The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (8 page)

The appearance of the police that June night on the Mortaras’ doorstep,
and the Marshal’s request to see their children, were, far from being baffling, all too readily decipherable by Marianna and Momolo. Indeed, the carabinieri’s knock on their door came in the wake of yet another case that had struck close to home, a case that was unusual only in being publicly discussed at the highest levels of government.

On June 9, 1858, barely two weeks earlier, a member of the Piedmontese parliament, that is, the parliament presided over by Cavour and reporting to King Victor Emmanuel II, rose to speak. “In Modena,” he told his fellow deputies, “many cases have occurred of Jewish children being baptized because of a vendetta, or from stupidity, or due to the fanaticism of some servant. If this extralegal action had no outcome other than a little bit of water being sprinkled by someone who shouldn’t, it would matter little.” Yet this was unfortunately not the case, he said, for all it took was such a splash of water from the hand of a servant for a squad of police to be sent to invade the home and remove the child from his family so that he could be educated as a Catholic. It was, he thundered, “the greatest outrage against the pure sentiments of nature, against the most elementary rules of morality, producing the most heinous oppression imaginable.” At these words, rumblings of protest rose from the benches on the right, where sat the conservative members of parliament, defenders of the Church.

The deputy looked their way and continued: “To save my adversaries any more exertions, let me say right away that I have been informed of all this and provided with the relevant documents by my Jewish friends of Modena.” Indeed, he said, “there is in Turin today a Jewish family that had to flee with their daughter from Modena out of terror that she would be taken from them because a young servant claimed to have baptized her.”

The deputy concluded patriotically: “I have spoken out on this as a matter of conscience. I have spoken because such an outrage against the laws of nature and morality must, in this nineteenth century, at least be stigmatized in the only Italian parliament, in the only place in Italy that, thanks to the efforts of the People, and the loyalty of the Ruler, is still free.” As he stepped down from the podium, he was met by cheers of “bravo” from the deputies to his left, epithets and mutterings from his right.
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In the days following Edgardo’s departure, Bologna’s small Jewish community—many of whom were in one way or another related to the boy—was mobilized, and through their networks, word of what happened began to spread to Jewish communities throughout Italy. The only Jew in Bologna not to hear the awful news was probably Edgardo’s grandmother, Marianna’s mother. No one had the heart to tell her. While the Pope, prime ministers, and even an emperor would be gripped by the drama of her grandson, she would find out about it only many months later.

Through the grapevine, the Mortaras heard rumors that Edgardo had
been taken all the way to Rome. It was time to call for help from the leaders of Rome’s ghetto, not only because they were the closest to Edgardo, but also because they were the only Italian Jews who had access to the Pope himself.

Momolo’s relatives and friends first helped him prepare his own formal request to have his son returned to his family. Their task was made simpler by the fact that the Jewish communities of Reggio and Modena kept files of past pleas, prepared for similar cases. On July 4, ten days after Edgardo’s abduction, letters were sent not only to Father Feletti, but to the Secretary of State of the Vatican, Cardinal Antonelli, and through him to Pope Pius IX himself.

The Mortaras’ cover letter to the Secretary of State employed the customary flowery, reverential style:

Most Eminent Prince—

Momolo Mortara, a Jewish native of Reggio, approaches your most Reverend Eminence with the deepest respect, finding himself in need of calling upon the inexhaustible goodness of His Holiness, Pope Pius IX, to beg, as a most desolate father and husband, his sovereign providence, and not knowing how to bring before his August Throne these most humble supplications, thought of directing them to the Supreme Ministry under your command.

In addition to being sent the long letter addressed to the Pope, Cardinal Antonelli was given a copy of the letter sent that same day to Father Feletti. Still ignorant of just who was supposed to have baptized Edgardo and when, the Mortaras could not contest the facts of the case. They resorted instead to more general arguments. They asked the Inquisitor to consider the value placed on paternal rights in canon law, in particular the right of
potestà paterna,
the father’s legal right over his children. Even if Edgardo had been baptized, they argued, he should be allowed to remain with his parents until he reached the age of reason, at which time he could decide “whether to remain in his paternal religion, or embrace Christianity.”

Their letter to the Pope, signed by Momolo alone, was much longer, for in addition to making a canonical argument for the return of their son, they recounted the painful scene of Edgardo’s capture, hoping that if the good-hearted Pope only knew the cruelty they had suffered, he would come to their aid.

The letter began, following its humble expressions of respect, by describing the events of the night of June 23. We were “struck as if by a bolt of lightning,” Momolo recalled. Marianna, racked by grief, had subsequently returned to her family in Modena, where she remained “gravely ill from anxiety.” “The dumbfounded boy,” Momolo’s letter to the Pope continued,
“was taken from his father’s arms by the police and sent to the capital. It is inconceivable, for me, that a child can be taken away like this.” Surely, he wrote, there must have been some misunderstanding, some mistake, behind it all. He concluded his letter by praising the Pope and expressing his faith, given the Pontiff’s renowned kindness, that he would restore the child to his grieving parents.
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The written plea to Father Feletti had no effect; the Inquisitor informed the Mortaras that the matter was out of his hands. Their only hope lay in Rome, but there the matter was much more complicated. While Sabatino Scazzocchio, the secretary of the Jewish community of Rome, took on the task of coordinating efforts on behalf of the Mortaras with the Vatican, he urged them to do what they could in Bologna to get to the bottom of the matter. They had to discover the circumstances of the alleged baptism if they were to have any hope of preparing a successful appeal. Who had baptized Edgardo?

The attention of the Mortara family and that of the other Jews of Bologna fell inevitably on the Catholic women who had worked as domestic servants in the Mortara home. Italy’s Jews, at least those with the modest resources that would permit them to have such domestic help, had long had an ambivalent relationship with the young women who worked for them. Jews looked outside their community to recruit these women, not only because that was where they were plentiful, but more importantly because one of the major services they could provide was to work on the Sabbath, when, beginning at sundown on Friday, Jews were forbidden by their religious law to light the lamps that gave them light, the flames that provided warmth or cooked their food. A family with no non-Jew to perform these and other tasks on the Sabbath lived uncomfortably. In Bologna in 1858, almost all the Jewish families had Catholic women working for them.

Yet Church authorities had never been happy about the practice of Christians working in Jewish homes. The Church’s goal was to keep the faithful away from the Jews, who, it was thought, might undermine the faith and corrupt the beliefs of any Christians who got too close to them. Already in 417, the Christian rulers of the Roman Empire forbade Jews to acquire Christian servants. The history of papal pronouncements and inquisitorial manifestos dealing with the Jews is a history of the reiteration and repeated expansion of this ban.
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Typical was the “Edict on the Jews” issued in Bologna on June 6, 1733, a large manifesto attached to church doors throughout the diocese. Signed by Father de Andujar, the Dominican Inquisitor of Bologna, it listed dozens of restrictions on Jews, one of which was “that Jews cannot keep either male or female Christian servants.” Eleven days later, the portals of Bologna were covered by a different version of the same edict, this one signed by Cardinal
Lambertini, Archbishop of Bologna and soon to become pope himself. The edicts specified that Jews were to remain in the ghetto every night, they could not read the Talmud or any other prohibited book, they must “wear the sign of yellow color, by which they are distinguished from others, and they must always wear it in every time and place, both within the Ghetto and outside it.” The edict warned that “the Jews may not play, nor eat, nor drink, nor have any other familiarity or conversation with Christians.” It dwelt at particular length on the evil of allowing Christians to work in the homes of Jews, and specified that any father who allowed his child to do so would be punished severely, and his child imprisoned.

All this attention to the Jews in Bologna in 1733 may seem odd, since they had been ejected from the city and its hinterland 140 years earlier. There was no longer any ghetto whose portals could be closed at night. But the edict was a product of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Rome, and local archbishops and inquisitors throughout Italy were directed to disseminate their own versions, whether there were Jews or not. Such was the thoroughness, and the bureaucratic logic, of the Church.
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Following the restoration of papal rule in 1814–15, among the old restrictions reimposed on the Jews was the ban on Christian servants. It was a ban, however, that was by this time only sporadically enforced. Occasionally, an eager inquisitor or concerned bishop ordered an end to the backsliding, and action was taken. In Ancona in 1843, for example, the Inquisitor issued an edict ordering the Catholic women working as servants in the city’s large ghetto to leave it immediately.
¹⁰
But typically, by midcentury, Church authorities turned a blind eye to the practice. This was certainly the case in Bologna, where the priest of San Gregorio, the parish in which the Mortaras and several other Jewish families resided, listed, year after year, in his annual census of the households under his care, the servants living in the Jewish households, with the note
“servente cattolica.”
¹¹

Yet it was not only the Church authorities who were concerned about the danger of allowing Catholic women to work in Jewish homes. Jews themselves, while reluctant to do without such help, long remained uneasy about it, an anxiety that only increased in the years of the Restoration. The problem was that Jews saw these Christian women in their midst as potential agents of disaster, for if the servants were otherwise in a subordinate position, they had one great power: they could, when the parents were not looking, baptize an unknowing baby and thereby bring about the family’s ruin. But although Jewish men and women spoke endlessly of the danger they faced, there is little evidence that they ever of their own accord sought to do without their Catholic servants. The possibility of allowing Jews to perform the tasks forbidden on the Sabbath was, given their religious beliefs and the attitudes of their rabbis, literally inconceivable.

In 1817, papal police were sent to a Jewish home in the ghetto of Ferrara, just thirty miles northeast of Bologna. There they seized the family’s 5-year-old daughter. The abduction was prompted by a young Christian woman’s claim that, five years earlier, when she had been caring for the girl, then an infant, she had secretly baptized her. In the wake of this case, the Ferrara Jewish community sent a delegation to Rome to plead with the Pope for the child’s return, but apparently to no effect. Ferrara’s Jews, now terrified by the dangers posed by their Christian servants, began to require that, on leaving their service, they sign (with an
X
) a notarized statement that they had never baptized a child of the family. Their innovation spread to other ghettoes in the Papal States.
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If the Inquisitor had received a report that Edgardo had been baptized, clearly the first place to look for the secret baptizer was among the women who had worked in the Mortaras’ home. After Anna Facchini, the Mortaras’ current domestic servant, heatedly denied having had anything to do with it, the family began to look back among their former servants, asking everyone they knew if they had heard anything from any of these women about a secret baptism.

Suspicion soon fell on Anna Morisi. She had moved into their home when Edgardo was but a few months old and had left it only recently to work with another Bologna family. They learned that Anna had since gotten married and left the city altogether.

One day late in July, when Momolo was off in Modena, Marianna’s brother Angelo stopped by her house for lunch. As they sat down to eat, an unexpected visitor arrived, Ginevra Scagliarini. Now married and living outside Bologna, Ginevra had for years worked as a servant for the family of Marianna’s sister, Rosina, the one who had taken in Marianna’s other children on the day of Edgardo’s abduction. Rosina and her husband, Cesare De Angelis, had six children of their own, and Ginevra had been there when most of them were born. She felt a strong bond with the family and often dropped in to see Rosina and her sisters when she made the trip to Bologna.

During most of the time when Ginevra had been with Rosina, Anna Morisi had been working for Marianna. Moreover, Ginevra and Anna were both from San Giovanni in Persiceto. The two young women had become good friends, a fact that came to Angelo’s mind as soon as Ginevra entered the house. With the thought that out of friendship Ginevra might try to protect Anna, Angelo decided to employ a small ruse. Pretending that he had already been told it was Anna Morisi who had baptized Edgardo, he said, in an ironical tone, “Some nice thing Nina did, eh?” He added, “She’s just devastated this poor family.”