By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO — 1857 the Vatican removed the six-year-old Jewish boy Edgardo Mortara from his family in Bologna and subsequently raised him in the House of Catechumens in Rome for young prospective Jewish and Muslim converts to Catholicism. The Papacy justified its action on the grounds that the family’s former Catholic servant had baptized the boy when she feared he was on the verge of dying and destined for eternal damnation if he didn’t receive the sacrament. The event sparked an international uproar among Jews, liberal governments, and the press. It also became a cause celebre for the Italian unification movement which ended the temporal rule of the Papacy in the regions, including Rome, it still controlled.
The Dreyfus Affair eventually overshadowed the Mortara controversy in historical memory. It augured the rise of the modern mass politics and antisemitic racism that would reach their full fruition in the rise to power and genocidal policies of Nazi Germany. Conversely, traditional Catholic anti-Judaism and the Vatican’s reactionary attempt to retain its authority motivated Pope Pius IX’s insistence on saving the soul of Edgardo by inculcating him with Catholic dogma and teaching him Catholic rituals. The calumnies Catholicism leveled against the Jews like being guilty of deicide and the prayers Catholics recited condemning Jewish perfidy surfaced in the battle over Edgardo’s fate and are reiterated in the film Kidnapped dramatizing it. Echoes of Nazism emerge, however, when the Inquisitor of Bologna cites superior orders from the Pope to exonerate himself for abducting Edgardo in a post-unification trial.
The movie viscerally reenacts the wrenching of Edgardo from his home, the anguish it caused his family, and the divisions it created among Italian Jewish leaders who worried that overt protests would jeopardize their already precarious position in the Papal States. It captures the powerful appeal Catholic doctrines and the spectacle of Church ceremonies conducted in ornate Vatican chapels exerted on the impressionable youth who gradually succumbed to both and became a monk. The musical score has an operatic quality that lends itself to the tragedy as it unfolds, but it sometimes struck me as overly dramatic and ponderous for scenes that are sufficiently harrowing as to not require an aural cue to influence the viewers’ emotions.
Parenthetically, Steven Spielberg announced he would make a film about the Mortara Affair in 2016. He hired Oscar Isaac and Mark Rylance to star in it and commissioned Tony Kushner to write the script. He decided to drop the project when he embarked on directing West Side Story and The Fabelmans and attributed his decision to his failure to find a credible child actor to play Edgardo. Instead, it fell to the 83-year-old Italian director Marco Bellocchio to skillfully retell this story. The moral of this story is that octogenarians should never be discounted as capable of helming movies or nations! Bellocchio has speculated that Spielberg abandoned his movie because he didn’t want to harm Catholic-Jewish relations in the United States.
Kidnapped will be screened at 7 p.m., Wednesday, January 31, by the San Diego International Jewish Film Festival at the Lawrence Family JCC, 4126 Executive Drive, San Diego.
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Baron is professor emeritus at San Diego State University. He may be contacted via Lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com