March 18, 2025 • 25 mins
In 1858, a Jewish child was taken from his family. They said that because the boy had been secretly baptized, he was now a ward of the Papal States. And his new adoptive father would be none other than Pope Pius IX.
Support Noble Blood:
— Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon
— Noble Blood merch
— Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm
and Mild from Aaron Mankie. Listener discretion advised. The year
was eighteen fifty one, and in Bologna, a little boy
was sick. That's what his nurse said. Anyway. He was
(00:21):
a little Jewish boy, and she was a Catholic nurse
working for the family in violation of the law. But
she genuinely cared about the children. She cared about this
littlest boy at Garo, she swore she did, and it
broke her heart that he was sick. The nurse was
a young woman herself. The little boy's illness had gotten
(00:44):
so bad that she believed he would die. She confided
in a friend, who said it was the merciful thing
to baptize the little boy before he died. The parents
would never have to know. Yes, the Catholic Church technically
forbade baptizing Jews, but it also believed in the sacrament
(01:05):
that could save the innocent baby's soul when it went
back to heaven. The nurse believed in that too. She
looked at the little child, so sickly in her arms,
so small, and she did a fateful thing. She filled
a glass with water, reached inside, wet her fingers, and
(01:25):
sprinkled the water across the boy's head. She didn't know
then that her action, performed in the privacy of an
empty room, would set off a chain reaction that would
lead to a scandal of international proportions. It would lead
to a state kidnapping, the heartbreak of a family, the
(01:46):
murder charge of a father, countless New York Times headlines,
and Napoleon the Third himself turning against the papal states
in favor of the unification of Italy. Because this little boy,
Edgardo Mortara, did not die during infancy, he lived on
happy with his Jewish family, who loved him until the
(02:09):
age of six. That was when the carabinieri burst into
his family's home, claiming that the child had been baptized
and therefore was a Catholic, that the boy was the
rightful charge of the Catholic Church, and that he should
be protected not just by anyone in the church, but
by the Pope himself. The Mortara case is the story
(02:33):
of Jews under the Catholic papacy, of a long forgotten
event in Italy before and after unification of the Pope's
fidelity to the letter versus the spirit of Catholic doctrine.
Of an international scandal that supercharged liberal Europeans understanding of
(02:54):
religious freedom. And it's the story of one little Jewish
boy kidnapped by the papacy and a family that put
everything on the line to get him back. I'm Dana Schwartz,
and this is noble blood. In order to understand what
(03:15):
happened to edgaro Mortara, you need a quick crash course
in the history of the Jews under papal rule. In
eighteen fifty one, when Edgara was born, Italy was not
a unified nation. Bologna was part of the Papal States,
which meant that Vatican law was the law of the land.
(03:36):
Edgarda was born during the papacy of Pope Pious the
Ninth when the total population of the Papal States was
around three million, including fifteen thousand Jews, which made Jews
a tiny minority at zero point five percent of the population.
As you might imagine, the role of Jews under papal
(03:58):
rule had been contested for centuries. By the time Edgardo
came along in Bologna, the nine hundred person Jewish population
had been expelled in the sixteenth century. By the time
Edgaro's family lived there, there were only about two hundred
Jews in all of Bologna. In Rome, the Papacy had
(04:19):
confined Jews to the Roman Ghetto since fifteen fifty five.
Shortly after Pope Pious the Ninth was elected in eighteen
forty six, he actually tore down the ghetto's gates, but
he restored them shortly after, and they would remain up
until Italian unification in eighteen seventy. If it sounds like
(04:40):
Pope Pious was pretty uncertain where he stood when it
came to Jews, well he was. Although Catholic doctrine held
that baptism could save a person's soul, Catholics were barred
from baptizing Jews. Then again, things got a little dicey
with the law if the Jewish person would a child,
(05:01):
much less a baby, and if that innocent was about
to die, And then dicey again if a Catholic did
baptize a Jew, that was a holy and irrevocable sacrament.
So the Jewish person illegally baptized was holy Catholic, and
it was illegal for a Catholic child to be raised
(05:21):
by a Jewish household. You might be able to see
where this is going for poor Edgaro and his family,
but there's one more thing you need to know before
we can return to Edgaro's story. At the time when
Edgara was born, Catholics were legally prohibited from working for
(05:42):
Jewish families, but many young Catholic girls in need of
money took jobs as maids anyway, and many claiming that
their young charges were on the brink of death, which
may have been true in at least some of the
cases wound up baptizing the family children. Anywhere from months
(06:02):
to years later, the Carabinieri would show up at a
family's door with news that their child was a Catholic
and they would take the child away. It got so
bad that before a Catholic maid left the job, Jewish
families took to getting her sign an affidavit attesting that
she had never baptized their child, Which brings us to
(06:26):
Anna Maurici. She was fourteen years old by some accounts,
eighteen by others when she took a job caring for
the Mortara household. The heads of the household, Momelo and
Marianna Mortara, were devoted parents to their nine children, including
twin girls, one boy who died in infancy, and of
(06:48):
course their middle little child, at Garo, and they were
also unusually devoted to Anna Maurici. The girl had been
with the family for three years when she fell pregnant.
It was eighteen fifty five and Edgaro was about four
years old. Papal law was no kinder to unwed Catholic
(07:09):
mothers than it was to Jews. In Anna Maurici's situation,
she would be required to give the baby up to
a foundling house. Many families in the Mortars situation would
have cast Anna Maurici out. She had shamed herself and
the family. Getting rid of her would have been the accepted,
even the expected thing to do. But Momolo and Marianna
(07:32):
were unusually compassionate. They paid for her to stay with
a midwife during her last trimester, covered the cost of
the supervised delivery of her child, and then they brought
her back to their home. They had no idea what
she had already done to their family, what was in
(07:52):
the works behind the scenes. They didn't see the irony
that history now sees. Anna Maurice forced to give up
her baby by the unforgiving laws of the papal state
had already set in motion the loss of someone else's
baby to those same laws. The knock on the door
(08:17):
came on June twenty third, eighteen fifty eight. The light
was dispersing, the air was warm, the smells of dinner
were wafting through the homes on the Martara's street. Edgara
was sleeping soundly. His two older brothers, one younger brother,
and infant's sister were sleeping too. His older two twin
(08:38):
sisters were chatting idly with their mother, Marianna, sewing at
the table. Edgardo's oldest brother was out on a walk
with their father. Momolo, and Marianna opened the door. The
carabinieri were standing outside. They were firm in their orders
that they were to come in. Perhaps in the edges
(08:59):
of their gaze there was some sense of shame of
what they were about to do, but they were firm
when they asked to see her children. Marianna panicked. Momolo
came home, and the policeman addressed him directly. They were
here to take Edgaro. He had been baptized and therefore
(09:19):
did not belong to his Jewish parents any more. He
was in the legal custody of the state. Marianna screamed.
She ran to six year old Edgaro, threw herself on
top of him. She held him to her chest, fingers
digging into her skin. If you want him, she said,
you'll have to kill me first. The scene was disastrous,
(09:44):
according to historian David Kurtzer, a Mortara neighbor reported, I
saw a distraught mother bathed in tears and a father
who was tearing out his hair, while the children were
down on their knees begging the policeman for mercy. It
was a scene so moving I can't begin to describe it. Indeed,
(10:05):
I even heard the police marshal by the name of
Lucidi say that he would rather have been ordered to
arrest a hundred criminals than to take the boy away
one more day. The family begged the inquisitor, father Pieto
Gaetano Filetti, just twenty four more hours with our precious boy, please.
(10:26):
Father Filetti granted the twenty four hours, but no more.
He was just following orders after all. In the meantime, Momolo,
their Jewish neighbors, and Marianna's family set off to find
a way to keep at Garo. They went to the cardinal,
the archbishop, the inquisitor, trying to get an audience with
anyone in government who might intercede. But twenty four hours
(10:50):
was too few. They were trapped. They were Jews in
a place where there was no safe place to be
a Jew. Jews had lived in Italy for thousands of years,
back to the Roman period, before Christians lived there. It
didn't matter to the Mortara case now. When the twenty
four hour grace period was up, Marianna's sister took Edgardo's
(11:14):
brother and sisters to her house. Marianna would not let
go of her son, kissing him and clutching him, and
everyone feared what would happen if the police had to
forcibly rip her son away from him. Would she attack them?
Would she have a heart attack and die right there?
She hadn't fed her infant daughter in too long, as
(11:34):
it stood, what would happen to her? So the men
of the family forcibly separated Marianna from the boy and
carried her outside into a waiting carriage. Even through the
covered carriage, her wails were so loud and terrible that
neighbors came running to see what was happening. Momola stayed home,
(11:55):
packed a few clothes for his son, and then held
at Gardo on his lap until his little boy was
taken away. The two policemen cried when they took the
boy away, but they didn't stop. They were just following orders.
Momolo followed the police outside as they carried his son
to the carriage, watching his boy so small in the
(12:17):
arms of these strangers. He couldn't stay on his feet.
He swayed for a moment, and then he fainted. There
was one light at the end of the tunnel. He
was told the boy's new surrogate father was not going
to be just anyone. He would be the pope himself.
After that, Marianna fell apart, but Momolo fought. The first
(12:40):
thing to do was to find out if the Carabinieria's
justification for kidnapping Edgardo was even true in the first place.
Who would have baptized the boy and how had that
news come out? The only reasonable culprit would have been
the family's old servant, Anna Maurici, with mo Lmolo's blessing.
(13:01):
Marianna's brother and brother in law found her when she
saw them she collapsed in tears. Yes, she said, when
Edgardo was very sick as a child, she had done
the fateful thing. She had baptized him, but she had
regretted it soon after he recovered and told no one.
When later another Mortara's son did get so sick that
(13:23):
he died in infancy, she had refused to do the
same thing again. She had learned her lesson, she told
her friend, so when asked if she had baptized that
boy before he died, all the Mortara representatives could hear
was that last part she had told her friend. But
there was reason for hope in her story. It wasn't
(13:46):
clear that she knew how to properly perform a baptism.
She had been so young at the time fourteen by
her own account, that her judgment was faulty. They asked
if she would be willing to record her testimony with
a notary. She agreed. She seemed genuinely distressed to have
caused the separation of another mother from her child, But
(14:08):
by the time the group came back with a notary,
Anna Maurici had disappeared. Momolo did not give up. Anna
Maurici had done what turned out to be a terrible thing.
But she was only a young girl who couldn't read,
who was just following what seemed like good advice. She
hadn't meant to hurt the Mortaro family. Surely some justice
(14:32):
would be served. Momolo learned that Edgaro had been taken
all the way to Rome. He wrote to the inquisitor,
the secretary of State, to the Pope himself. He traveled
all the way to Rome, where he was allowed visitation
with Edgaro, but at the end of his visits he
was not allowed to take his son back home. The
(14:56):
sympathies of the world were not with the pope. While
a handful of Catholic publications supported the removal of a
baptized child from a Jewish home, this was the mid
nineteenth century, not the sixteenth century anymore. The ideals of
civil liberties and religious freedom were spreading all over the globe.
(15:17):
Already in eighteen forty eight, ten years before Edgaro's kidnapping,
the Kingdom of Piedmont Sardinia, had given its minority Jewish
and Protestant populations their religious freedoms. Massimo Dzeglio, prime Minister
of Piedmont, had written a pamphlet called Quote on the
civil Emancipation of the Israelites. So the European and American
(15:41):
presses both covered the Mortara kidnapping as a scandal. The
New York Times ran twenty articles about it in December
eighteen fifty eight alone, nearly one per day. Outraged, popular
demonstrations broke out on both sides of the Atlantic advocated
for the Pope to give Edgaro back to his family.
(16:03):
Even in Catholic France, the Ambassador to the Holy See
met with the Vatican Secretary of State and the Pope
himself on Edgaro's behalf celebrated. French playwright Victor Sejour wrote
a play based on the kidnapping called The Fortune Teller. Licique,
France's most read newspaper, described the play as documenting Quote,
(16:27):
the hideous attack committed by the Holy See toward the
Mortara boy. The play drew one hundred thousand people to
the theater on opening night December twenty second, eighteen fifty nine.
Emperor Napoleon the Third and Empress Eugenie were prominently present
in the audience. Rumors swirled that Napoleon's private secretary had
(16:50):
actually worked with the playwright on the play. None of
it mattered. At the end of the day, Edgaro and
the Mortaras were under papal authority, and the Hope wanted
the boy. Indeed, Pope Pious the Ninth spent substantial time
with Edgaro. With no son of his own, the Pope
viewed Edgaro as a kind of son. In eighteen sixty seven,
(17:14):
the Pope sent a shockingly self pitying note to Edgaro,
which said, quote, you are very dear to me, my
little son, for I acquired you for Jesus Christ at
a high price. Your case set a worldwide storm against me.
The rulers of the world, as well as the journalists,
who are the truly powerful people of our times, declared
(17:36):
war on me. Monarchs themselves entered the battle against me,
and all this because of you. People lamented the harm
done to your parents, because you were regenerated by the
grace of Holy Baptism. And in the meantime, no one
showed any concern for me, father of all the faithful,
(17:57):
and in a true tragedy for the mortal Para family,
Edgaro came to regard the Pope as a father. He
was only six years old when he was taken from
his Jewish family and re educated to believe that his
was a story of Catholic salvation and redemption for a
life that might otherwise have been lived in a kind
(18:20):
of spiritual darkness without the light of Catholic teachings. At thirteen,
the age of Barmitzvah, had he been allowed to remain
under the care of his parents, Edgardo re christened himself
with the name Pio, in honor of Pious the Ninth. Finally,
in eighteen seventy, when Edgardo was nineteen years old, his parents'
(18:44):
most ardent wish came true. Italian unification succeeded Rome was
captured for the new Kingdom of Italy. Their son, Edgaro
was no longer under the legal authority of the Pope.
He could come home now. Momolo had not seen his
son in twelve years, but he had never given up
(19:06):
on his love for him. Momolo made his way to
Rome to bring his son home. At last, his mother
would once again hold her son in her arms. But
Edgaro was Pio now. He only feared his father's return
to Rome. Pio refused to return for the rest of
(19:28):
Edgaro's life, he devoted himself to Catholicism, the religion of
his captors. At twenty one, too young for ordination, he
received a special dispensation to become a priest. The Pope
sent him a letter of congratulations. Edgardo read nine languages,
including Hebrew, and traveled all over Europe preaching the Catholic faith.
(19:52):
It would be another one hundred years before the term
Stockholm syndrome was coined to describe the bond between a
king captive and their captor. As for the Mortara's, yet
more tragedy befell them in eighteen seventy one, their new servant,
Rosa Tugnazi, tragically died after a fall that was almost
(20:14):
certainly a suicide. Nonetheless, suspicion fell on the man, who
was called the Jew Mortara throughout his trial. Even the
prosecutors called the fifty five year old Momolo by that
anti Semitic epithet, rather than the customary term the defendant Mortara.
The trial was almost certainly motivated by anti Jewish hostility.
(20:39):
Momolo was ultimately found not guilty, but he had spent
seven months in prison in ill health, and one month
after his release. He died seven years later. In eighteen
seventy eight, Marianna, widowed, now found out that Edgaro was
scheduled to preach in France. She went to where he
(21:01):
would be for the first time in twenty years. Mother
and son embraced from then until her death twelve years later.
Edgaro remained close with his mother, but neither ever warmed
to the other's desire that they change religions. Edgardo's that
his mother converted to Catholicism, Mariana's that her son return
(21:25):
to Judaism. Edgaro lived a long life, preaching the whole time.
On March eleventh, nineteen forty, he died at the age
of eighty eight in Belgium. His story has been forgotten
compared to the more famous nineteenth century European case of
anti Semitism, the Dreyfus affair, but he prefigured it. Some
(21:47):
historians actually believe that the Edgardo Mortara kidnapping played a
major role in turning Napoleon the Third towards the side
of Italian unification. Indeed, nap Jolian was secretly party to
the agreement in support of unifying much of the papal
states under the authority of Sardinia. Only one month after
(22:10):
Atgaro's kidnapping. Two months after Edgaro died in Belgium, the
Nazis invaded the country. If he had lived, he might
have been among those stolen once again, this time by
different policemen working for a different state, for the crime
of being born under a hostile regime into a Jewish home.
(22:35):
That's the story of Edgaro Mortara, the Jewish child kidnapped
by the papal state, but stick around after a brief
sponsor break to hear about Edgaro's legacy in the Mortara
family today. As for the Mortara family, the story of
(22:58):
Edgaro still had a long life. One of Agaro's twin sisters,
on her deathbed seventy years after the abduction, cried out
not to take her children. The great granddaughter of that sister,
a scholar named Elena Mortara, is now a scholar who
published a twenty fifteen book with Dartmouth University Press about
(23:20):
the affair. She spoke out on her family's behalf against
the benification of Pope Pious. The ninth quote, a man
who has so unjustly violated family rights, an enemy of
freedom of religion, the last pope to keep the Jews
of Rome by law in the ghetto. Pope Pious the
(23:41):
Ninth was betified in the year two thousand. The Mortara
family of the twenty first century opposed it. What would
Edgardo himself have thought? We can't know. What we do
know is that he remained a devout Catholic priest until
the end of his life. Countless times Edgara more Tara
(24:02):
must have wetted his hands as his nursemate did decades before,
and sprinkled holy water over a young infant's head. Noble
Blood is a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and
(24:22):
Mild from Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood is hosted by me
Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and research by Hannah Johnston, Hannahswick,
Courtney Sender, Amy Hit and Julia Milani. The show is
edited and produced by Jesse Funk, with supervising producer rima
il Kaali and executive producers Aaron Mankey, Trevor Young, and
(24:46):
Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm
and Mild from Aaron Mankie. Listener discretion advised. The year
was eighteen fifty one, and in Bologna, a little boy
was sick. That's what his nurse said. Anyway. He was
(00:21):
a little Jewish boy, and she was a Catholic nurse
working for the family in violation of the law. But
she genuinely cared about the children. She cared about this
littlest boy at Garo, she swore she did, and it
broke her heart that he was sick. The nurse was
a young woman herself. The little boy's illness had gotten
(00:44):
so bad that she believed he would die. She confided
in a friend, who said it was the merciful thing
to baptize the little boy before he died. The parents
would never have to know. Yes, the Catholic Church technically
forbade baptizing Jews, but it also believed in the sacrament
(01:05):
that could save the innocent baby's soul when it went
back to heaven. The nurse believed in that too. She
looked at the little child, so sickly in her arms,
so small, and she did a fateful thing. She filled
a glass with water, reached inside, wet her fingers, and
(01:25):
sprinkled the water across the boy's head. She didn't know
then that her action, performed in the privacy of an
empty room, would set off a chain reaction that would
lead to a scandal of international proportions. It would lead
to a state kidnapping, the heartbreak of a family, the
(01:46):
murder charge of a father, countless New York Times headlines,
and Napoleon the Third himself turning against the papal states
in favor of the unification of Italy. Because this little boy,
Edgardo Mortara, did not die during infancy, he lived on
happy with his Jewish family, who loved him until the
(02:09):
age of six. That was when the carabinieri burst into
his family's home, claiming that the child had been baptized
and therefore was a Catholic, that the boy was the
rightful charge of the Catholic Church, and that he should
be protected not just by anyone in the church, but
by the Pope himself. The Mortara case is the story
(02:33):
of Jews under the Catholic papacy, of a long forgotten
event in Italy before and after unification of the Pope's
fidelity to the letter versus the spirit of Catholic doctrine.
Of an international scandal that supercharged liberal Europeans understanding of
(02:54):
religious freedom. And it's the story of one little Jewish
boy kidnapped by the papacy and a family that put
everything on the line to get him back. I'm Dana Schwartz,
and this is noble blood. In order to understand what
(03:15):
happened to edgaro Mortara, you need a quick crash course
in the history of the Jews under papal rule. In
eighteen fifty one, when Edgara was born, Italy was not
a unified nation. Bologna was part of the Papal States,
which meant that Vatican law was the law of the land.
(03:36):
Edgarda was born during the papacy of Pope Pious the
Ninth when the total population of the Papal States was
around three million, including fifteen thousand Jews, which made Jews
a tiny minority at zero point five percent of the population.
As you might imagine, the role of Jews under papal
(03:58):
rule had been contested for centuries. By the time Edgardo
came along in Bologna, the nine hundred person Jewish population
had been expelled in the sixteenth century. By the time
Edgaro's family lived there, there were only about two hundred
Jews in all of Bologna. In Rome, the Papacy had
(04:19):
confined Jews to the Roman Ghetto since fifteen fifty five.
Shortly after Pope Pious the Ninth was elected in eighteen
forty six, he actually tore down the ghetto's gates, but
he restored them shortly after, and they would remain up
until Italian unification in eighteen seventy. If it sounds like
(04:40):
Pope Pious was pretty uncertain where he stood when it
came to Jews, well he was. Although Catholic doctrine held
that baptism could save a person's soul, Catholics were barred
from baptizing Jews. Then again, things got a little dicey
with the law if the Jewish person would a child,
(05:01):
much less a baby, and if that innocent was about
to die, And then dicey again if a Catholic did
baptize a Jew, that was a holy and irrevocable sacrament.
So the Jewish person illegally baptized was holy Catholic, and
it was illegal for a Catholic child to be raised
(05:21):
by a Jewish household. You might be able to see
where this is going for poor Edgaro and his family,
but there's one more thing you need to know before
we can return to Edgaro's story. At the time when
Edgara was born, Catholics were legally prohibited from working for
(05:42):
Jewish families, but many young Catholic girls in need of
money took jobs as maids anyway, and many claiming that
their young charges were on the brink of death, which
may have been true in at least some of the
cases wound up baptizing the family children. Anywhere from months
(06:02):
to years later, the Carabinieri would show up at a
family's door with news that their child was a Catholic
and they would take the child away. It got so
bad that before a Catholic maid left the job, Jewish
families took to getting her sign an affidavit attesting that
she had never baptized their child, Which brings us to
(06:26):
Anna Maurici. She was fourteen years old by some accounts,
eighteen by others when she took a job caring for
the Mortara household. The heads of the household, Momelo and
Marianna Mortara, were devoted parents to their nine children, including
twin girls, one boy who died in infancy, and of
(06:48):
course their middle little child, at Garo, and they were
also unusually devoted to Anna Maurici. The girl had been
with the family for three years when she fell pregnant.
It was eighteen fifty five and Edgaro was about four
years old. Papal law was no kinder to unwed Catholic
(07:09):
mothers than it was to Jews. In Anna Maurici's situation,
she would be required to give the baby up to
a foundling house. Many families in the Mortars situation would
have cast Anna Maurici out. She had shamed herself and
the family. Getting rid of her would have been the accepted,
even the expected thing to do. But Momolo and Marianna
(07:32):
were unusually compassionate. They paid for her to stay with
a midwife during her last trimester, covered the cost of
the supervised delivery of her child, and then they brought
her back to their home. They had no idea what
she had already done to their family, what was in
(07:52):
the works behind the scenes. They didn't see the irony
that history now sees. Anna Maurice forced to give up
her baby by the unforgiving laws of the papal state
had already set in motion the loss of someone else's
baby to those same laws. The knock on the door
(08:17):
came on June twenty third, eighteen fifty eight. The light
was dispersing, the air was warm, the smells of dinner
were wafting through the homes on the Martara's street. Edgara
was sleeping soundly. His two older brothers, one younger brother,
and infant's sister were sleeping too. His older two twin
(08:38):
sisters were chatting idly with their mother, Marianna, sewing at
the table. Edgardo's oldest brother was out on a walk
with their father. Momolo, and Marianna opened the door. The
carabinieri were standing outside. They were firm in their orders
that they were to come in. Perhaps in the edges
(08:59):
of their gaze there was some sense of shame of
what they were about to do, but they were firm
when they asked to see her children. Marianna panicked. Momolo
came home, and the policeman addressed him directly. They were
here to take Edgaro. He had been baptized and therefore
(09:19):
did not belong to his Jewish parents any more. He
was in the legal custody of the state. Marianna screamed.
She ran to six year old Edgaro, threw herself on
top of him. She held him to her chest, fingers
digging into her skin. If you want him, she said,
you'll have to kill me first. The scene was disastrous,
(09:44):
according to historian David Kurtzer, a Mortara neighbor reported, I
saw a distraught mother bathed in tears and a father
who was tearing out his hair, while the children were
down on their knees begging the policeman for mercy. It
was a scene so moving I can't begin to describe it. Indeed,
(10:05):
I even heard the police marshal by the name of
Lucidi say that he would rather have been ordered to
arrest a hundred criminals than to take the boy away
one more day. The family begged the inquisitor, father Pieto
Gaetano Filetti, just twenty four more hours with our precious boy, please.
(10:26):
Father Filetti granted the twenty four hours, but no more.
He was just following orders after all. In the meantime, Momolo,
their Jewish neighbors, and Marianna's family set off to find
a way to keep at Garo. They went to the cardinal,
the archbishop, the inquisitor, trying to get an audience with
anyone in government who might intercede. But twenty four hours
(10:50):
was too few. They were trapped. They were Jews in
a place where there was no safe place to be
a Jew. Jews had lived in Italy for thousands of years,
back to the Roman period, before Christians lived there. It
didn't matter to the Mortara case now. When the twenty
four hour grace period was up, Marianna's sister took Edgardo's
(11:14):
brother and sisters to her house. Marianna would not let
go of her son, kissing him and clutching him, and
everyone feared what would happen if the police had to
forcibly rip her son away from him. Would she attack them?
Would she have a heart attack and die right there?
She hadn't fed her infant daughter in too long, as
(11:34):
it stood, what would happen to her? So the men
of the family forcibly separated Marianna from the boy and
carried her outside into a waiting carriage. Even through the
covered carriage, her wails were so loud and terrible that
neighbors came running to see what was happening. Momola stayed home,
(11:55):
packed a few clothes for his son, and then held
at Gardo on his lap until his little boy was
taken away. The two policemen cried when they took the
boy away, but they didn't stop. They were just following orders.
Momolo followed the police outside as they carried his son
to the carriage, watching his boy so small in the
(12:17):
arms of these strangers. He couldn't stay on his feet.
He swayed for a moment, and then he fainted. There
was one light at the end of the tunnel. He
was told the boy's new surrogate father was not going
to be just anyone. He would be the pope himself.
After that, Marianna fell apart, but Momolo fought. The first
(12:40):
thing to do was to find out if the Carabinieria's
justification for kidnapping Edgardo was even true in the first place.
Who would have baptized the boy and how had that
news come out? The only reasonable culprit would have been
the family's old servant, Anna Maurici, with mo Lmolo's blessing.
(13:01):
Marianna's brother and brother in law found her when she
saw them she collapsed in tears. Yes, she said, when
Edgardo was very sick as a child, she had done
the fateful thing. She had baptized him, but she had
regretted it soon after he recovered and told no one.
When later another Mortara's son did get so sick that
(13:23):
he died in infancy, she had refused to do the
same thing again. She had learned her lesson, she told
her friend, so when asked if she had baptized that
boy before he died, all the Mortara representatives could hear
was that last part she had told her friend. But
there was reason for hope in her story. It wasn't
(13:46):
clear that she knew how to properly perform a baptism.
She had been so young at the time fourteen by
her own account, that her judgment was faulty. They asked
if she would be willing to record her testimony with
a notary. She agreed. She seemed genuinely distressed to have
caused the separation of another mother from her child, But
(14:08):
by the time the group came back with a notary,
Anna Maurici had disappeared. Momolo did not give up. Anna
Maurici had done what turned out to be a terrible thing.
But she was only a young girl who couldn't read,
who was just following what seemed like good advice. She
hadn't meant to hurt the Mortaro family. Surely some justice
(14:32):
would be served. Momolo learned that Edgaro had been taken
all the way to Rome. He wrote to the inquisitor,
the secretary of State, to the Pope himself. He traveled
all the way to Rome, where he was allowed visitation
with Edgaro, but at the end of his visits he
was not allowed to take his son back home. The
(14:56):
sympathies of the world were not with the pope. While
a handful of Catholic publications supported the removal of a
baptized child from a Jewish home, this was the mid
nineteenth century, not the sixteenth century anymore. The ideals of
civil liberties and religious freedom were spreading all over the globe.
(15:17):
Already in eighteen forty eight, ten years before Edgaro's kidnapping,
the Kingdom of Piedmont Sardinia, had given its minority Jewish
and Protestant populations their religious freedoms. Massimo Dzeglio, prime Minister
of Piedmont, had written a pamphlet called Quote on the
civil Emancipation of the Israelites. So the European and American
(15:41):
presses both covered the Mortara kidnapping as a scandal. The
New York Times ran twenty articles about it in December
eighteen fifty eight alone, nearly one per day. Outraged, popular
demonstrations broke out on both sides of the Atlantic advocated
for the Pope to give Edgaro back to his family.
(16:03):
Even in Catholic France, the Ambassador to the Holy See
met with the Vatican Secretary of State and the Pope
himself on Edgaro's behalf celebrated. French playwright Victor Sejour wrote
a play based on the kidnapping called The Fortune Teller. Licique,
France's most read newspaper, described the play as documenting Quote,
(16:27):
the hideous attack committed by the Holy See toward the
Mortara boy. The play drew one hundred thousand people to
the theater on opening night December twenty second, eighteen fifty nine.
Emperor Napoleon the Third and Empress Eugenie were prominently present
in the audience. Rumors swirled that Napoleon's private secretary had
(16:50):
actually worked with the playwright on the play. None of
it mattered. At the end of the day, Edgaro and
the Mortaras were under papal authority, and the Hope wanted
the boy. Indeed, Pope Pious the Ninth spent substantial time
with Edgaro. With no son of his own, the Pope
viewed Edgaro as a kind of son. In eighteen sixty seven,
(17:14):
the Pope sent a shockingly self pitying note to Edgaro,
which said, quote, you are very dear to me, my
little son, for I acquired you for Jesus Christ at
a high price. Your case set a worldwide storm against me.
The rulers of the world, as well as the journalists,
who are the truly powerful people of our times, declared
(17:36):
war on me. Monarchs themselves entered the battle against me,
and all this because of you. People lamented the harm
done to your parents, because you were regenerated by the
grace of Holy Baptism. And in the meantime, no one
showed any concern for me, father of all the faithful,
(17:57):
and in a true tragedy for the mortal Para family,
Edgaro came to regard the Pope as a father. He
was only six years old when he was taken from
his Jewish family and re educated to believe that his
was a story of Catholic salvation and redemption for a
life that might otherwise have been lived in a kind
(18:20):
of spiritual darkness without the light of Catholic teachings. At thirteen,
the age of Barmitzvah, had he been allowed to remain
under the care of his parents, Edgardo re christened himself
with the name Pio, in honor of Pious the Ninth. Finally,
in eighteen seventy, when Edgardo was nineteen years old, his parents'
(18:44):
most ardent wish came true. Italian unification succeeded Rome was
captured for the new Kingdom of Italy. Their son, Edgaro
was no longer under the legal authority of the Pope.
He could come home now. Momolo had not seen his
son in twelve years, but he had never given up
(19:06):
on his love for him. Momolo made his way to
Rome to bring his son home. At last, his mother
would once again hold her son in her arms. But
Edgaro was Pio now. He only feared his father's return
to Rome. Pio refused to return for the rest of
(19:28):
Edgaro's life, he devoted himself to Catholicism, the religion of
his captors. At twenty one, too young for ordination, he
received a special dispensation to become a priest. The Pope
sent him a letter of congratulations. Edgardo read nine languages,
including Hebrew, and traveled all over Europe preaching the Catholic faith.
(19:52):
It would be another one hundred years before the term
Stockholm syndrome was coined to describe the bond between a
king captive and their captor. As for the Mortara's, yet
more tragedy befell them in eighteen seventy one, their new servant,
Rosa Tugnazi, tragically died after a fall that was almost
(20:14):
certainly a suicide. Nonetheless, suspicion fell on the man, who
was called the Jew Mortara throughout his trial. Even the
prosecutors called the fifty five year old Momolo by that
anti Semitic epithet, rather than the customary term the defendant Mortara.
The trial was almost certainly motivated by anti Jewish hostility.
(20:39):
Momolo was ultimately found not guilty, but he had spent
seven months in prison in ill health, and one month
after his release. He died seven years later. In eighteen
seventy eight, Marianna, widowed, now found out that Edgaro was
scheduled to preach in France. She went to where he
(21:01):
would be for the first time in twenty years. Mother
and son embraced from then until her death twelve years later.
Edgaro remained close with his mother, but neither ever warmed
to the other's desire that they change religions. Edgardo's that
his mother converted to Catholicism, Mariana's that her son return
(21:25):
to Judaism. Edgaro lived a long life, preaching the whole time.
On March eleventh, nineteen forty, he died at the age
of eighty eight in Belgium. His story has been forgotten
compared to the more famous nineteenth century European case of
anti Semitism, the Dreyfus affair, but he prefigured it. Some
(21:47):
historians actually believe that the Edgardo Mortara kidnapping played a
major role in turning Napoleon the Third towards the side
of Italian unification. Indeed, nap Jolian was secretly party to
the agreement in support of unifying much of the papal
states under the authority of Sardinia. Only one month after
(22:10):
Atgaro's kidnapping. Two months after Edgaro died in Belgium, the
Nazis invaded the country. If he had lived, he might
have been among those stolen once again, this time by
different policemen working for a different state, for the crime
of being born under a hostile regime into a Jewish home.
(22:35):
That's the story of Edgaro Mortara, the Jewish child kidnapped
by the papal state, but stick around after a brief
sponsor break to hear about Edgaro's legacy in the Mortara
family today. As for the Mortara family, the story of
(22:58):
Edgaro still had a long life. One of Agaro's twin sisters,
on her deathbed seventy years after the abduction, cried out
not to take her children. The great granddaughter of that sister,
a scholar named Elena Mortara, is now a scholar who
published a twenty fifteen book with Dartmouth University Press about
(23:20):
the affair. She spoke out on her family's behalf against
the benification of Pope Pious. The ninth quote, a man
who has so unjustly violated family rights, an enemy of
freedom of religion, the last pope to keep the Jews
of Rome by law in the ghetto. Pope Pious the
(23:41):
Ninth was betified in the year two thousand. The Mortara
family of the twenty first century opposed it. What would
Edgardo himself have thought? We can't know. What we do
know is that he remained a devout Catholic priest until
the end of his life. Countless times Edgara more Tara
(24:02):
must have wetted his hands as his nursemate did decades before,
and sprinkled holy water over a young infant's head. Noble
Blood is a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and
(24:22):
Mild from Aaron Mankey. Noble Blood is hosted by me
Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and research by Hannah Johnston, Hannahswick,
Courtney Sender, Amy Hit and Julia Milani. The show is
edited and produced by Jesse Funk, with supervising producer rima
il Kaali and executive producers Aaron Mankey, Trevor Young, and
(24:46):
Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Host
Dana Schwartz
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!