The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (4 page)

Scarcely had they begun to adjust to this life of confinement when, in 1569, came the first papal order for their expulsion from Bologna. A thousand Jews, their worldly possessions strapped to their backs or swaying atop wooden carts, left the city behind them. Amidst the packs of their clothes, books, and kitchen utensils were nestled the bones of their ancestors. Pope Pius V offered the Jewish Cemetery of Bologna as a gift to the nuns of the convent of Saint Peter the Martyr, telling them “to destroy all graves … of the Jews … and to take the inscriptions, the memorials, the marble gravestones, destroying them completely, demolishing them … and to exhume the cadavers, the bones and the fragments of the dead and to move them wherever they please.”
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After seventeen years in exile, the city’s Jews were permitted to return in 1586, but in 1593 Pope Clement VIII ordered them out of Bologna again and indeed expelled them from the pontifical state, excepting only the capital of Rome and the Adriatic city of Ancona, where ghettoes would be allowed to remain. The Spanish Bourbon rulers of the Italian south, inspired by Spain’s example, had earlier in the century expelled Jews from their entire territory, from Naples to Palermo. The south, which up through the eleventh century had been the home of Italy’s most thriving Jewish communities, now had no Jews at all.

Fortunately for Bologna’s dispossessed Jews, just to the northeast and northwest of Bologna lay Ferrara and Modena respectively, lands still under the control of the Estensi dukes. When forced for the second time to leave Bologna, most of the displaced Jews headed not to Rome or Ancona but out of the Papal States altogether, seeking refuge in the Estensi lands. Although Ferrara was itself soon swallowed up by the Papal States, the popes left that city’s Jews where they were, and Ferrara’s Jewish communities—swollen by the immigrants from Bologna and other lands where Jews had been expelled—lived on.

When the Estensi lost control of Ferrara in 1598, the ducal family moved its home to Modena. The duchy of Modena encompassed not only the city of that name, thirty-nine kilometers from Bologna, but the city of Reggio Emilia, twenty-four kilometers farther northwest in the Po Valley. In the centuries
when Jews were barred from living in Bologna, both Modena and Reggio had flourishing Jewish communities, and it was from these that Edgardo Mortara’s family came. In 1858, Bologna, unofficial capital of the pontifical state’s northern territories, known as the Legations, was ruled by Pope Pius IX. Modena and Reggio lay in the domain of Duke Francesco V.
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Momolo Mortara was born in Reggio just two years after the Estensi duke had been restored to power in Modena following Napoleon’s fall and the withdrawal of French troops from the duchy. Momolo’s father, Simon, born in 1797, had had little experience with the legal restrictions of ghetto life, for his birth had coincided with the arrival of French troops, the burning of the ghetto’s gates, and the abolition of all restrictions on the Jews.
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Like many of Reggio’s 750 Jews, Simon owned a small shop, where he was assisted by his wife and four children. His family had lived in Reggio for well over a century, but they felt part of a much wider Jewish community. Along with the other Jews of the peninsula, they shared the burden of the laws aimed against them and the sense of living as not entirely welcome guests in a land belonging to others. They were united, too, by the manifold ritual prescriptions they followed, the teachings of their holy texts.

When, in 1814, the Duke of Modena returned to power, he put most of the old discriminatory regulations back into effect. Under these laws, Jews could not spend the night outside the ghetto or own stores outside its walls. Christians were forbidden to venture into the ghetto after dark, nor could they work as servants for Jewish families. On the other hand, Christians were warned not to harass the Jews or make fun of them. This was especially a problem in the duchy, as throughout Italy, during Carnival and Lent, times when it was a valued part of popular tradition to taunt Jews. To avoid provoking the Christians, the law forbade Jews to leave the ghetto for the duration of Holy Week.

The ducal decree of 1814, after condemning the Jews’ collaboration with the French-installed regime, reinstated the old code but abrogated some of its most irksome features, including the obligation to close the gates of the ghetto at sundown and to return to the ghetto before nightfall. Also abolished was the centuries-old requirement that Jews wear a distinctive emblem on their clothes so that all would know that they were Jews. In Modena, this emblem had consisted of a red ribbon, which Jews wore prominently atop their hats. Although the prohibition on Jewish residence and ownership of stores outside the ghetto remained technically on the books, it was suspended in exchange for a hefty annual payment from the Jews to the Duke. And so, after the fall of the French, the Mortaras were among the Reggio Jewish families who continued to live and keep their store outside the ghetto walls.
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All in all, the duchy’s Jews could have been worse off. In Rome, restoration of papal power
in 1814 not only led to reghettoization, but the city’s rabbis were once again required to make their humiliating appearance at Carnival. Forced to dress in grotesque black outfits, with short pants and a little cloak, they were made to march through the streets as part of popular festivities, their loose neckties serving as a target for rotten food and other missiles hurled by the jeering throngs.
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When it was time to find a husband or a wife, a Reggio Jew could draw on a dense kin network that extended indifferently across political borders. It went without saying that the spouse should be Jewish, not only because this was required by Jewish law but because marriage of a Jew to a Christian was forbidden by the state as well.

A woman moved to her husband’s home upon marriage. Momolo’s grandfather married a woman from Mantua, who moved to Reggio in 1789; his father married a woman from Verona in 1815, and she likewise moved. When it was time for Momolo to marry, in 1843, his bride, Marianna Padovani, from a family of successful merchants herself, moved from Modena to join him.

It was common for Jews in Modena and Reggio to live in large, extended families. Momolo followed this tradition, bringing his new bride into his parents’ home. Their marriage was blessed with many children. By the time their fourth child, Augusto, was born, in 1848, the house was getting crowded. In addition to Momolo, Marianna, and their children, it included Momolo’s father and mother, his 26-year-old bachelor brother, Abram, and another brother, Moses Aaron, with his new bride, Ricca Bolaffi. When, just a month after Augusto’s birth, Moses and Ricca had their first child, Momolo and Marianna must have felt not only that their living quarters were tight, but that the store which provided all of them with their living could no longer do so. It was time to move.

Generations of marriages linking men and women from different ghettoes produced far-flung networks, stretching from Rome and Ancona through Livorno and Florence to Ferrara, Turin, and Venice. In deciding where to move, Momolo and Marianna acted no differently than their fellow Jews, no differently than their ancestors had: they turned to these networks. In discussions with kin and friends, the attractions of Bologna became clear.

The young couple knew a number of Jewish families, including Marianna’s wealthy Modena neighbors the Sanguinettis, who had recently moved to Bologna. Much larger than either Reggio or Modena, and a much more important center of commerce, Bologna offered broader scope for an enterprising young man like Momolo. The very fact that there were hardly any Jews in the city—a result of two centuries of banishment following 1593 and the renewed government restrictions on Jews in the Restoration years—meant
that the economic niche occupied by Italy’s Jews in local commerce was largely open. Of course, this also meant that the thick web of Jewish social, economic, and religious institutions familiar to Momolo and Marianna in Reggio and Modena would not be found in Bologna. But the Mortara family would not be alone in their new home. It was a family decision. Around the same time that Momolo and Marianna arrived with their children, Marianna’s parents, her uncle, and her married brother and sister also moved there.

As they were debating the move, dramatic events unfolding in the larger world could not be ignored. The year 1848 was one of upheaval and revolt throughout Europe, when rulers were chased from their palaces. In Modena and Bologna people rebelled, and armed revolt blended with general chaos. The very month that the Mortaras’ son Augusto was born, the Duke of Modena, Francesco V, fled his capital, alarmed by reports that insurrectionary forces from throughout his dukedom were marching on Modena, together with hundreds of armed rebels on the move from Bologna. In both Modena and Reggio, civil militias filled the vacuum, installing a provisional government committed to constitutional law and individual rights.

The center of the uprising was the city of Bologna itself. Although part of a different state, it exercised considerable influence over Modena. Little more than three decades earlier, during the years of French rule, the two areas had been joined together in a single government.
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When papal rule was restored in 1814 at the end of the Napoleonic wars, the Church had tried to impose tighter control over the rebellious northern Legations. These efforts were met with resistance by the Bolognesi: the years of French occupation had left a legacy of liberal ideas among the upper classes, and a growing cadre among the educated in this university city regarded papal temporal rule as an insufferable anachronism.

Publicly organized resistance was, of course, viewed by the authorities as treason, so the political opposition formed secret societies, including the famed Carbonari. Revolts against the old order in Naples and Turin in 1820–21 prompted Pope Pius VII to excommunicate members of the Carbonari. In the ensuing police inquiries into the secret society, one of those whose names came up most often in Modena was a member of the Sanguinetti banking family.
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Leo XII, elected pope in 1823, decided that extraordinary measures were required. In his five-year reign he canceled the modest reforms that had been enacted by his immediate predecessors, and imposed heavy-handed police surveillance. He demanded that the old measures against the Jews be enforced, and that the rest of the population be watched carefully to ensure that Church precepts with regard to fasting and religious observance were
followed. Practices identified with modernity—and so deemed at odds with divinely ordained ways—were attacked. Even smallpox vaccinations were halted.
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To deal with the unrest in the Romagna area—the portion of the Legations that stretched from Bologna across to Ravenna and Ferrara—the Pope appointed Agostino Cardinal Rivarola as his
legato straordinario.
The Cardinal was to have unlimited powers, and he quickly acquired a reputation for brutality and repression. In 1825, after summary trials, he oversaw the sentencing of five hundred men from Romagnola for participation in
carbonarismo
and conspiracy. A year later, in return for his efforts, the Cardinal Legate was the target of an assassination attempt in Ravenna; after a narrow escape, he fled the Legations, but his replacement continued his iron-fisted policies, executing four of the men judged guilty for the attempt on the Cardinal’s life.

Despite the campaign to stamp out political opposition, the next decade began with a new wave of unrest in the Legations. In early 1831, local elites led an uprising aimed at winning greater liberty and constitutional rule. In February, a nervous Cardinal Legate abandoned Bologna, and people rushed into Piazza Maggiore to celebrate the end of papal rule. They ripped the papal insignia from atop the door of the government palace and hoisted in its place an Italian national tricolor. Amidst the revolutionary fervor, papal troops fled the city, and a provisional government was formed, headed by the prominent local jurist Giovanni Vicini. When Duke Francesco IV of Modena heard about the successful revolt in Bologna, he hurriedly departed his capital. In Reggio the tricolor replaced the Duke’s flag, and while his officers joined him in flight, the bulk of the troops joined the rebels.

On February 6, 1831, the very day that cardinals gathered in Rome to install Gregory XVI, the new pope received the news of the revolt in Bologna. Two days later, Vicini’s provisional government declared an end to papal rule over Bologna. On February 19, seeing the Legations slipping away from him, Gregory urged Austria to send its troops to crush the rebellion. Two weeks later, thousands of Austrian soldiers poured into the duchy of Modena to retake it for the Duke, who had ties of blood to the Habsburg throne. On March 24, Austrian troops entered Bologna, and Vicini and his colleagues fled.
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This was not the first time that Vicini had provoked the wrath of papal authorities. Just five years before the 1831 revolt, he had been punished for his notorious public defense of Jewish rights in the Papal States. His action was prompted by a sermon given during Lent in 1826 by Ferdinando Jabolot, a monk known for his oratorical zeal, in Bologna’s San Petronio Church. To make the sermon’s message available to a wider audience of the faithful, the
monk had it published. His topic was the Jews, who were, he pronounced, the plague of humanity, a bunch of filthy usurers and lawless ruffians, richly deserving of the divine punishment that had been meted out to them.

The roots of Jabolot’s diatribe lay in centuries of Church dogma concerning the Jews. In Catholic theology, embodied in papal declarations of various kinds over the centuries, Jews were a people to be tolerated, but only within strict limits. As the people from which Jesus sprang, and a people whose Bible formed one of the Church’s holy books, they enjoyed a special place that other non-Christian peoples did not. Yet they also bore a special guilt, for they were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. While the Jews were once God’s favored people on earth, they had become God’s enemies. Their temples in Palestine had been destroyed as divine punishment, and they were consigned by God to be perpetual wanderers, leading a wretched life.