The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (10 page)

The informal committee of Bologna Jews launched a frenetic search for an advisor expert in canon law, hoping to find the citations that would clinch their case and persuade the Pope to free Edgardo. Meanwhile, research was under way at the Roman synagogue as well, and Scazzocchio sent the committee the results of the initial investigation into Church doctrine on the baptism of Jewish children. Two weeks after his first letter to Scazzocchio, Padovani wrote again, reporting his mounting concern that the Church canons were, in fact, not in Momolo’s favor, as well as the committee’s anxiety at the lack of a response from the Secretary of State to Momolo’s plea.

Padovani also wrote that they were preparing Momolo for his trip to Rome, planned for the end of July. To offset his expenses, they had already circulated a letter to Jewish communities throughout Italy, calling for a collection to be taken up to support the Mortara cause. They were also still hoping to find a legal advisor—and here they felt a Catholic lawyer would be best—to accompany Momolo and act as his representative in dealing with the papal authorities. Yet they had run into insuperable difficulties. No one willing to make the trip and represent the Jews could be found in Bologna, and their urgent requests to the Jews of Ancona and Ferrara, Pesaro and Florence, to locate such a person had gotten them nowhere.

Scazzocchio was not pleased with the letter from Bologna. It would be best, he thought, if he and his colleagues in Rome were left to handle the matter in their own way, using their own channels and their own methods. The prospect of Momolo arriving with his own legal advisor—and a Christian
one at that—to make an independent approach to the Roman authorities was deeply troubling. Anything that might cause the Vatican to view the Jews as lacking in proper deference to the Church was to be avoided at all costs, for it would be the Jews of Rome who would suffer most from the resulting papal displeasure.

On July 29, Scazzocchio sent an urgent letter to Bologna to try to persuade Momolo to put off his trip. At this point, he wrote, the need for his presence in Rome was less pressing; the matter “having lost its primitive virginity, a large part of the hoped-for effect of having the paternal pain on display has already been lost.”

At the bottom of his letter, Scazzocchio added a worried postscript, reflecting a development that had been taking on increasing importance in recent days. Defenders of the Church were beginning to spread their own account of what had happened. In their version, the boy had left his parents without protest and had gone happily with his police escort to Rome. Scazzocchio’s postscript reads: “Write me immediately, today, a detailed account of the abduction.” He wanted to know the exact words the boy had uttered as he was being taken away.

The question had become so urgent, in fact, that the impatient Scazzocchio also sent Padovani a telegram, despite his concern about the prying eyes of the papal police. Both sides took care to do what they could to disguise the subject of their communication. Padovani’s reply arrived in Rome by return telegram the same day: “Individual speechless, crying convulsively, frightened. Torn away, wanted parental company.”

The major development in Bologna, meanwhile, as Momolo tried to get his business affairs in order for what threatened to be a long stay in Rome, was the discovery, thanks to Anna Morisi’s confession, of what lay behind the Inquisitor’s order to seize Edgardo. Right after Momolo’s brothers-in-law returned from their encounter with her, Angelo Padovani wrote to Rome to recount her story. Padovani chose to write to a relative of his in Rome, Jacob Alatri, rather than directly to Scazzocchio, in part because he was not entirely happy with the way Scazzocchio was handling the affair. The tone of his July 30 letter reflects the family’s mounting frustration.

Padovani complained that neither he nor his Bologna brethren could understand why Scazzocchio refused to send new pleas to the papal authorities, as they had asked. As for all the material on Church law that Scazzocchio had been sending them, it was practically useless, since none of them knew Latin and they had been unable to find any lawyer in Bologna to help them. Although they had located two experts on relevant canon law, one, Padovani wrote, was mired in “exaggerated superstition,” and the other was a friend of the Inquisitor.

He then came to Anna Morisi’s tearful testimony, which his nephew had written down and which he enclosed:

There is no need to comment on the woman’s deposition. You see that, when she was just fourteen or fifteen, she threw some well water, taken from a bucket, on a child 12 or 14 months old, who was sick with the kind of infection children get but not in any danger of dying (we attach the doctor’s statement). She had no idea of the importance of what she was doing, which, consequently, might not have had the characteristics demanded by the Church. She acted as a result of the suggestion, very possibly made in jest, of the grocer Lepori.

Recognizing that the authenticity of Morisi’s account might be questioned, for it was neither notarized nor signed, Padovani suggested that efforts be made to have the young woman sent to Rome to testify. He relished the prospect of such a confrontation and what he took to be its likely result: “a Decree of Nullification, and the return of the son to his father, and, in addition, for the glory of the Church, in the interest of Public Morality, and for the tranquillity of all, a law that would call for the censuring and punishment of anyone who, by such underhanded means, tries to steal children from their parents.” He concluded by voicing the hope that the first to be brought to justice under the new law would be “the instigator,” Cesare Lepori.

By the time Momolo left Bologna for Rome, on July 31, relations between the Jews of Bologna and the leaders of the Roman ghetto had become tense. The last letter received from Scazzocchio had begun with the remark: “I was hoping to be able to tell you today about recent developments of the greatest importance, but I hope to do so next Monday.” The response from the Bolognesi showed their exasperation: “You wrote on the 27th that you hoped soon to send an extremely important communication, which filled us with great hope, and we anxiously await the news, which it seems you are still not in a position to give us. We would be very grateful if you would let us know the present state of things, insofar as you can, and what steps are in progress.”

Momolo set out. According to a friend, he was in a sad state, his spirit broken, his once boundless energy drained.

While Rome’s Jewish leaders wanted to handle all dealings with the papal authorities in their own way, the Jews of Bologna favored a more aggressive approach. Their end-of-July letter proposed a multipronged strategy. The first involved Momolo’s activities once he reached Rome. The second, they proposed, should be a unified effort by all the Jewish communities of the Papal States, calling on the Pope to act in order to “relieve thousands of the state’s most peaceful and obedient subjects from anxieties that are worse than having
to fear for their lives and their possessions.” It was the third, however, that brought Momolo’s Bolognese kin and friends into active conflict with Scazzocchio and his colleagues, for the letter called for mobilizing “the most eminent foreign Jews to interest European public opinion, nations, and governments in the case.”

The same day that this letter was written, another was sent to Rome’s Università Israelitica, this one from Crescenzo Bondi, a Roman Jew who happened to be on a business trip in Senigallia, a town of twenty-four thousand in the central Adriatic region of the Papal States. Bondi reported on a meeting held there the previous day, a gathering of representatives from all the major Jewish communities of the area—Ancona, Urbino, Pesaro, and Senigallia—who had come to meet with Angelo Moscato, Marianna’s brother-in-law. Moscato briefed them on the latest events and urged them to join a fund-raising campaign for the Mortaras. Knowing that this news would be poorly received in Rome, Bondi asked his Roman brethren to be understanding of their friends from Bologna, who were gripped by a desperate need for action and had organized the fund-raising campaign “without first consulting our Community, as it was their duty to do.”

Rome’s Jewish community could boast of being Europe’s oldest, for Jews had lived there continuously for two millennia. Its location at the center of power in the Papal States and, indeed, at the center of world Christendom gave it a certain pride of place among the Jews of Italy—an honor, however, that came at a high price. Rome’s Jews keenly felt the might of the Pope and the Church hierarchy, and their very proximity to ecclesiastical power meant they came under greater scrutiny than Jews elsewhere.

Rome’s Jews had their own unhappy memories, which the news from Bologna once more brought to mind. One of the most searing was a story told to them by their parents and grandparents, the story of the dramatic confrontation that took place on the evening of December 9, 1783, when the ghetto gate, already shut for the night, was unexpectedly opened. A coach, with a large police escort, rolled in. Residents rushed to put on their yellow hats, which by law they had to wear at all times, as the carriage rolled across the cobblestones and stopped in the center of the ghetto. Out from the coach came two government officials, who demanded to see the rabbis and lay leaders of the community.

When the surprised ghetto leaders made their way to the carriage, the reason for the visit was explained. The men were looking for two orphans, a boy aged 11 and his sister, aged 7, who lived with their grandmother. They were to be taken to the House of the Catechumens to be prepared for baptism.

Alarmed and indignant, the Jewish leaders demanded an explanation and were told what had happened. Decades earlier, a great-aunt of the children
had left the ghetto, converted, and married a Catholic man. Her son, a cousin of the children’s father, was now a grown man. He had decided that his long-lost kin should enjoy the benefits of conversion and had asked the authorities to arrange for their baptism.

The armed escort was ordered to locate the children and seize them. By that time, the family had received word of the uninvited visitors, and the children were nowhere to be found.

The efforts to squirrel them away, however, proved of little avail. The police were ordered to grab whatever children they could and to hold them as hostages until the two youngsters were relinquished. Scores of children were rounded up. There was little for the Jews to do but fetch the two siblings from their hiding place. The carriage carrying the befuddled youngsters rumbled back across the cobblestones, and the ghetto gate thudded shut behind them.

Nor was this the end of the matter. When the Roman police chief heard of the Jews’ insolence, he ordered an armed force into the ghetto, and sixty young Jewish men were hauled off and thrown, in chains, into dungeons. It took more than four months for the Jewish community to come up with the payment demanded for the men’s release. The two children, meanwhile, were baptized, never again to set foot in the ghetto.
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Such encounters had taught the leaders of Rome’s ghetto to tread gingerly in dealing with the Church, especially when questions of doctrine were at stake. Nor were the memories of their vulnerability all so old. Only nine years before the Mortara abduction, in the wake of the retaking of Rome by French troops in 1849, the Jews were accused of having purchased holy objects stolen from Roman churches in the previous year of upheaval. Soldiers invaded the ghetto one evening, locked the Jews in their homes for three days and nights, and went house to house ransacking their belongings in search of the stolen goods. Frustrated at not finding any of the loot they were looking for, the soldiers carried off the Jews’ own golden sacred objects to compensate them for their efforts.
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Despite such experiences, Rome’s Jews felt grateful to Pope Pius IX for relieving them of some of the most irksome and degrading restrictions that had been imposed on them. Shortly after becoming pope, he had eliminated the
predica coatta,
the centuries-old requirement that Jews attend a Saturday sermon, given by a priest, aimed at demonstrating the evils of Judaism and the joys of conversion. Pius IX had also ordered the ghetto gates to be torn down, despite lively opposition from the Roman plebes.

Yet the Jews of Rome still lived almost entirely in the old ghetto and were still bound by many restrictions. Of all the major Jewish communities in Italy in 1858, Rome’s was the poorest, and visitors to the ghetto were appalled by the conditions they found. A Spanish traveler, Emilio Castelar, no friend of
papal rule himself, has left a graphic—although somewhat overdrawn—picture of the sight that met him when he visited the ghetto in the 1860s. He began by putting the place into context, for, he wrote, aside from the beautiful Saint Peter’s Square, Rome “is a filthy city.… Mounds of garbage lie at every street corner.… The Tiber is truly an open sewer; its sickly yellow waters give the appearance of an immense vomit of bile.”

But amidst the general squalor, Castelar reported, Rome’s ghetto was in a category of its own. As one entered, “one’s feet sink into a soft layer of excrement, which seems to be the droppings of a pig or a hippopotamus. Half-naked children, covered with scabs of filth which resemble a leper’s gangrenous sores, slither everywhere. A few old people, with wrinkled, jaundiced skin, white hair, glassy eyes, emaciated, with sinister smiles, stand guard by the doors to the houses, which seem to be true rat holes. And from each of those dens wafts a fetid smell.”
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Complaints that Rome’s Jews lived in squalid conditions, and that the Church was to blame for this, were dismissed as rank anti-Catholic propaganda by Church defenders. In a typical apologia of the 1860s, a biographer of Pius IX argued that there was no place in the world where the Jews suffered less than in Rome. Now that the good pope had opened the ghetto gates, the only reason that the Jews still lived there, he wrote, was “their own spirit of exclusion and separation.” He continued: “If the ghetto in the past was dirty and disgusting, if even today it is unhealthy, that is certainly not the fault of the popes.” In this account and thousands of others, the Church fathers were portrayed as having done the Jews a great favor by putting them in the ghetto, for this was the only way to protect them from the people’s ire. “The Jews lived happily and peacefully in Rome, their property, their safety, and their beliefs effectively protected.”
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