The Pope's Jewish Son
Stuart Schoffman

The bizarre tale of a Jewish boy abducted by the Church in 19th-century Italy

On June 24, 1858, in Bologna, home to Europe's oldest university and second city of the Papal States, a 6-year-old Jewish boy named Edgardo Mortara was taken from his home by police on the orders of the Catholic Church and spirited off to Rome to be raised as a Christian. The reason: He had been baptized as an infant by the family's servant girl, a kosher and irreversible practice in the eyes of the Church and a not-infrequent one in 19th-century Italy. Indeed the time was ripe, as David Kertzer ably demonstrates, for the issue of the abduction of secretly baptized Jewish children to play a palpable role in the collapse of the Vatican's political power. "For the opponents of papal rule," writes Kertzer, "the taking of the Mortara boy was manna from heaven, a publicist's dream."

This is the theme of Kertzer's book, a scrupulously researched, elegantly written narrative that deftly combines the tale of one family's anguished and fruitless efforts to reclaim their child and the stirring saga of the Risorgimento, Italy's unification movement, climaxing with the fall of Rome in September 1870 to the troops of King Victor Emmanuel II, the new nation's constitutional monarch. Among the soldiers was Edgardo's eldest brother, Riccardo, who rushed to the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, where Edgardo had long been held and indoctrinated, only to find his brother, now 19, dressed in the robes of a monk, raising his hand before Riccardo and exclaiming: "Get back, Satan!"

For Edgardo, over the years, had come to think of himself as the son of Pope Pius IX, who had steadfastly refused to heed the rising chorus of demands to return the boy to his family. "You are very dear to me, my little son," wrote the pope in a note to Edgardo in 1867, "for I acquired you for Jesus Christ at a high price... Your case set off a worldwide storm against me and the apostolic See. Governments and peoples, the rulers of the world as well as the journalists - who are the truly powerful people of our times - declared war on me." Father Pio Edgardo lived out his life in an abbey in Belgium, where he died in March 1940, aged 88, one month before the country was overrun by the Nazis. Had he been rounded up and killed along with others of Jewish parentage - who knows? - maybe today he'd be St. Edgardo.

David Kertzer stops well shy of such crude speculation. He is a social anthropologist and historian, a professor at Brown University, and his account is cautious and balanced to a fault. Certainly he is unsympathetic to the religious fanaticism that prompted and justified the kidnapping, and alert to the "ill-disguised hostility," as he puts it, leveled at the Mortara family by "many of Catholic neighbors," but he is also critical of the "scathing anti-Catholicism" of American Jews, notably Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, who rose loudly in protest.

Kertzer himself, as he reveals in an afterword, is the son of the late Rabbi Morris Kertzer, who served as a U.S. army chaplain in Italy during World War II. The Mortara affair, he observes, has been much better known among Jewish scholars than Italian ones, chiefly because it was a significant spur to the creation of Jewish self-defense organizations in America and Europe, such as the Paris-based Alliance Isralite Universelle, founded in 1860. The story "fell from the mainstream of Italian history into the ghetto of Jewish history" - a place the author clearly prefers not to inhabit.

In striving to rescue his subject from parochialism, Kertzer misses a fine opportunity to draw an edifying portrait of Italian Jewry in the 19th century. We learn relatively little about Jewish communal and cultural life, though we do gather a good deal about the relationship of the Church and the Jews in the Papal States, which compelled a distressing habit of obsequiousness on the part of the pope's Jewish subjects: The secretary of Rome's Jewish community, Sabatino Scazzocchio, in a letter to Edgardo's father, Momolo Mortara, denounces the "indiscreet chatter" of liberal newspapers that criticize the Church, and advocates appealing quietly to "the benign and charitable nature of the one who sits on high," meaning Pius IX.

But what Kertzer does set out to do, he does with great skill, using a wealth of archival material (if sometimes a surfeit of detail) to bring alive a wide range of characters, from grocer and hat-maker to Inquisitor and pope. As a work of Italian social and political history, "The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara" rarely ceases to fascinate. For the Israeli reader, it also offers - unintentionally, to be sure, and mutatis mutandis - a cautionary analogy about doctrinal inflexibility and the dangerous admixture of church and state.