The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara Read Online Free PDF

economic niche occupied by Italy’s Jews in local commerce was largely open. Of course, this also meant that the thick web of Jewish social, economic, and religious institutions familiar to Momolo and Marianna in Reggio and Modena would not be found in Bologna. But the Mortara family would not be alone in their new home. It was a family decision. Around the same time that Momolo and Marianna arrived with their children, Marianna’s parents, her uncle, and her married brother and sister also moved there.
    As they were debating the move, dramatic events unfolding in the larger world could not be ignored. The year 1848 was one of upheaval and revolt throughout Europe, when rulers were chased from their palaces. In Modena and Bologna people rebelled, and armed revolt blended with general chaos. The very month that the Mortaras’ son Augusto was born, the Duke of Modena, Francesco V, fled his capital, alarmed by reports that insurrectionary forces from throughout his dukedom were marching on Modena, together with hundreds of armed rebels on the move from Bologna. In both Modena and Reggio, civil militias filled the vacuum, installing a provisional government committed to constitutional law and individual rights.
    The center of the uprising was the city of Bologna itself. Although part of a different state, it exercised considerable influence over Modena. Little more than three decades earlier, during the years of French rule, the two areas had been joined together in a single government. 7 When papal rule was restored in 1814 at the end of the Napoleonic wars, the Church had tried to impose tighter control over the rebellious northern Legations. These efforts were met with resistance by the Bolognesi: the years of French occupation had left a legacy of liberal ideas among the upper classes, and a growing cadre among the educated in this university city regarded papal temporal rule as an insufferable anachronism.
    Publicly organized resistance was, of course, viewed by the authorities as treason, so the political opposition formed secret societies, including the famed Carbonari. Revolts against the old order in Naples and Turin in 1820–21 prompted Pope Pius VII to excommunicate members of the Carbonari. In the ensuing police inquiries into the secret society, one of those whose names came up most often in Modena was a member of the Sanguinetti banking family. 8
    Leo XII, elected pope in 1823, decided that extraordinary measures were required. In his five-year reign he canceled the modest reforms that had been enacted by his immediate predecessors, and imposed heavy-handed police surveillance. He demanded that the old measures against the Jews be enforced, and that the rest of the population be watched carefully to ensure that Church precepts with regard to fasting and religious observance werefollowed. Practices identified with modernity—and so deemed at odds with divinely ordained ways—were attacked. Even smallpox vaccinations were halted. 9
    To deal with the unrest in the Romagna area—the portion of the Legations that stretched from Bologna across to Ravenna and Ferrara—the Pope appointed Agostino Cardinal Rivarola as his legato straordinario. The Cardinal was to have unlimited powers, and he quickly acquired a reputation for brutality and repression. In 1825, after summary trials, he oversaw the sentencing of five hundred men from Romagnola for participation in carbonarismo and conspiracy. A year later, in return for his efforts, the Cardinal Legate was the target of an assassination attempt in Ravenna; after a narrow escape, he fled the Legations, but his replacement continued his iron-fisted policies, executing four of the men judged guilty for the attempt on the Cardinal’s life.
    Despite the campaign to stamp out political opposition, the next decade began with a new wave of unrest in the Legations. In early 1831, local elites led an uprising aimed at winning greater liberty and constitutional rule. In February,