The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara

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Description

Soon to be a major motion picture from Steven Spielberg. 

A National Book Award Finalist

The atypical story of how the vatican’s imprisonment of a six-year-old Jewish boy in 1858 helped to bring about the collapse of the popes’ worldly power in Italy.

Bologna: nightfall, June 1858. A knock sounds at the door of the Jewish merchant Momolo Mortara. Two officers of the Inquisition bust inside and seize Mortara’s six-year-old son, Edgardo. As the boy is wrenched from his father’s arms, his mother collapses.  The cause of his abduction: the boy had been secretly “baptized” by a circle of relatives servant.  In step with papal law, the child is subsequently a Catholic who may also be taken from his circle of relatives and delivered to a special monastery where his conversion will be completed. 
   With this terrifying scene, prize-winning historian David I. Kertzer begins the true story of how one boy’s kidnapping became a pivotal event in the collapse of the Vatican as a secular power.  The book evokes the anguish of a modest merchant’s circle of relatives, the rhythms of day-to-day life in a Jewish ghetto, and also explores, through the revolutionary campaigns of Mazzini and Garibaldi and such personages as Napoleon III, the emergence of Italy as a modern national state.  Moving and informative, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara reads as both a historical thriller and an authoritative analysis of how a single human tragedy changed the course of history.
Out of seemingly small events are from time to time born great historical moments. The case of young Edgardo Mortara is one. In 1858 the 6-year-old Jewish boy used to be taken from his parents’ home in Bologna, Italy, by agents of the Papal inquisition. The year before, seriously ill, Edgardo had been secretly baptized, by the Mortaras’ Catholic servant (or so she claimed); it used to be against the law for baptized Christians to be raised by Jews, and so, in the eyes of the Church, the kidnapping used to be only just. Secular Italians did not agree, and thus used to be set in motion a series of reforms that ended the Church’s temporal power in Italy and forged the creation of a liberal, near-democratic state. For his part, young Edgardo became a priest and lived in a Belgian abbey until 1940–just before the invading Germans started to deport and execute all those tainted with Jewish blood. David Kertzer has shaped a remarkable narrative from almost forgotten events.

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