Montefiore Snubbed!
The kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara
The Mortaras were a well-to-do Jewish family in 19th century Bologna, a town governed by papal law. Although the law prohibited Jews prohibited from employing Christian servants the Mortara family engaged a 14 year old Catholic girl as a kitchen maid and nanny for their new born baby Edgardo.
When Edgardo was a few months old he fell gravely sick. The maid, who loved the baby, feared that he may die and would be refused admission to heaven because he wasn’t Catholic. So she took some water from the kitchen and secretly baptised him.
The baby recovered and grew into a healthy child. Nobody knew about his secret baptism until one day, when he was six years old, the maid confessed what she had done to her priest. A few days later, on 23rd June 1858, five gendarmes and a papal Inquisitor at the Mortara house. They told Edgar’s parents that they had come to claim a Christian child, whisked up the boy and took him away. Their justification was that he had been baptised a Catholic and that it was forbidden under papal law for him to be brought up by Jewish parents.
Edgardo was taken to Rome and placed in the House of the Catechumens, where converts to Catholicism lived while receiving instruction in the faith. His devastated family protested in vain, all they could do was to beg for help from Jewish communities throughout Italy. Appeals were made to the Pope, Pius IX, from across Europe praying that he restore the boy to his family, but they came to nothing. The Pope was adamant that the child was Catholic. He would not let him go.
News travelled slowly in those days. The first account of the kidnapping reached England in July, in a single paragraph, somewhat inaccurate, report in the Jewish Chronicle of July 16th. A month later the paper carried a fuller account, declaring that this was not the first time something similar had happened and demanding to know why the event had aroused such little indignation. Did a woman only have to say that that she had “poured a little water over the head of a child to bring the dragoons into the parental house to carry the child away and to bring it up in another religion?”
The Daily Telegraph took a stronger line. Noting that the abduction was legal under papal law the paper told its readers that all opposition would have been useless, even if it had been possible. “The mother has gone crazy, the father will probably commit suicide, and the Jews are filled with fear. No matter. Holy mother church must save an erring soul at all risks!”
The matter was raised at a meeting of the Jewish representative council in London, the Board of Deputies. The Jewish Chronicle regretted that it did not have enough space to report on the Board’s discussion in the week it took place, but it did touch on the story the following week reporting, incorrectly, that the boy’s mother had now died of grief.
It wasn’t until September 3rd that the Jewish Chronicle raised the abduction to its front page treating its readers to a long and woolly discursion on the persecution of Jews in times past, before turning its wrath, first upon the Pope, whom it held personally responsible, then the church and finally, irately, upon the Board of Deputies. The paper expressed its surprise that the Board had decided not to act, not because they disbelieved the story but because no application had been made to the Board by any of the parties concerned. “What!” it exclaimed, excoriating the Board’s pomposity, “is a Roman Jew to bring under the cognisance of the London Board of Deputies an act of the Roman Inquisition?”
Meanwhile the British press had taken the matter up, not always with the greatest gravity. Punch, the closest thing the Victorians had to Private Eye, warned the Chief Rabbi not to travel in the same railway compartment as Cardinal Wiseman, the leader of Britain’s Catholics, in case he fell asleep and woke up to find himself a Catholic. It reported that the Cardinal had a fire engine filled with Holy Water with which he intended to spray and baptise the members of the Protestant Association.
The following week the Board were moved to action. An appeal for assistance had arrived from the Jewish community in Turin, calling upon them to use their influence with the British government. This was the sort of desperate and deferential request that the Board expected. They formed a special sub-committee to decide what to do. It would be chaired by the President of the Board, Sir Moses’s Montefiore, British Jewry’s undisputed hegemon. Sir Moses immediately sent letters to the Foreign Secretary and the British Press.
Although the abduction of Edgar Mortara was a Jewish tragedy certain Protestant groups tried to make political capital from it. The Evangelical Alliance proposed to the Board that they send a joint deputation to France to lobby the Pope’s ally Napoleon III whose troops were protecting the Vatican from the turmoil of Italian unification.
Perhaps not wanting to become involved in disputes between the various Christian denominations, the Board declined the offer and decided instead to confront the Pope directly. They would send a memorandum directly to him. The memorandum would be delivered by a deputation led by Sir Moses Montefiore. Montefiore had already led delegations on behalf of persecuted Jewish communities to Russia and Damascus; he was a baronet of the British Empire, a personal friend of Queen Victoria and would travel with letters of introduction from Prince Albert, Napoleon III and the British Government. Nobody, the Board surmised, would fail to pay heed to Sir Moses Montefiore’s embassy; not even the Pope.
Sir Moses travelled to Rome at the beginning of February 1859. The Chief Rabbi wrote special prayers for the success of his mission, to be recited in synagogues. Quoting from Genesis and indicating that the boy’s mother had not, after all, died of grief, the prayer requested that the right words be put into Sir Moses’s mouth “when he supplicateth for the child, that it may be restored to its heart-broken father and distracted mother; for the lad cannot leave his father—if he should leave his father he would die.”
When Sir Moses arrived in Rome he consulted Sir Stratford de Redcliffe who, as British Ambassador to Turkey, had helped Montefiore when he travelled to Damascus. Sir Stratford was now living in Rome. He told Montefiore that although justice was on his side, he wasn’t optimistic about his chances of success.
Sir Stratford was right. Montefiore was snubbed. The Pope refused to see him. The Secretary of State to the Vatican did meet him but said that he had no power to intervene. It was God’s law he said, and there was nothing that could be done.
Sir Moses was not alone in his failure to rescue Edgardo Mortara. Napoleon III, who had been negotiating with less fanfare, had also failed. There had been protests around the world but none to any avail. The family’s only hope now was that when the boy came of age and the church could no longer restrain him he would voluntarily return to his home.
But it was not to be. By 1870 Italy had been unified, it was now an independent nation with a secular government. Papal law no longer reigned supreme. The French troops protecting the Vatican were withdrawn, Italian forces arrived in Rome and Edgar was free of the Pope’s civil authority. One of his brothers immediately travelled to meet him, to welcome him back to the family. Edgardo told him that he was delighted that the family could now be together again but it could only occur if they all converted to Catholicism. He did not want to be a Jew.
Edgardo Mortara spent his life in the Catholic church. He became a priest and an ambassador to the Vatican. He remained vaguely in touch with his family, he attended his mother’s funeral and was once seen in a restaurant with his brother. But it was not the reunion his family had longed and prayed for. He retired to an abbey in Belgium where he died in 1940, just weeks before the Nazis occupied the country. Had he lived a few weeks longer, Catholic priest or not, the Nazis would almost certainly have marked him out as a Jew.
The Edgardo Mortara story continues to fascinate and enrage. Articles appear regularly in newspapers, Stephen Speilberg has a film in the pipeline, a book by David Kertzer thoroughly detailing the events appeared in 1996. Ironically the book won an award for Jewish-Christian relations.
We might assume that nothing like the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara could ever happen again. But that’s what the Jewish Chronicle thought in 1858, when it treated the Mortara kidnapping as something unimaginable for its time, anachronistic and impossible to believe. Our history since then demands that we should never be so naïve.