Free The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara by David I. Kertzer Page B

leaders demanded an explanation and were told what had happened. Decades earlier, a great-aunt of the childrenhad left the ghetto, converted, and married a Catholic man. Her son, a cousin of the children’s father, was now a grown man. He had decided that his long-lost kin should enjoy the benefits of conversion and had asked the authorities to arrange for their baptism.
    The armed escort was ordered to locate the children and seize them. By that time, the family had received word of the uninvited visitors, and the children were nowhere to be found.
    The efforts to squirrel them away, however, proved of little avail. The police were ordered to grab whatever children they could and to hold them as hostages until the two youngsters were relinquished. Scores of children were rounded up. There was little for the Jews to do but fetch the two siblings from their hiding place. The carriage carrying the befuddled youngsters rumbled back across the cobblestones, and the ghetto gate thudded shut behind them.
    Nor was this the end of the matter. When the Roman police chief heard of the Jews’ insolence, he ordered an armed force into the ghetto, and sixty young Jewish men were hauled off and thrown, in chains, into dungeons. It took more than four months for the Jewish community to come up with the payment demanded for the men’s release. The two children, meanwhile, were baptized, never again to set foot in the ghetto. 4
    Such encounters had taught the leaders of Rome’s ghetto to tread gingerly in dealing with the Church, especially when questions of doctrine were at stake. Nor were the memories of their vulnerability all so old. Only nine years before the Mortara abduction, in the wake of the retaking of Rome by French troops in 1849, the Jews were accused of having purchased holy objects stolen from Roman churches in the previous year of upheaval. Soldiers invaded the ghetto one evening, locked the Jews in their homes for three days and nights, and went house to house ransacking their belongings in search of the stolen goods. Frustrated at not finding any of the loot they were looking for, the soldiers carried off the Jews’ own golden sacred objects to compensate them for their efforts. 5
    Despite such experiences, Rome’s Jews felt grateful to Pope Pius IX for relieving them of some of the most irksome and degrading restrictions that had been imposed on them. Shortly after becoming pope, he had eliminated the predica coatta, the centuries-old requirement that Jews attend a Saturday sermon, given by a priest, aimed at demonstrating the evils of Judaism and the joys of conversion. Pius IX had also ordered the ghetto gates to be torn down, despite lively opposition from the Roman plebes.
    Yet the Jews of Rome still lived almost entirely in the old ghetto and were still bound by many restrictions. Of all the major Jewish communities in Italy in 1858, Rome’s was the poorest, and visitors to the ghetto were appalled by the conditions they found. A Spanish traveler, Emilio Castelar, no friend ofpapal rule himself, has left a graphic—although somewhat overdrawn—picture of the sight that met him when he visited the ghetto in the 1860s. He began by putting the place into context, for, he wrote, aside from the beautiful Saint Peter’s Square, Rome “is a filthy city.… Mounds of garbage lie at every street corner.… The Tiber is truly an open sewer; its sickly yellow waters give the appearance of an immense vomit of bile.”
    But amidst the general squalor, Castelar reported, Rome’s ghetto was in a category of its own. As one entered, “one’s feet sink into a soft layer of excrement, which seems to be the droppings of a pig or a hippopotamus. Half-naked children, covered with scabs of filth which resemble a leper’s gangrenous sores, slither everywhere. A few old people, with wrinkled, jaundiced skin, white hair, glassy eyes, emaciated, with sinister smiles, stand guard by the doors to the houses, which seem to be true