The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara Read Online Free PDF Page A

was a valued part of popular tradition to taunt Jews. To avoid provoking the Christians, the law forbade Jews to leave the ghetto for the duration of Holy Week.
    The ducal decree of 1814, after condemning the Jews’ collaboration with the French-installed regime, reinstated the old code but abrogated some of its most irksome features, including the obligation to close the gates of the ghetto at sundown and to return to the ghetto before nightfall. Also abolished was the centuries-old requirement that Jews wear a distinctive emblem on their clothes so that all would know that they were Jews. In Modena, this emblem had consisted of a red ribbon, which Jews wore prominently atop their hats. Although the prohibition on Jewish residence and ownership of stores outside the ghetto remained technically on the books, it was suspended in exchange for a hefty annual payment from the Jews to the Duke. And so, after the fall of the French, the Mortaras were among the Reggio Jewish families who continued to live and keep their store outside the ghetto walls. 5 All in all, the duchy’s Jews could have been worse off. In Rome, restoration of papal powerin 1814 not only led to reghettoization, but the city’s rabbis were once again required to make their humiliating appearance at Carnival. Forced to dress in grotesque black outfits, with short pants and a little cloak, they were made to march through the streets as part of popular festivities, their loose neckties serving as a target for rotten food and other missiles hurled by the jeering throngs. 6
    When it was time to find a husband or a wife, a Reggio Jew could draw on a dense kin network that extended indifferently across political borders. It went without saying that the spouse should be Jewish, not only because this was required by Jewish law but because marriage of a Jew to a Christian was forbidden by the state as well.
    A woman moved to her husband’s home upon marriage. Momolo’s grandfather married a woman from Mantua, who moved to Reggio in 1789; his father married a woman from Verona in 1815, and she likewise moved. When it was time for Momolo to marry, in 1843, his bride, Marianna Padovani, from a family of successful merchants herself, moved from Modena to join him.
    It was common for Jews in Modena and Reggio to live in large, extended families. Momolo followed this tradition, bringing his new bride into his parents’ home. Their marriage was blessed with many children. By the time their fourth child, Augusto, was born, in 1848, the house was getting crowded. In addition to Momolo, Marianna, and their children, it included Momolo’s father and mother, his 26-year-old bachelor brother, Abram, and another brother, Moses Aaron, with his new bride, Ricca Bolaffi. When, just a month after Augusto’s birth, Moses and Ricca had their first child, Momolo and Marianna must have felt not only that their living quarters were tight, but that the store which provided all of them with their living could no longer do so. It was time to move.
    Generations of marriages linking men and women from different ghettoes produced far-flung networks, stretching from Rome and Ancona through Livorno and Florence to Ferrara, Turin, and Venice. In deciding where to move, Momolo and Marianna acted no differently than their fellow Jews, no differently than their ancestors had: they turned to these networks. In discussions with kin and friends, the attractions of Bologna became clear.
    The young couple knew a number of Jewish families, including Marianna’s wealthy Modena neighbors the Sanguinettis, who had recently moved to Bologna. Much larger than either Reggio or Modena, and a much more important center of commerce, Bologna offered broader scope for an enterprising young man like Momolo. The very fact that there were hardly any Jews in the city—a result of two centuries of banishment following 1593 and the renewed government restrictions on Jews in the Restoration years—meantthat the