Mortara - A Footnote / by Raphael Langham

Posted by admin on 10 March, 2008 - 16:02

Edgardo Mortara was the six-year-old Jewish boy who on 23 June 1858 was taken by the Inquisition from his parents' home in Bologna to the House of Catechumens (an institute for Neophytes) in Rome. They had discovered that when he was a baby he had been seriously ill and was secretly baptised by a maid who feared for his immortal soul. The Inquisition's case was that as he was thus a Catholic he couldn't be brought up by Jewish parents as they were unlikely to give him a Catholic education. Despite immense international pressure the Roman Catholic Church never released him; he became a priest and died in a priory in Belgium in 1940. A lot has been written about this episode and its consequences 1In particular see David Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (London, 1997) and Raphael Langham, 'The Reaction in England to the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara', Jewish Historical Studies, Vol. 39 (2004), 79-101. , and although much is known about Edgardo's life it would appear that few documents written by him have been published. One was his testimony in 1912 in favour of the Beatification of Pope Pius IX2 http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/pope025501.htm. , who was the Pope who consistently refused to return Edgardo to his family. This particular beatification was a long process, it started on 11 February, 1907 and he was only beatified on 3 September, 2000. He has not yet been canonised as a Saint.

I have come across another letter that Edgardo wrote which reveals his own attitude to the Church and his 'kidnapping' and is of more than passing interest. The background to my find is an observation passed on to me from Dr George Mandel of Jerusalem. From late 1877 to 1881 Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew, was a student in Paris, and among other things wrote an occasional "Letter", for the Hebrew newspaper Habazeleth published in Jerusalem. One of the "Letters", published in the issue of 12 September, 1879 , was about the Catholic Church's opposition to a new education bill. One of those who spoke out on the issue was the former Edgardo Mortara, who argued that a father should have the right to choose the kind of education his child received. Ben-Yehuda pointed out the irony of this argument coming from that particular source.

I decided to search for Ben Yehuda's source and found it in an article in the 24 July, 1879 edition of Archives Israelites, a weekly Jewish newspaper published in Paris3Archives Israelites, No. 30, 24 July 1879, 243-4.. This article reproduced a letter dated 10 July, 1879 from Edgardo Mortara to a Deputy in the National Assembly in Paris that had been published in L'Univers, a Catholic daily newspaper.

The background to the letter is this.

In 1879 the Republicans, an anti-clerical party, took power in France. They brought in a number of reforming education laws, known as The Jules Ferry laws after the Minister (later Prime Minister) who proposed them. Among the main features of these laws was that primary education became compulsory, free education was

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