The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (9 page)

Ginevra took the bait: “Yes, it’s true,” she said. “I found out about it from Monica, her sister. She said that it really was Anna who baptized Edgardo.”
When Anna had first heard the news that Edgardo had been seized by the police as a result of what she had done, Ginevra reported, she was overwhelmed by the fear that the Mortaras would want revenge.

Later in the day, when Momolo returned, Angelo excitedly told him of his discovery and proposed that he and Cesare De Angelis, their brother-in-law and Ginevra’s former employer, make the trip to San Giovanni in Persiceto to confront Anna Morisi and find out what had really happened.

Angelo and Cesare arrived in San Giovanni two days later. It was a Wednesday, market day in this large rural community, so their arrival went unnoticed amidst the bustle of merchants hawking their wares and market-goers descending on the town from outlying hamlets.

The two men went first to Ginevra’s home, where Ginevra and Monica, Anna Morisi’s sister, were awaiting them. The two women led Angelo and Cesare to the building where Anna lived. They climbed the stairs to the third floor, where Anna and her husband occupied a single squalid room carved out of the home of another of Anna’s sisters, Rosalia. It was 11 a.m.

Monica and Ginevra had warned Nina, as Anna was known, of the men’s arrival just a few minutes before the stagecoach carrying them arrived in town. Angelo described the scene that met them:

We found Nina bathed in tears and trembling with uncontrollable sobbing. Only when we were able to cheer her up, assuring her that we had not come to do her any harm, but only to discover the truth so that a remedy to the sad situation might be found, did she tell us about the baptism. She told us the following story:

“A few years ago I was in Bologna, in the service of the Mortaras, when a son of theirs, named Edgardo, about a year old at the time, got sick. One day when he got much worse, and I thought he might die, I spoke to Signor Cesare Lepori [who ran the grocery store near the Mortara home] about it, saying how sad I was, especially since he was a handsome baby, and I was sorry to see him die.

“Signor Lepori suggested that I baptize him, but saw that I was reluctant, especially since I didn’t even know how to do it. So he taught me, and I went back to the house with a glass, filled with some water that I got out of the bucket, and, coming up to the sick boy, I threw some on him saying, ‘I baptize you in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,’ adding a few other words as well that I can’t remember right now. The boy got better, and I didn’t think any more about it, because I figured that it wasn’t of any importance since I had done it without really knowing what I was doing.

“It was only last year that, when a son of the Mortaras named Aristide died, I was talking sadly about it one day with a certain Regina, the
servant of our neighbors, the Pancaldis, and she told me that I should’ve baptized him. I told her that was a suggestion I wouldn’t want to follow, and I went on to tell her about the time in the past, when Edgardo was sick, when I’d thrown some water on him, but that it hadn’t had any effect. Hearing that, Regina told me that I should have spoken about it with some priest, but I didn’t.

“Last winter I was called to the Convent of San Domenico in Bologna, and there that Holy Inquisitor interrogated me about what I had done with Edgardo, forcing me to tell him everything. Crying, I told him, and his secretary wrote down what I said, and the Inquisitor made me swear on the Crucifix to say nothing. I figured at the time that I must have been summoned to that Convent because of Regina, given what slipped out of my mouth when I was talking with her.

“I was surprised again when Edgardo was carried off, and, figuring that it was all my fault, I was very unhappy, and still am. I just hope that the fact that I did what I did when I was only around 14 years old, and not really thinking, is some excuse.”

Angelo Padovani, hearing Anna’s tale, found that he was moved by it, despite himself: “She said no more, but her words, and her demeanor, and her tears before she could launch into her story, persuaded me that what she told me was all true.”

Going through the minds of the brothers-in-law as they listened to Anna’s story was the question of whether there was anything in what she said that might help persuade the papal authorities to let Edgardo go. If there was, they thought, it would do them little good unless they could get her account down in legal form. When Anna finished her recollections, Angelo asked if she would be willing to repeat her account in the presence of witnesses. They were relieved to hear her say that she would.

Angelo and Cesare then ran off to find the local notary, which took a bit of doing, but at two o’clock they returned with the notary and two witnesses. They found Anna’s room deserted. In her sister’s apartment, they were told that she had left town.

Anna had in fact not left San Giovanni, but following her dramatic encounter with the two men, her sisters, Rosalia and Monica, warned her not to say anything more about the matter to the two Jews. In order to convince her, they took her to see their parish priest. Don Luigi, when told of Anna’s interrogation by the Inquisitor and of the subsequent events, ordered her to say nothing more.

Angelo and Cesare rode the coach back to Bologna empty-handed, in possession only of a story, a story in some ways new to them, in others all too familiar.

CHAPTER 5
The Mezuzah and the Cross—
Edgardo’s Trip to Rome

C
ENTURIES OF CONFINEMENT
in ghettoes had led Italy’s Jews to cultivate special channels for dealing with state authorities, a kind of Jewish diplomatic service. A Jew normally approached state or Church power not directly or alone but through the offices of the local corporate Jewish community, which, through its official spokesmen (they were never women), would petition the ruler on behalf of any Jew who came under its authority.

Bologna’s Jews, given their small number, the recency of their arrival, and, above all, their dubious legal status, had no official organization at all. They had no synagogue and, having no rabbi, remained under the religious authority of the rabbi of Cento, a small town midway between Bologna and Ferrara that, because it lay in the Estensi domain at the time Pope Clement VIII banished Jews from most of the Papal States, had been able to maintain a small Jewish community.

In the absence of a formal organization in Bologna, efforts on behalf of the Mortaras fell to a handful of influential Jewish men who were close to the family. It was they who first alerted the other Jewish communities of Italy to the disturbing news, they who kept Jews throughout Italy and beyond posted on the latest developments, and they who organized the fund-raising drive to pay the costs of the campaign to free Edgardo.

No strangers to crises of this kind, Italian Jews were masters at spreading bad news. Marriages linking the Jews of the various ghettoes, the movement of
families from one ghetto to another, the skillful use of Jewish ties to promote commerce in the face of archaic customs barriers, and a total population in the peninsula that, at around thirty thousand, was barely that of a small city combined to create a thriving, nonlocalized community. Sharing a long history of subjection to the powers of a hostile Christian state and forbidden to develop ties with their Christian neighbors, the Jews were cast together by outside pressures. But they were also fortified by a belief in their basic oneness as the People of the Book, united—at least in theory—with Jews everywhere.
¹

News of the Mortaras’ misfortune spread quickly through the old Jewish ghettoes of Italy, to Ferrara, Ancona, Cento, and Rome, under papal rule, and to Modena and Reggio Emilia, where many of Momolo and Marianna’s relatives still lived, under the Duke of Modena’s rule. The news sped on to Florence and Livorno, under the somewhat more benign authority of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and to Turin and the other recently emancipated Jewish communities of the kingdom of Sardinia.

For the Jews of Italy who lived as not entirely welcome guests in places where the Inquisition was still in force, the Mortaras’ misfortune was their own. Having gotten a taste of equality during the French occupation, and aware of the recent emancipation of brethren in Piedmont, France, and Britain, they reacted to news of the Mortara affair not only with fear but also with rage. Yet the Jews of the Papal States remained—as unemancipated Jews had been over the centuries—muted in their public protests, fearful of stirring up the wrath of their rulers. In the Italian peninsula, public protest was limited to Piedmont, for only there did Jews have basic constitutional rights, and these had been granted only a decade before. But in France and Britain, not to mention the United States, Jews were free to organize politically. Just as important, the development of a relatively free press, intended for a mass audience, had by 1858 changed the dynamics of power in much of Western Europe. One part of this movement was the founding of Jewish newspapers. While some of these, clinging to a more traditional path, were limited to the narrow discussion of religious matters and remained under rabbinical control, others, with lay editors, charted a new course. Weighing in on larger social and political issues, they gave Jews a public voice that they had never before had.
²

If the Mortara case became an international cause célèbre, it was in no small part due to the newly acquired ability of the Jews to make their grievances known publicly and to communicate and organize rapidly across national boundaries. The emancipated Jews profited not only from their newfound freedom of expression and freedom of the press, but from their increased political influence, as the Enlightenment ideology that citizens were entitled to enjoy certain basic rights was rapidly spreading. Europe’s Jews had
long shared a sense that they were all one people, but in the past they had found it difficult enough to influence the actions of their own civil rulers and had no hope of intervening on behalf of their brethren elsewhere. Now Jewish solidarity would have a political dimension as well.

Within days of Marshal Lucidi’s visit to the Mortara home, emergency meetings of Jewish community leaders were being called throughout Italy. Jewish fathers told stories of similar cases that had befallen their community. Mothers looked at their own children with new anxiety, and at their servants with new dread.

At Rome’s central synagogue, in the ghetto that had since the sixteenth century enclosed the ancient Jewish community on the bank of the Tiber, Sabatino Scazzocchio, the young secretary of the four-thousand-member community, officially known as the Università Israelitica, was soon bombarded with letters from his counterparts throughout Italy, urging him to act. One such plea came from Livorno, dated July 7, 1858, sent by Signor Alatri, a man well known to Scazzocchio, for he was related to one of the influential families of the Roman ghetto.

“I want to let you know,” Alatri wrote, “the many urgent requests and recommendations I have had from the most respectable persons, both from Florence and from here, that you take this matter in hand.” He went on to tell the Roman leaders what they should do, listing eight points they should make in their petition to the Vatican, ranging from arguing the supremacy of paternal rights over a child to demanding that the Church reveal the facts of the alleged baptism.

Momolo had learned, wrote Alatri, that canon law called for the corporal punishment of anyone who baptized Jewish children without their parents’ permission. (Although this was true, what he did not mention was the difficulty of discovering any case where such punishment had actually been meted out.) Momolo asked that the law be applied in his own case, in order to dissuade the overly zealous from baptizing Jewish children in the future. Alatri further reported that, although others had suggested enlisting the aid of foreign governments, he thought this was not a good idea. It would be best if the matter were handled by the Jews in Rome, as had been done for centuries.
³

Two days after the Livorno letter was penned, the Mortara family sent its first letter to the Jewish secretary of Rome. It was written by Marianna’s uncle Angelo Padovani, whose diplomatic skills had so impressed Marshal Lucidi. In the early days following the abduction, the family turned to Angelo to coordinate their efforts.

Aware that Scazzocchio already knew about the abduction, Padovani wrote from Bologna to bring him up to date on what had already been done to try to get the child back. Since the family’s plea to Bologna’s Inquisitor had been rejected, he reported, their only hope remained in Rome. He continued:

While we have been busy here tracking down rulings found in the sacred books in order to gather material for another petition, some people have advised us instead to try going to Court. I have already told you that there has been a great commotion in the city [about the abduction], and I haven’t exaggerated. I know that it has been, and still is, the subject of bitter comment in high society here. And I found out that the Marquise Zampieri, who just arrived here on Wednesday, said that the subject is the talk of the town in Rome and that it has been acutely felt by [the French] General Goyon, who, moreover, said that something like this, given that the honor and glory of the Church are at stake, merits the attention of the ministers of the Foreign Powers, to show that such persecution is incompatible with the times.

Padovani asked Scazzocchio whether he thought it might help if Momolo himself came to Rome. As Momolo was far from rich, he quickly added, he wondered what sort of support might be forthcoming from Rome’s Jewish community. He concluded by asking if Scazzocchio could reassure the anxious parents by providing word of Edgardo’s well-being, for the boy had by now been in Rome for several days.