The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (57 page)

For Italy’s Jews, it is not the pain of the Mortara memories that has made its discussion uncomfortable, but the embarrassment. The battle between the Jews and the Church was played out in a struggle over a 6-year-old boy. For the Jews, the Church’s claim that Edgardo could not remain with his Jewish parents because he had been supernaturally transformed by baptism was doubly insulting. Not only did it demonstrate their vulnerability to the Church’s political power, but it also asserted a Catholic claim to possession of the true religion, to a privileged relationship with the Almighty, and to the dismissal of Judaism as error, if not worse. When the Church began to publicize reports that Edgardo was showing signs of his supernatural transformation, the discovery of what, in fact, the little boy actually believed, and whether he truly preferred to stay in the Church rather than to return home to the Judaism of his ancestors, became a kind of public test of the relative merits of the two religions. It was a test the Jews lost.

Of course, Italian Jews were well aware of the psychological pressures exerted on the small boy and had no trouble coming up with a secular explanation of his ultimate decision to abandon his family and Judaism and embrace the Church, but this did not make his transformation any more palatable. That he followed the long—and, for the Jews, vile—tradition of such converts and dedicated himself to trying to convert his own family, and indeed Jews everywhere, meant that Edgardo came to be viewed with horror: he was a changeling. The child who had once been portrayed in the most glowing terms, the object of Jewish compassion, became a man who was disdained, whose character had to be discredited. He could not be happy, he could not even be fully sane, for were he happy and sane, it would reflect poorly on the religion of the Jews. It was best not to talk of him at all.

My own interest in this story derives from a mixture of personal and professional motives. I am not a historian of the Risorgimento, nor a Church historian, nor a student of Jewish history. As a social anthropologist who became interested in historical questions, my work in Italian history up to now has focused on social history, trying to shed light on how the masses of people, mainly illiterate, lived in the past and how their lives were transformed in the nineteenth century. Those whose lives I have examined—sharecroppers and day laborers, unwed mothers and foundlings—were people who had largely escaped the attention of chroniclers of the time as well as of historians today. In short, I had never examined the life of anyone famous, never inquired into affairs of state or diplomacy. My work bore the marks of a movement that was rather critical of all the attention paid by historians in the past to the lives of the elite, to the machinations of political leaders, and to the conduct of wars.

How, then, did I come to write this kind of narrative history, telling a story, one that involves some of Europe’s major personages, a war for national
unification, and the drama of a pope under siege? The professional part of the answer stems from my admiration for those historians who have been able to blend historiographic and literary skills to bring a particular historical case to life. They have focused on the lives of “regular” people, telling gripping stories that shed new light on life in the past. One of the best examples of this genre is Natalie Davis’s
The Return of Martin Guerre,
the story of obscure French peasants of the sixteenth century who, unexpectedly caught up in a dramatic case of spousal imposture, came to the attention of the courts, and whose lives became known to the eager readers of pamphlets that recounted the dramatic tale.

The Mortara case differs in some important ways from the story of Martin Guerre, for it involves important historical figures—from a pope to an emperor—and had an impact on events of much broader significance. But as in the French case, at the heart of the story lies an obscure family caught up in a drama—and later a court case—that offers a glimpse of life among a segment of the population that rarely comes into view in historical work. Indeed, one of the surprises for me in doing the research for this book was how rich a view of people’s daily lives we can get through the study of court and notarial records of the type used here. Such insight is simply not obtainable if we limit ourselves to the kinds of sources most closely identified with the new social history: parish censuses, baptismal records, land registers, and the like. I have, for example, spent much time in the past using this more demographic type of records to get a better understanding of the lives of the illiterate young women who worked as domestic servants in Italy, but I was never able to get the kind of insight into the relations between servants and their employers, nor among servants, that I found in the records connected with the Mortara case.

But all this said, an admission is in order. What drew me most to the Mortara case was not professional interest at all but forces rooted deep in my own family background. My fondness for Italy dates back to early in my childhood, when I heard the stories my father told about his experiences in the war. Chaplain Morris Kertzer landed at Anzio beachhead with the Allied forces early in 1944 as part of the effort to drive out the Nazi occupiers. In April, he conducted a Passover seder at Anzio for the Jewish troops. At the adjacent cemetery, he officiated at more than a hundred funerals of young Jewish soldiers in a few weeks’ time.

On Sunday afternoon, June 4, Kertzer entered Rome as the city was being liberated. On the following Friday evening, June 9, together with Rome’s Chief Rabbi, Israel Zolli, he conducted the first Sabbath service to be held in one of liberated Europe’s major synagogues. Four thousand people crammed into Rome’s central synagogue, overlooking the Tiber. That historic service itself presaged, in a number of ways, my own later fascination with the
Mortara case. As the service was about to begin, an American soldier forced his way through the crowd to the front, where my father stood, and explained that he was himself a Jew from Rome, who had been sent ten years earlier to the United States. He had not seen his parents since then. He did not know whether they had been sent off to the concentration camps or had survived, and he pleaded with the Chaplain to do something to see if they were present amidst the throng. My father asked the soldier to stand at his side as the service began, so that his parents could see him if they were indeed still alive. A woman’s cry of joy and recognition pierced the crowd, and she ran up. Mother and son were reunited in front of the Ark of the Torah.

Barely half a year later, while Nazi forces still occupied portions of northern Italy, the elderly Rabbi Zolli—enmeshed in a bitter dispute with the leadership of the Rome synagogue—stunned Jews worldwide by announcing his conversion to Roman Catholicism. The embarrassment of Italy’s Jews could scarcely have been greater, and denunciations of his character, his past, and even his sanity thundered from Jewish leaders far and wide. My father, who had visited Rabbi Zolli’s apartment and gotten to know him a bit, wrote in his defense.

A half century after my father assisted the Chief Rabbi at that emotional and exhilarating service at Rome’s Tempio Israelitico, I sat outside the Chief Rabbi’s office there, in the adjacent reading room, poring through the 1858 correspondence between the Secretary of Rome’s Jewish community and Momolo Mortara, the desperate father of a boy taken from him and from his religion.

I dedicate this book to the memory of my father, who received word of the death of his own father, David Kertzer, after whom I was named, while he was stationed in Naples before the triumphal march into Rome. I dedicate it as well to his granddaughter, Molly, my daughter, who shares with her father not only a love for Italy but a fascination with
il caso Mortara.
I am only sorry that my father did not live to read his granddaughter’s undergraduate thesis, or this book by his son, both of which, in some way, are testaments to his memory.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
T WAS
Steven Hughes who first drew my attention to the Mortara case several years ago. Since he first told me about the boy who was taken from his Bologna home on orders of the Inquisitor, I found myself drawn in, entranced not only by the personal drama, but by what the story told about the battle between the old order and the new, the dawn of modernity. For a number of years I took advantage of trips to Italy designed for other purposes to collect what I could about the case from archives and libraries. It was only in 1995–96, however, that I was able to devote my attention entirely to the project, thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (long may it live!), with additional support from Brown University and from the Paul Dupee, Jr. University Professorship at Brown. Earlier support had been provided by the William R. Kenan Professorship at Bowdoin College. During my year in Italy, I was hosted by the Fondazione Carlo Cattaneo of Bologna, a wonderful group of scholars and staff, which offered both a stimulating environment and excellent research support. Special thanks go to Robert Cartocci, director of research at Cattaneo, for providing me with such a conducive environment for bringing this project to completion.

Many colleagues in Italy helped steer me through the intricacies of Italian and Church history, as well as through the archives and libraries. In particular, I would like to thank my good friends Mauro Pesce, Pier Cesare Bori, and Arturo Parisi, as well as Margherita Pelaja, Gadi Luzzato Voghera, and Paolo Bernardini. I would also like to thank Nancy Green for her help in Paris.

A number of people assisted me in the research. Adanella Bianchi worked closely with me on the library and archival research for this project in Bologna. I would also like to thank Amitai Touval, Arnaldo Ferroni, Miriam
Bellecca, Jennifer Frey, and Kathy Grimaldi for their help in the United States, and Carolina Cappucci for her help in Modena.

In the early days of this project, Mauro Pesce and I talked of working on a book together, and Mauro subsequently directed two laurea theses on press reaction to the Mortara case, by Floriana Naldi and Grazia Parisi. I would like to thank both Floriana and Grazia for sharing the materials they collected with me, and thank Grazia for her kind help at the state archives in Reggio.

Of the many librarians and archivists who helped me in this research, I would like to thank Otello Sangiorgi and Mirtide Gavelli at the Biblioteca del Museo del Risorgimento di Bologna, Elvira Grantaliano of the Archivio di Stato di Roma, Mario Fanti of the Archivio Arcivescovile di Bologna, Simona Foà of the Archivio Storico della Comunità Israelitica di Roma, Luigi Fiorani of the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, and Domenico Rocciolo of the Archivio del Vicariato di Roma. Thanks also to Don Vittorio Gardini, of Bologna’s San Gregorio parish, for his kind help with the parish censuses.

Special thanks go to Luisella Mortara Ottolenghi, director of the Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea in Milan, whose deep knowledge of the Mortara case is enriched by a special family connection, her husband being Edgardo Mortara’s great-nephew. Thanks also to Franca Romano for all her help.

For their comments on an earlier draft of this book, I would like to thank Bernardo Bernardi, Robert Dana, Pamela Goucher, Steve Hughes, Massimo Marcolin, Luisella Mortara Ottolenghi, Tom Row, Aaron Seidman, Daniel Wathen, and Paolo Zaninoni at Rizzoli, editor of the Italian edition of this book. For his infectious enthusiasm for this project, and for his wonderful work as literary agent, I am grateful to Ted Chichak. Thanks also to Tom Dunne, who helped guide me through the world of commercial publishing, to Carol Brown Janeway, my editor at Knopf, whose sharp eye and keen literary judgment helped shape this book, and to Knopf staff members Stephanie Koven and Melvin Rosenthal for their help.

I dedicate the book in part to my daughter, Molly, who has long shared my passion for the Mortara story. While still in high school she transcribed the several hundred handwritten pages of the Feletti trial transcript, no mean job even for a professional scholar. She beat me to the punch by writing her undergraduate history honors thesis at Brown on the Mortara case. I am very proud of her and of my son, Seth.

NOTES

T
HROUGHOUT THIS BOOK
, unless otherwise noted, all translations from Italian, French, and Latin sources are my own. For more information on archival sources used and abbreviations employed, please refer to “Archival Sources and Abbreviations.”

PROLOGUE

1
. For population figures on the Jews in the Papal States at midcentury, see Ministero del Commercio e Lavori Pubblici,
Statistica della popolazione dello Stato Pontificio dell’anno 1853
(1857).

CHAPTER 1

1
. The primary source used to prepare this account of the events of June 23–24, 1858, are the transcripts of the 1860 trial of Father Feletti for kidnapping, found in ASB-FV. Among the other sources employed is Marshal Lucidi’s account, dated August 8, 1858, which somehow made its way into ASCIR.

2
. Enrico Bottrigari,
Cronaca di Bologna,
vol. 2 (1960), p. 419.

3
. In fact, the two cardinals were traveling together that day, visiting the town of San Giovanni in Persiceto. See Giuseppe Bosi,
Archivio di rimenbranze felsinee,
vol. 3 (1858), p. 309.

CHAPTER 2

1
. On
Cum nimis absurdum,
see Luciano Tas,
Storia degli ebrei italiani
(1987), p. 64; and Attilio Milano,
Storia degli ebrei in Italia
(1992), p. 247.

2
. The passage from Pius V’s papal brief is taken from Lucio Pardo, “Il ghetto e la città,” in Sergio Vincenzi, ed.,
Il ghetto: Bologna. Storia e rinascita di un luogo
(1993), p. 56.

3
. There were five northern legations, ranging, north to south, from Ferrara, Bologna, Ravenna, and Forlì—together constituting the region of Romagna—to the legation of Pesaro and Urbino, part of the Marches.