{"id":7647,"date":"2022-01-10T19:47:27","date_gmt":"2022-01-10T18:47:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/moked.it\/international\/?p=7647"},"modified":"2022-01-31T18:30:10","modified_gmt":"2022-01-31T17:30:10","slug":"the-abduction-of-a-jewish-child-in-1858-recounted-by-a-descendant-who-is-a-scholar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moked.it\/international\/2022\/01\/10\/the-abduction-of-a-jewish-child-in-1858-recounted-by-a-descendant-who-is-a-scholar\/","title":{"rendered":"The abduction of a Jewish child in 1858 recounted by a descendant who is a scholar"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a> For the Italian scholar El\u00e8na Mortara, the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara is both family history and subject of research. After having explored the cultural and intellectual atmosphere of that period in the book Writing for Justice: Victor S\u00e9jour, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, and the Age of Transatlantic Emancipations (Dartmouth College Press, 2015), she now confronts the issue in the essay The kidnapping and its historical context published in the catalog of the exhibition Beyond the ghetto. Inside & out of which we publish here an excerpt.<\/em><\/p>\n

What has become known, in both contemporary reports and later historical accounts, as the \u201cMortara case,\u201d or also the \u201cMortara affair,\u201d is the dramatic case of a six-year-old Jewish child from Bologna named Edgardo Mortara (1851\u20131940), who \u2013 having been clandestinely baptized at the age of around one by the family\u2019s Catholic maid \u2013 in June 1858 was suddenly taken away by force of law from his family, by order of the Inquisition.
\nBologna was at that time part of the wide Papal States, whose dominion extended across many central regions of the Italian Peninsula, projecting out north-eastwards from Rome to include the Legation of the Romagne, with Bologna as its capital. Bologna was therefore subject to the laws of the Papal State and \u2013 given the blurred nature in those days of the lines between religious and temporal power \u2013 was governed by a cardinal appointed by the pope, Cardinal
\nLegate Giuseppe Milesi Pironi Ferretti, and was subjected to civil and criminal legislation based on the Code of Canon Law of the Church of Rome. From 1856 onwards, the city\u2019s main spiritual authority was the influential archbishop Michele Viale-Prel\u00e0, whereas the inquisitor responsible in Bologna for the Roman Inquisition, the institution dedicated to safeguarding the integrity of the Catholic faith against infidels and heresies, had for many years been a Dominican father, Pier Gaetano Feletti. Above all of them, sitting as Head of State on the throne of the Holy Roman Church was Pope Pius IX (born Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti, 1792\u20131878), who became pontiff in 1846.
\nOn June 23, 1858, in the night, the Marshal in the papal carabinieri, Pietro Lucidi and
\nBrigadier Giuseppe Agostini, followed by a squad of other papal guards, appeared at the home
\nof Momolo (Salomone David) and Marianna Mortara (n\u00e9e Padovani), at no. 196, Via delle
\nLame, in a central district of Bologna, with the order to take away with them one of the couple\u2019s children \u2013 six-year-old Edgardo. \u201cI\u2019m sorry to have to inform you that you are the victim of betrayal,\u201d said Marshall Lucidi to Marianna Mortara. \u201cYour son Edgardo has been baptized, and I have been ordered to take him with me\u201d (Kertzer 1998, pp. 4\u20135; Tribunale 1860). The order, given by the head of the pontifical gendarmerie, Lieutenant Colonel Luigi De-Dominicis, and sent by him to the aforementioned carabinieri, came from above, from Father Feletti.
\nThe abduction, which was postponed for a day following feverish overnight negotiations with
\nthe inquisitor himself, was inexorably carried out the next night, June 24. Torn away from his
\nfamily and entrusted to Brigadier Agostini, little Edgardo was immediately moved away from
\nBologna and taken by coach to Rome, and specifically to the Casa dei Catecumeni (House of
\nCatechumens) on Via della Madonna dei Monti, the Catholic institution responsible for the
\nindoctrination of \u201cneophytes\u201d who had been converted to Catholicism.
\nThis event marked the start of a family tragedy that would go on to acquire historic importance, extending well beyond a family and a city. The relevance of the kidnapping was not due to the exceptional nature of the episode itself, but to the particular resonance that it had in contemporary public opinion, to the international scandal to which it gave rise, and to the consequences that derived from it.
\nThe kidnapping of a Jewish child who had secretly been converted to Catholicism, unbeknownst to the child\u2019s parents and against their will (invitis parentibus), and his or her subsequent transfer to the House of Catechumens, was a coercive practice that occurred frequently during the centuries of subjugation of the Jewish minority in the Roman ghetto and in the papal domains.
\nThis practice, based on a principle formally sanctioned by the Church for the first time in the sixtieth canon (concerning the Israelites) of the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633, had been questioned numerous times, even within the ecclesiastical hierarchies over the course of the centuries, but it continued to be applied zealously in the regimes still subject to the power of the Inquisition.
\nIt was above all in the case of young children considered to be \u201cin danger of death\u201d that, in order to save their souls, it was deemed right and legitimate to baptize them without their parents\u2019 knowledge. Once baptized, regardless of the circumstances that had led to the baptism taking place, these youngsters became Catholic, and if by chance they happened to survive, it was necessary to separate them from their families, in order to educate them on the religion to which they were now judged to belong irreversibly.
\nThe astonishment of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in the face of the enormous uproar generated in public opinion not just in Italy but internationally following the revelation of Edgardo\u2019s kidnapping is effectively documented by the comment made, after a prolonged silence, in the first article on the Mortara case appearing in the periodical La Civilt\u00e0 Cattolica on October 30, 1858. In this piece, titled Il piccolo neofita Edgardo Mortara (\u201cThe Little Neophyte Edgardo Mortara\u201d), one evinces bewilderment for the case having become a cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre in newspapers across the world.
\n\u201cAn event that the world has certainly witnessed before, a very simple one at that and one that in centuries of belief would have passed without arousing attention, let alone surprise, recisely because the minimal faith that is necessary to understand the sense of it was commonplace,\u201d observed the editor of La Civilt\u00e0 Cattolica, \u201cthat deed, as we may call it, has provoked in this past month of September, and even more so this October, a hornets\u2019 nest of journalistic diatribes and declamations, deafening the world.\u201d
\nThe controversy and the accusation made by the journal \u2013 an unofficial voice of the papacy since 1850 (the year of foundation of the Jesuit periodical) \u2013 were addressed in particular against those within the Christian world, who in \u201cthis century of disbelief, slave to despicable utilitarianism\u201d were blind with respect to the \u201cdivine mission of the Church\u201d in favor of \u201ca poor seven-year-old boy, obscure offshoot of a parasitical plant,\u201d to whom had been given the gift of grace through baptism: \u201cFor this child, an august Sovereign, a Vicar of Christ, a supreme Pontiff must see all of the supposed organs of libertine opinion that are unleashed and quivering with indignation around him as they cry out for diplomatic initiatives, public protests, interventions and who knows what else.\u201d <\/p>\n

* El\u00e8na Mortara taught American Literature at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. She edited the Italian critical edition of Philip Roth\u2019s early work, Romanzi, 1959-1986 (Meridiani Mondadori, 2017). <\/em><\/p>\n

Above, from left Carlo Andrea, El\u00e8na, Giorgio and Paola Mortara portrayed next to \u201cThe kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara\u201d; far right, Ari Kinsberg, representing Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein, owners of the painting. Photo by Enrico Aliverti Piuri.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For the Italian scholar El\u00e8na Mortara, the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara is both family history and subject of research. After having explored the cultural and intellectual atmosphere of that period in the book Writing for Justice: Victor S\u00e9jour, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, and the Age of Transatlantic Emancipations (Dartmouth College Press, 2015), she now… leggi <\/i><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4563,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":10,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9316],"tags":[],"position":[],"class_list":["post-7647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nThe abduction of a Jewish child in 1858 recounted by a descendant who is a scholar - Pagine Ebraiche International<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/moked.it\/international\/2022\/01\/10\/the-abduction-of-a-jewish-child-in-1858-recounted-by-a-descendant-who-is-a-scholar\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The abduction of a Jewish child in 1858 recounted by a descendant who is a scholar - Pagine Ebraiche International\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"For the Italian scholar El\u00e8na Mortara, the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara is both family history and subject of research. 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