The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara

The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara is a 1997 study on the famous kidnapping of a Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, by order of Pope Pius IX in 1858, after a family servant claimed that he was given a Catholic baptism. The strange and tragic event, Kertzer contends, remains under-researched and poses much significance in Italian and Catholic history. The book details the Papal State’s abduction of Edgardo from his parents and the reactions of the Jewish community, many of whom tried for years to recover him from the Pope’s custody without avail. The question of what became of Edgardo is highly disputed: while the Church asserted that he grew up to love the catechisms and voluntarily rejected his Jewish family and their faith, many others claim that both Edgardo and his family made repeated attempts to reconnect, but were thwarted by the Pope. Kertzer’s well-researched book has been praised for animating the friction that existed between different conceptions of personhood and faith in nineteenth-century Italy, showing that the religious state abused its power to harm an innocent child.

The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara begins by contextualizing the famous kidnapping in wider Italian history. Since the rise of the Catholic Church, Italy had been governed by the Pope, rather than a democratically elected leader. There existed no separation of church and state in Italy. Rather, the Pope acted as the main arbiter of individual morality and controlled what forms of expression were permitted in Italy. As a result, Italians were not well tolerated if their religion fell outside the domain of Christianity; many Christians were even persecuted for not being Catholic. A former servant to Edgardo’s parents, Momolo and Marianna, told the Catholic Church that he had been baptized without his parents’ knowledge. The Catholic Church held that any baptized child was a child of their God for life, and set out to seize Edgardo from his family.

In late June of 1858, the Bologna police appeared at the Mortara household and announced their intent to take Edgardo to Rome. Though Momolo and Marianna resisted, insisting that their family was Jewish, they were powerless to stop the Church. The following day, the police escorted Edgardo to Rome. His family continued to petition the Inquisitor in Bologna, to no avail. They later discovered that the person said to have baptized Edgardo was a Catholic girl named Anna Morisi, who thought that he would die in infancy and wished to ensure that he went to heaven.



News of the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara spread like wildfire throughout Italy, touching Jewish communities and Christian communities alike. It eventually extended into other countries, triggering discourse on the rights of the Church to intervene in the family as far as northern Europe and the United States. The Rothschild family dynasty spoke out against the Pope, Napoleon III even spoke out against the kidnapping. In the United States, many families turned their backs on the Vatican, viewing it as a despotic and criminal institution. Despite the mounting opposition against the Church, Pope Pius IX refused to back down, citing Edgardo’s baptism as incontrovertible evidence that Edgardo belonged to the Church and not his family. The Pope had a special interest in Edgardo and was intent on raising him as a Christian.

The annexation of Rome during the Italian Unification in 1870 provided hope for Edgardo’s parents and many others that Edgardo would be given back. However, by this time, Edgardo was a young adult. Momolo and Edgardo’s brother, Riccardo, located Edgardo during Rome’s capture but failed to return with him. The prevailing narrative is that Edgardo voluntarily stayed with the Church, believing that he could not go back to Judaism. In order to stay with the Church, he disobeyed the Roman chief of police’s orders to return to his family, fled Rome by stowing away on a train, and joined the priesthood in Austria. He only visited his family many years later, by which time his father had died. The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara illuminates an extreme outcome of a society without separation of church and state. Though its outcome was tragic to many, it catalyzed discourse about individual autonomy and religious freedom that contributed to the improvement of human rights in the longer term throughout the civilized world.