network of families linked by marriage who controlled major banks and businesses. His wife’s sister, for example, was married to Nathan Mayer Rothschild, and Lionel Rothschild, who became the head of the Rothschild family in Britain, was their son, and Moses’ nephew. With Montefiore’s wealth, his connections, his talents, and his kin relations, he represented an ascension of Jews to the halls of power that excited marvel among his coreligionists throughout Europe. Montefiore was able to retire as a wealthy man at the age of 40, and devoted the remaining decades of his long life to philanthropy. In 1835, he agreed to become president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the central organization of Jews in Britain, a post he held for the next forty years. Two years after becoming president, he was knighted, in one of the first ceremonies that Victoria performed as queen.
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The event that first triggered Montefiore’s philanthropic wanderlust—and that was to establish his international reputation as protector of the Jewish oppressed—took place in 1840. On February 5 of that year, Friar Tommaso, a Capuchin friar of Italian origin living in Damascus, disappeared along with his Muslim servant. The city, capital of Syria, and since 1832 under Egyptian control, was divided into separate sections of Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

When Tommaso disappeared, his fellow friars spread the story that he
and his servant had been captured by Jews, who wanted to drain their blood to use in making matzah. Sixty-three Jewish children were seized and thrown into a dungeon as a means of forcing their parents to tell what they knew about the whereabouts of the missing men and to reveal what the Jews had done with their blood. Jewish homes were torn apart to find evidence—and to vent rage—and in a sewer in the Jewish quarter, suspicious bones were found. These were proclaimed to be the remains of the unfortunate friar and were buried in a tomb, on the grounds of the Capuchin convent. The tomb bore the words: “Here rest the bones of Father Tommaso of Sardinia, Capuchin missionary, murdered by the Hebrews on February 5th 1840.” By the end of April, 129 Jews were being held in prison, four others had already died from torture, and ten men had been found guilty of murder and awaited execution. Most of the rest of the Jewish population of Damascus had fled.

When word of all this reached Britain, the Board of Deputies approved Sir Moses’s plan that he lead a mission to Damascus to intervene on the Jews’ behalf. He left England on July 7. Two weeks later he reached Livorno—“my native city,” as he called it in his diary—where a delegation from the Jewish community met him. They warned him that he should not get off the boat when it came to port in Civitavecchia, near Rome, as there had been some recent disturbances aimed at Jews who passed through there, the product of the fulminations of “a priest called Meyer, a converted Jew.” He also learned of the unpleasant experiences of some other Jewish travelers who, but a few weeks before, had gotten off their boat not far from Civitavecchia, a French couple named Montel.

Of even greater concern to Montefiore were reports he received from Rome that, as he wrote in his diary while still off the Italian coast, “both the Pope and his Government were extremely against the Jews and had expressed a belief in the murder of Father Tomassio [sic]. The Pope had refused to confirm the two Bulls issued by former Pontiffs when similar charges were brought against the Jews.”

The ruler of the Egyptian-controlled lands, Muhammad Ali, was based in Alexandria, and so it was there that Sir Moses went. Presenting himself as having the authority of the British government behind him, Montefiore demanded that he be given permission to sail on to Damascus and launch an inquiry, and he called for the immediate release of all Jews being held in the Syrian prison. Three weeks after his first meeting with Muhammad Ali, an agreement was struck: the Jews would be freed from jail, Damascus’s Jews could return to their homes, and the Pasha would condemn the tales of Jewish ritual murder. In exchange, Sir Moses would forgo his demand—made credible by the strong diplomatic support he enjoyed from the British government—that he be allowed to go to Damascus and mount an investigation. For
Montefiore, it was a great victory, and for the Jews in Europe and the United States—where protest meetings had been called for the first time on behalf of Jews abroad—it marked the birth of a new champion, the Jewish knight.

On his way back home, Sir Moses stopped in Italy, hoping to persuade Church officials to remove the offending tombstone at the Capuchin convent in Damascus, but he had no luck. It was reported to him that the Pope, and the others in the Vatican and in the Capuchin order, remained convinced that Tommaso had indeed been ritually murdered by the Jews. The tombstone stood for two decades as a continuing reproach to the Jews’ perfidy, before being destroyed in 1860 when a Druze raid laid waste to the Christian outpost.
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On landing in Livorno on his way back to England in January 1841, Montefiore wrote to several Italian Jewish communities, reporting the outcome of his expedition. Among these was a letter he sent to the deputies of the Università Israelitica of Reggio Emilia. “Knowing of your religious zeal and noble humanitarian sentiments,” he began, “it is my pleasure to send you the documents relative to the Damascus affair.” He went on to inform them of Muhammad Ali’s official proclamation of the Jews’ innocence, and of the Sultan’s decision to grant full rights to the Jews who lived in the Ottoman Empire, which Montefiore obtained during a stop in Constantinople. He appended both documents. Receiving such a letter from the Jewish hero surely created a stir among Reggio’s Jews, among whom lived Momolo Mortara, aged 23.
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In 1846, after finishing a stint as sheriff of London, Montefiore journeyed through the Russian winter to reach Saint Petersburg in order to meet with the Czar and enlist his help in ending a wave of Jewish persecution. That same year, Pius IX became pope, and Sir Moses presided over a Board of Deputies meeting in which a letter was prepared expressing the board’s appreciation to the new pontiff for his efforts to improve the conditions of the Papal States’ Jews.
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In August 1858 Montefiore, as president of the Board of Deputies, received the plea prepared by the Jewish representatives of Piedmont seeking aid in winning Edgardo Mortara’s release. The board responded immediately, forming a special committee on the case that was headed by Montefiore himself.

Three and a half months later, in December, Sir Moses gave the committee’s final report. Montefiore had fed materials received from the Piedmont Jews to the British press, and then sent copies of the story that had run in the London
Times
to every member of the Catholic clergy in the United Kingdom, eighteen hundred in all. He reported the committee’s pleasure at the solidarity expressed by Britain’s Protestant community; the Evangelical
Alliance had taken an especially vigorous role in the protest. Although the British government had expressed its full support for their efforts, the Foreign Minister had noted that Britain’s diplomatic relations with the Vatican were already strained, so that an official government protest could not be contemplated, nor, the Minister had added, would it do any good.

Sir Moses reported that the committee members, following a thorough investigation, “have strong grounds for believing that the alleged baptism never took place.” Even if it did, he added, the circumstances of the alleged baptism “appear to render it invalid, even by the Roman canonical laws.” Rejecting accounts being spread in the Catholic press that “Edgar Mortara rejoices in his adoption into the Catholic Faith (a statement which, considering the still tender age of the child is manifestly absurd),” Montefiore reported that the child “yearns incessantly for the restoration to its home.” And he concluded: “The civilised world will indeed be wanting in energy and wisdom if it permits the nineteenth century to be disgraced by the retention of the child in contravention of the laws of nature, morality and religion, and most especially it behooves the Jewish community to exert itself to the utmost.”
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In receiving the report, the board not only decided to send a petition to the Pope, urging him to free Edgardo, but called on Sir Moses to make the trip to Rome to present it personally. Curiously, Sir Culling Eardley, head of the Protestant Evangelical Alliance of Britain, who had taken on the campaign to free Edgardo as his own, had strongly urged Montefiore to another path. In a series of five letters to the Jewish board’s committee, he had called on them to organize a delegation to plead not with the Pope—whom Eardley no doubt believed to be unsympathetic to such an appeal—but to the French emperor. When informed by Montefiore of the board’s finding that “a deputation from the Jewish community to the Emperor of the French would be of no utility,” the Protestant head expressed his disappointment in a letter to Sir Moses, which was published in the
Times.
Eardley explained:

Had your attention been directed to Paris our arrangements were made to help you. The Lord Mayor of London and the Lord Provost of Edinburgh had agreed to accompany a deputation from the British branch of the alliance to the Emperor. The secretaries were instructed to request the Lord Mayor (elect) of Dublin to do the same.… It was felt that such an appeal to the Emperor in support of a similar one from the Jews of Europe, would be gratifying to the French nation. We were also assured that the Emperor would appreciate it.
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In preparing for his trip to Rome, Sir Moses met with Lord Malmesbury, the British foreign secretary, who offered to do what he could to help, which
included letters of introduction to various British diplomats in Italy. After prayers for the success of the Mortara mission were recited in synagogues throughout London, Montefiore and his party set off. It was March 3, 1859, more than eight months since Edgardo had been taken.
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The party took its time en route, partly as a result of Lady Montefiore’s illness, and did not arrive in Rome until April 5. None of the diplomats Sir Moses spoke to were encouraging about his prospects. His ability to persuade the Pasha, the Sultan, and the Czar were one thing; his power to move the Pope was quite another.

Indeed, it soon looked as though he might not get to see the Pope at all. Montefiore enlisted the aid of members of the British diplomatic community in Rome, who were supportive but pessimistic. He relied particularly on Odo Russell, the British military attaché, who went to see Cardinal Antonelli on his behalf. Russell reported back to Montefiore: “It is with deep regret that I have to inform you that all my exertions in the interest of your cause have failed. Cardinal Antonelli declined to enter upon the subject, saying, ‘It was a closed question.’ ” The Secretary of State referred Russell to the papal chamberlain, Monsignor Pacca, to try to arrange a meeting for Montefiore with the Pope. Although the matter seemed hopeless, Sir Moses hurriedly prepared a letter to Monsignor Pacca and delivered it personally at the Vatican.

The situation in Rome was tense. Rumors circulated of an impending drive by Piedmontese troops down into the Papal States and a war against the Austrian forces in Italy. In February, a secret accord had been signed between France and the Kingdom of Sardinia pledging French military assistance for the creation of an enlarged Italian kingdom running from the north of Italy—with the Austrians evicted from Lombardy and Veneto—down through the Legations of the Papal States. Members of the National Society in Tuscany and in the Legations had received secret instructions to prepare the partisans of Italian unification for an uprising.

On Friday evening, April 15, at the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath, a phalanx of police entered the Roman ghetto and searched the synagogue, rummaging among the sacred scrolls of the Torah and scouring through the nooks and crannies of the basement. An angry crowd meantime began to gather outside, accusing the Jews of kidnapping two Christian children so that they could use their blood to make Passover matzah. Late in the night, the last of the crowd dispersed, but the next morning fear hung over the ghetto.

The following day, the newspaper
Il vero amico del popolo
ran a piece reporting that a Catholic man had recently been murdered in Smyrna by Jews who sought his blood for matzah, and dredging up the accusations of the Jews’ murder of Father Tommaso in Damascus. Among Rome’s Jews, the suspicion began to grow that the timing of these attacks was significant. Montefiore’s visit was apparently not welcome in some quarters.

When leaders of the Jewish community reported their suspicions to Sir Moses as he prepared for the Passover seder, he grew depressed. But his spirits recovered when the British representative to the Vatican dropped by to tell him that he had spoken with Cardinal Antonelli on his behalf and that the Cardinal was willing to meet with him. Wasting no time, Montefiore had his carriage take him to the Vatican, where the Cardinal had his rooms on the floor directly above those of the Pope. “I had to ascend 190 steps”—wrote the 74-year-old Sir Moses—“a most splendid marble staircase”; but Antonelli was not there to receive him. He left his card for the Secretary of State and then did the same at the residence of the French ambassador, the Duke de Gramont, whom he wanted to thank for his impassioned efforts to win Edgardo’s release.