The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (24 page)

In the Marquis’s description of Gramont’s tense meeting with the Pope, the link between the Mortara case and the events that were about to alter the political map of Italy was made clear. Gramont told Pius IX of the loud chorus of complaints in France aimed at the Holy See as a result of its handling of the affair. The Pope responded that he, too, had recently been hearing some disturbing reports regarding France. The Pontiff went on: “I would greatly appreciate it if you could help me, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, to put to rest the rumors that are circulating in my states, rumors that have been accompanied, as well, by pieces of information that my agents have been picking up, in which all of Emperor Napoleon’s intrigues in Italy have been exposed.”

Just what those plans were the Pope then recounted to the discomfited Duke. The secret French goal, said the Pope, was “to chase the Austrians from Lombardy and Veneto and, through universal suffrage, let the people themselves select the institutions and the king of their choice. The Roman Legations would be joined to this new Kingdom of Italy.” Pius IX accused the French of planning to go even further than this and annex other portions of the Papal States to Piedmont, including the kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the duchies—Tuscany, Modena, Parma—leaving the Pope to rule only the city of Rome.

“Monsieur de Gramont,” the Sardinian ambassador wrote Cavour, “appeared astonished by this outburst by the Pope and sought to calm him
down and assure him that there was not a single word of truth in the whole account.” The Pope, skeptical of the Duke’s assurances, directed him to convey his comments to the Emperor and to report back with Napoleon’s response.
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Count Cavour’s reply to Ambassador Villamarina in Paris similarly reflects the curious interweaving of concern over the Mortara affair with the momentous political events that were about to unfold in Italy. (Cavour, like Villamarina, wrote in French. Although he was the architect of Italian unification, the man responsible for expelling foreigners and creating an Italian nation, Cavour never felt entirely comfortable with the Italian language and, indeed, addressed his own parliament in French, not Italian. All this, to be sure, was natural enough in Piedmont, whose royal court and high society had until very recently seen France, rather than Italy, as their main cultural point of reference.)

“The news that you send me,” he responded, “is of the utmost gravity.” What Villamarina had written about what was going on in Rome, Cavour wrote, corresponded perfectly with what he had heard from other sources. Passing on to Villamarina news of Gramont’s plan to kidnap Edgardo and smuggle him out to Piedmont, he wrote of the French ambassador: “He confided it to Minerva, to whom I gave the order to back it, although leaving to him the major part of the arrangements.” Cavour, then, had approved the plan himself. “Gramont,” he wrote, “later hesitated and has probably given up the idea, on orders from Paris.”

Although Napoleon no doubt thought that his enraged ambassador in Rome had gone too far in cooking up the kidnapping plan, in Cavour’s view, “the Emperor has been delighted by the Mortara affair, as he is with everything that can compromise the Pope in the eyes of Europe and among moderate Catholics.” The case would give Napoleon a freer hand in whittling away the Papal States: “The more difficult it will be for the Pope to make his weight felt against him, the easier it will be for him to impose the sacrifices necessary for the reorganization of Italy.”

Cavour spelled out for his ambassador to France the stance they should take with Napoleon III. They should remind him of the intransigence that the Pope showed in rejecting Gramont’s pleas on behalf of the Mortara family “and conclude by arguing that the Pope’s conduct shows the absolute impossibility of his conserving temporal power beyond the walls of Rome.”
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As the liberal and anticlerical newspapers throughout Europe kept up the drumbeat of criticism aimed at the Vatican over the Mortara affair, and the French ambassador to Rome renewed his protests, Cardinal Antonelli’s diplomatic pouch filled with updates by nuncios from all parts of the continent, reporting the troubling signs of a new wave of antipapal sentiment. In January
1859, the nuncio in Paris wrote Antonelli to report that the French emperor and his ministers were still unhappy about the Mortara affair, although, he added, “without the least reason.”
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A series of letters to the Secretary of State from the apostolic nuncio in Madrid likewise reported disturbing developments in Spain, a country that had virtually no Jewish population at all.

To a letter dated the first of December, 1858, the nuncio appended copies of recent Spanish newspaper stories on the Mortara case. Of particular concern was the fact that the
Diario Spagniol,
a paper close to the government, had published a piece that referred to the taking of the boy as “a kidnapping and a crime.” The nuncio went directly to the Minister of State and to the Minister of Internal Affairs to protest the outrage, berating them for their “neglect in not preventing such scandalous abuses of the periodical press.” He found the ministers agreeable, and they assured him that it would not happen again. But the nuncio did not stop there. He arranged for two Church-friendly newspapers to run stories lambasting the
Diario
for publishing the critical piece. The result of these efforts, he reported with considerable satisfaction, was publication of an apology by the paper in the previous day’s edition. Unfortunately, the nuncio wrote, he had found no way of “repressing the impertinence of the other newspaper,
El Clamor,
which has always been less than devoted to the Holy See.”
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In the Netherlands, the Vatican had to deal with a less cooperative government. On November 8, Count Du Chastel, the Dutch emissary to Rome, sent a letter to Cardinal Antonelli on behalf of his government. He wrote:

The Mortara affair, which has created such a stir over the last several months in Europe, has not failed to make an equally distressing impression on the people of the Low Countries, where a substantial number of Jews live, distinguishing themselves by their private and civic virtues. The events of Bologna have greatly upset the High Commission of Dutch Jews, which, following the example of their counterparts in England, France, and Sardinia, petitioned the Dutch Government with the request that it interest itself in this affair and work, through its good offices, to obtain a favorable solution for the Mortara family.

Remarking that his government had no wish to become involved in the internal affairs of another state, the Count nonetheless wanted to let the pontifical government know how offended Dutch public opinion was. He concluded with the hope that “the Holy See, in its great wisdom, is able to prevent in the future the recurrence of similar actions, which, in strongly stirring popular passions, result in the growth of unfavorable impressions of the Holy See.”
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The Secretary of State must have been especially concerned about this letter on behalf of the King of the Low Countries, for he wrote an unusually long reply. He complained that the Dutch were doing just what they themselves recognized that they had no right to do—namely, interfering in the internal affairs of another state. The matter, Antonelli informed them, involved “an essentially and exclusively religious fact, and therefore is naturally a matter to be handled by the Ecclesiastical Authority, which may not be interfered with by secular bodies.” The plea was therefore improper: “As the nature of the case is entirely religious, involving the Sacrament of baptism administered to a child, with all the consequences that flow from it, so too are the reasons that prevent the Supreme Head of the Church from taking action of the kind requested by the Jewish parents of the baptized boy.” As for the Count’s argument that the case was making a bad impression on his countrymen, Antonelli responded: “Whatever the impression made on those who either do not want to or do not know how to see the case in its proper light, the Holy See remains confident that it has acted according to the unchanging maxims of the Catholic Church, from which no human reason would ever allow it to shrink.”
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Across the Atlantic, the case was nourishing a new sense of national solidarity among the Jews of the United States. Although, at 150,000 strong, there were many more Jews in the U.S. than in Italy, France, or England, most American Jews were immigrants, and they had as yet little in the way of national organization. Even the three major English-language Jewish newspapers were local products, efforts of particularly influential rabbis in New York, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia.

Word of the Mortara affair came to American Jews indirectly, for neither the Università Israelitica of Rome nor the much more modest Jewish community of Bologna had direct links to their transatlantic brethren. A number of the leading American rabbis, however, were notified by a letter sent in September from Sir Moses Montefiore, head of the Board of Deputies of the British Jewish community. Interest quickly spread.

Only a minority of American Jews came from Roman Catholic countries, but the Mortara abduction represented for them all that was wrong with the Old World, a painful reminder of the oppression they had escaped. These sentiments were nourished not only by the American ideology of freedom and equality but by less salubrious forces as well. In the America of 1858, many took a dim view of Roman Catholicism. Catholic immigrants from Ireland and elsewhere were vilified and derided, and the Pope was painted as the devil incarnate. Ironically, the Jews, who shared much the same fate as the Catholic immigrants of the time at the hands of the overwhelmingly Protestant majority, were overjoyed to find such widespread popular support for their campaign against the Pope.

Beginning in mid-September, the major American Jewish papers carried story after story on the Mortara case. Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise of Cincinnati—one of the founders of Reform Judaism in the United States and editor of one of the major Jewish newspapers—wrote in tones of which American anti-Catholics of the time could be proud:

The facts are, Edgar Mortara never was baptized, the Pope and his numerous, soul-less lackeys never cared whether that boy is a Christian or a Jew. It was not nor is it now the object of the papal officers to make Edgar a Christian, in order that he be saved in the Romish style, or because a few drops of water were sprinkled on him and an unknown woman said a few words over the unconscious child. Some petty priest or schoolmaster of an illiterate Catholic congregation may believe such nonsense, and prompt his flock to subscribe to the doctrine. But the chief movers in all those things are not so foolish.… One must have grown up in the midst of the Catholic clergy to know how much they preach and how little they believe; how severe and strict they are in all religious matters before the illiterate, and how they make light of the whole concern when they find an intelligent and confidential man. Hence Rome’s object is not and can not be the religion of a boy, not religion per se.… We may venture to say, if that nurse was brought before a court of justice in this country, any of our lawyers with a little cross-examination could make the woman tell, that she is the hired tool of some priest, who is himself the tool of his superior, and who again may be the blind tool of a Jesuit, who in his turn is the instrument of the inquisition, which sacred office is the handmaid of the Pope, who again is the subject of the Jesuits.…
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While the Jews living in the Papal States had to grovel before the terrifying power of the Pope, those in the United States clearly found no difficulty in going to the other extreme.

How much this scathing anti-Catholicism had roots in the European Jewish communities from which Wise and the other Jews came, and how much they picked up from their Protestant neighbors in the land of the free, is an intriguing question. Yet one of the ironies of Wise’s diatribe is how closely it mirrors the image of the Jews found in the Catholic press. While the Pope’s defenders viewed the motives of those calling for Edgardo’s release as ignoble, and argued that the boy’s parents themselves were moved by anti-Church rancor rather than parental devotion, in Wise’s rendering, it is the Pope and his clerical colleagues who dissemble, driven not by any true religious belief but by the most corrupt and insincere of motives.

Throughout the country, Jewish communities organized meetings to decide what action to take, and from New York to San Francisco, public
protest rallies were held. In Boston, where anti-Catholic sentiment flourished, two synagogues held a joint meeting to consider what to do, and a four-member committee read its resolution to much applause. Going a step beyond Rabbi Wise, they specifically appealed for solidarity with Protestants who shared their view of the “Prince of Darkness”:

We hear with astonishment and deep sorrow that the most odious act that ever emanated from the Prince of Darkness was recently perpetrated in the dominions of Pio Nono, the Pope of Rome.… This abominable outrage not only affects the Jew, but it equally concerns the Christian who is not of the Catholic creed, as what they (the Inquisition) dared in defiance of every principle of moral justice, inflict one day on the Jew, they may and
will
repeat on a future day to the detriment of the Protestants residing within the limits of their unprincipled power. The history of these incarnate fiends, written in the blood of millions of victims, fully justifies such conclusion.
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Not all of the protests in the United States leaned so heavily on the Know Nothing slogans that the Jews imbibed as part of their acculturation. In early December, at Mozart Hall in New York, a citywide gathering of Jews was called, the first in eighteen years, to protest the Mortara abduction. For hours more than two thousand New Yorkers heard speaker after speaker call for Edgardo’s liberation. Anti-Catholic rhetoric in New York was more muted than in Boston. The most enthusiastically received speaker, Raphael De Cordova, a popular Jewish humorist, asked, irreverently: Could it be true that a Jewish baby baptized surreptitiously by a nurse was thereby made Catholic? What if, he ruminated, a band of Jews, armed with a razor, were to sneak into the Vatican, seize the Pope, and, while holding the protesting Pontiff down, perform a circumcision? “Surely,” he concluded, to the chuckles of the appreciative audience, “that would not make the Pope a Jew, any more than the sprinkling of water made a child of a Jew a Christian.”
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