THE MORTARA AFFAIR ON STAGE
 
 

Association for Theater in Higher Education, Annual Meeting

San Antonio, TX-- August 12 -16, 1998
 
 

The relationships between historical narratives and dramatic
representations are often complicated and convoluted. It is easy for us
today to smugly point out the wild inaccuracies and inconsistancies in
the works of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Schiller, et al-- But such
criticism would be highly unfair because--as Matthew Wikander points
out--these dramatists’s usually adhere to the historiographical
principles of their own times and it would therefore be unfair to
adjudicate their works using contemporary standards. Nevertheless such
comparisons are fascinating and revealing--not necessarily in terms of
learning history, but in revealing the dramatists proclivities,
prejudices and points of view. A textbook example of how historical
drama operates in this fashion is provided for us in two contemporaneous
dramatic reperesentations of an historical event that occurred in the
mid-nineteenth century known as the Mortara Affair.

The Mortara Affair began on June 23, 1858 in Bologna, Italy, when civil
authorities removed a child from his parents’ home ostensibly for his
own safekeeping. Within the space of two years, this relatively minor
civil action became an international cause celebre that undermined the
spiritual and temporal powers of the Papacy; contributed to the
unification of Italy; and laid the groundwork for the later emergence of
the Zionist movement.

On that day in 1858, a six-year-old Jewish boy named Edgardo Mortara was
seized forcibly from his home because he had been secretly baptized by a
sixteen-year-old hired domestic. According to Catholic theology and
Canon law, anyone--Christian or non-Christian--can baptize a
non-believer with--or without holy water--by merely reciting the phrase
"I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost."
Once water has been dripped on the subject and those words have been
spoken--the action is inviolate and can never be undone. Also according
to Canon law, once a juvenile has been baptized, the Church has a moral
and legal obligation to remove the child from the care of non-believers
to ensure proper rearing and education.

In 1858, the Jews of Europe--and particularly of Italy--were well aware
of these rules. The seizure of Jewish children, because they had been
baptized, was a fairly regular occurrence. In Northern Italy alone,
there had been a number of relatively recent cases that had traumatized
the community: For example, in 1814, a seven-year-old boy had been taken
from his parents in Reggio; in 1817, a five-year-old girl was seized in
Ferrara: in 1840, a new-born baby girl was snared in Fulminino; and in
1844, a 19-month-old baby girl was taken from her parents in Modena. The
Jewish families in these cases--and in other similar incidents--were
powerless to complain, protest or to seek redress. The children were
removed, sent to Rome, raised as Catholics and were forever lost to both
their parents and the Jewish community.

By 1858, however, the political, economic and social landscape of Europe
was being transformed. Industrialization, urbanization, and the
emergence of the commercial middle classes led to the wide embracement
of liberal ideologies. The political uprisings of 1848, solidified and
institutionalized these gains . A major beneficiary of the new liberal
era were the Jews of Western Europe who were allowed, for the first
time, to own land; to pursue professional careers in fields such as
medicine and law; to travel freely as citizens within their own
countries; sometimes even to vote; and in England--to even serve in
Parliament.

On the Italian peninsula, however, the forces of liberalism and
nationalism battled against the Papacy and a Pope--Pius IX--who sought
desperately to turn back the hands of time. The Papacy had never
accepted the emancipation of the Jews and those Jews living in the Papal
states were forced to dwell in strictly controlled ghettos. Pius IX , in
the face of liberalism and modernism was even more steadfast--more
reactionary--both in issues of faith--and in his treatment of the Jews
then his predecessors had been.

The Jews, however, were no longer acquiescent and silent in the face of
such discrimination. When Edgardo Mortara was seized in 1858, a hue and
a cry went up among Jews across Europe. The Mortara Affair galvanized
the various national Jewish communities. In England, the Board of
Deputies of British Jews was founded in 1858 with Sir Moses Montefiore
as its leader. In 1859, American Jews formed the Board of Delegates of
American Israelites, and in 1860, French Jews formed the Alliance
Israélite Universalle. For the first time, there was communication and
coordination among different Jewish populations--both nationally and
internationally--as they sought to lobby individual governments and the
Papacy for the return of the Mortara child.

And Jews were not the only the people outraged by the actions of the
Papacy. Protestant clergymen, and secular powers across Europe, seized
upon the Mortara Affair as a club with which to bludgeon the Catholic
Church-- as proof positive that the Church represented medieval ideas
inappropriate in the modern age. And that the Church needed to be
subservient in all civil matters to the secular state. Newspapers-- from
San Francisco to Vienna-- were filled with endless accounts of the
Affair. The melodrama of a family being ripped apart, and the political
ramifications of the Church’s actions proved irresistible fodder to a
new, liberal, consumer-oriented population.

In the space of two years after Edgardo Mortara had been kidnapped--two
plays were written about the incident-- One in France and one in
America. These two works--one by a French, Black man named Victor Sejour
and the other by an American Jew named Herman Moos sought to use the
incident to further idiosyncratic political and social agendas.

The Mortara Affair was followed particularly closely in France because
of the long-standing tension between the Church and the forces of French
liberalism dating back to the French Revolution. Napoleon III, seeking
the support of the Papacy to shore up his legitimacy at
home--particularly with conservative monarchists--and to offset Austrian
influence in Italy--had sent French troops to assist Pius IX in his
struggle to maintain a political and territorial stronghold on the
Italian Peninsula. The Mortara Affair, however, was a cause of great
embarrassment for Napoleon III. He was ostensibly a champion of liberal
modernism, but he was now tainted by his close association to Pius IX .
By the end of 1858, as the firestorm surrounding the controversy flared
and it became a magnet for anti-clerical outrage, the French Emperor
attempted to intercede diplomatically but was firmly rebuffed by the
Pope.

After this diplomatic initiative failed, Napoleon III’s private
secretary and confidante-- Jean- Francois- Mocquard-- a minor literary
figure in his own right-- contacted a popular playwright willing to
assist the liberal cause. Mocquard met with Victor Sejour in early 1859
and the two men collaborated secretly in writing La Tireuse de Cartes
(The Fortune-Teller).

Victor Sejour was born in 1817 in New Orleans. His parents were "free
coloreds" who owned both property and slaves in Louisiana. At the age of
nineteen, with the financial support of his parents, Sejour moved to
Paris to seek fame and fortune as a writer. He became a fairly well
known dramatist and wrote eight plays that were produced successfully on
the Boulevard between 1848 and 1858. All his plays were written in the
same pseudo-Romantic style that suggested a pastiche of Victor Hugo and
Shakespeare. And although his work was generally dismissed by the
critics as being derivative and old-fashioned, he nevertheless managed
to cultivate a large--and profitable--public following .

The Sejour/Mocquard collaboration--La Tireuse de Cartes The Fortune
Teller-- takes place between 1728 and 1746 in Bologna, Italy. The play
is a romantic pot-boiler about a Jewish woman whose baby daughter is
taken from her away when she is baptized by a neighbor. After the
neighbor dies--struck down by God for her crime against the sanctity of
the family--the child is adopted and raised by a Catholic family. The
birth-mother--who has become a traveling fortune-teller-- and has spent
17 years searching for her daughter, finally meets her in a climatic
scene. The daughter--out of goodness and loyalty--chooses to return to
her birth mother and lives with her in a fabulously wealthy villa. But
the daughter begins to fade way--heartbroken because she misses her
adoptive mother and because of the spiritual bankruptcy of the Jewish
home. The adoptive mother arrives and the two women struggle for the
girl’s soul. The daughter is literally driven mad by this confrontation,
but at the end of the play, she hears singing of the choir from the
local Catholic Church and is miraculously healed. The Jewish mother
realizes that only the power of the Church can save her daughter--in
this world and in the next. The play ends with the Jewish mother
embracing the adoptive mother--forgiving her and thanking her for saving
the girl.

Sejour and Mocquard manage to have it both ways in this drama--they
create a play that illustrates the spiritual superiority of Catholicism
over Judaism, but yet implicitly criticizes the Church’s handling of the
Mortara Affair. In the preface to the published version of the
play--distributed in 1861--, Sejour admits freely that La Tireuse de
Cartes is an explicit commentary on the Mortara Affair. The author,
however, goes to great lengths to praise Pius IX personally: "le pape,
l’homme saint, l’homme sacré, l’homme béni." But Sejour wonders why
people who serve the Pope would dishonor him by connecting the Papacy to
such a petty, cruel act of persecution such as the Mortara Affair. Later
in the preface, Sejour (and apparently Mocquard) reveal their true
strategy by drawing a political analogy between the family and the
state. Just as the father is the head of the family, so the Emperor is
the head of the state--and in both cases the Church has no place
interfering.

Sejour and Mocquard use the play to champion both liberal ideals and the
sanctity and independence of the state. The anti-Semitism and prejudice
of the work is apparent--and is actually essential--in order not to
offend the Catholic public. Numerous negative images and stereotypes
about Jews--taken almost verbatim from The Merchant of Venice. pervade
the play. But the take-home-message of the play is that although we may
despise Jews for justifiable reasons, in a modern society, we must
nevertheless be tolerant of them, and most important, the Church cannot
be allowed to interefere in civil matters.

There can be no question that La Tireuse de Cartes was officially state
sanctioned. When the official censors rejected an early draft of the
play, high government officials intervened to ensure both its
performance and later publication. In an unprecedented act, Napoleon III
and his Empress attended the opening night performance on December 22,
1859 thereby officially endorsing the production and creating immense
public interest. The play ran for four months--with audiences totaling
over 100,000 patrons -- making it one of the most popular and profitable
theatrical ventures in France during the 19th century. In addition, the
play was performed in a number of French provinces; most notably in
Strasbourg. And In 1866 and in 1876, the play was revived and performed
again on the French Boulevard--- All this for a work that the Goncourt
brothers described desmissively as "a play thought should be flushed
down the toilet. It is not even good imitation Victor Hugo" [73,
O’Neill]

A very different play was written by Herman Moos in America. Moos --an
American Jew from Cincinnati-- wrote a play in 1860 about the Mortara
Affair that was radically different in tone and content from that of
Victor Sejour’s. Moos wrote specifically for an American Jewish audience
that was just beginning to flex its political and social muscle. In
1858, when the Mortara Affair occurred, there were somewhat less than
150,000 Jews in all of North America, and almost half of those had
arrived in a wave of immigration following the European political
uprisings of 1848. Thus the majority of Jews in the Unites States were
poor, struggling immigrants who could barely speak the English language.

In the fall of 1858, the Mortara Affair exploded upon the American
political scene attracting an inordinate amount of attention. Perhaps
because it was a distraction from the coming storm of the Civil War or
perhaps because it could be used to further political agendas, the
Mortara case was followed closely in the American press. Thirty-one news
articles appeared in the Baltimore American, twenty-three in the
Milwaukee Sentinel, and more than twenty in The New York Times. The New
York Herald said that interest in the affair had "reached colossal
dimensions."

Reaction to the Mortara Affair in America--whether Jewish or gentile--
depended primarily upon political orientation. The American political
landscape was in chaotic disarray in 1858 and 1859. In addition to the
established Democrat and Republican parties, there were Whigs,
Know-Nothing Americanists, Abolitionists, and die-hard Southerners.
Republicans attacked President Buchannan--a Democrat--for failing to
speak out in support of Mortara. Know-Nothing Americanists--who were
virulently anti-Catholic--used the case to rally populist support.
Democrats--and particularly Southerners--applauded Buchannan’s reticence
to involve the United States. Southerners understood the true
ramifications of American involvement: How could Buchanan criticize the
Pope for his actions against a single Jewish family when the United
States allowed the institution of slavery? Northern Abolitionists picked
up on this connection immediately and trumpeted it--Newspapers in
Chicago, New York, and Boston published pointed editorials linking the
Mortara case to the issue of slavery. The Chicago Press and Tribune put
it succinctly: "Our Israelitish citizens must consequently see, that
they can expect nothing from a pro-slavery administration, for the very
best reasons--self-interest"

The American Jewish community became aware of the Mortara case by August
and September of 1858 and various Jewish journals were filled with
details about the case; diatribes against the Pope and the Catholic
Church; and calls for action among American Jews. Public rallies were
organized by Jews in a dozen Northern and Midwestern states. On December
7, 1858, over two thousand Jews and Protestants held a protest rally at
Mozart Hall in New York City. The largest protest meeting--attended by
well over three thousand people-- was held in San Francisco on January
15, 1859.

One of the most radical leaders of the American-Jewish community was
Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise of Cincinnati. Wise was the founder and editor of
The Israelite and Deborah-- a paper that railed endlessly against the
Catholic Church. Wise set forth the theory that the Church’s actual
intent in the Mortara Affair was much broader then the religious welfare
of a single Jewish child: " [It is] a declaration of war on the rights
and liberties of humanity." The Israelite and Deborah was a weekly
journal devoted to Jewish religion, history and literature. The weekly
paper was distributed in New York, Illinois and in Ohio-- and thus was
the first attempt to establish a national Jewish journal. Wise was a
literary gadfly who saw himself and his journal as a beacon for Jewish
culture--particularly Jewish-German culture in America. In the mid
1850s, Wise enlisted a young Jewish man of German descent named Herman
Moos to serve as literary editor for the paper.

Moos was born in 1836 in Germany and emigrated to America with his
family when he was three-years-old, settling in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Moos, an aspiring writer, moved to Cincinnati in the mid 1850s and
quickly joined forces with Rabbi Wise. In 1859, Moos began writing a
response to the Mortara in the form of a play that was entitled Mortara
or the Pope and his Inquisitors. In early 1860, the Jewish publishing
house of Bloch & Co. published the play and Rabbi Wise gave the play a
glowing review in The Israelite and Deborah. Later that year, Wise
advertised the play on the front page of The Israelite and Deborah and
solicited mail orders for the play. Although there is no record of the
play ever being publicly performed, the published version was apparently
widely distributed among the Jewish population.

Mortara or the Pope and his Inquisitors is so poorly written and so
outlandish that it demands our attention in the same manner as a
car-wreck. Moos uses the broad outline of the actual Mortara Affair but
embellishes wildly upon it. The kidnapping of the Mortara child is
represented as part of a grand plot by the Papacy to regain temporal and
spiritual control of Europe. The Pope--in a soliloquy--admits that
Catholicism is a total fraud that can only be maintained through fear
and terror. The emancipation of the Jews is the single greatest threat
to the Church because free thinking Jews will reveal the truth about the
Catholic religion, particularly their secret plan to re-take Europe. The
Jews must be destroyed, and once this is accomplished, then Papal agents
will take over England and crush Protestantism throughout Europe.

The Pope orders a nun named Cornelia to seduce a Jew named Jephthah. The
plan is to reveal the affair and to claim that the nun has been raped by
the Jew--this, in turn, will lead to outrage and mass killings of Jews.
The Pope’s plot fails, however, when Cornelia falls in love with
Jephthah and refuses to betray him. She sends Jephthah away and refuses
to ever see him again. The Pope learns of Cornelia’s betrayal and throws
her into the dungeon located in the basement of the Vatican, The
vengeful Pope then orders the arrest of Jephthah’s nephew--the Mortara
child--and his forced conversion in order to exact revenge. In the Fifth
act, Jephthah sneaks into the Vatican to save his nephew. Jephthah
confronts the Pope in his private quarters and demands the release of
the boy. The Pope pulls a knife out of his robe and the two men
struggle--Jephthah knocks the dagger out of the pontiff’s hands and
strangles him--but being a good Jew, Jephthah cannot kill anyone-- so he
releases the Pope in order to grab a papal edict that hangs on the wall.
The Pope then pulls a pistol from his robe and shoots Jephthah in the
back--Jephthah--mortally wounded-- picks up the knife from the
ground--lunges at the Pope and kills him. Jephthah--bleeding to
death--takes the papal edict to the jailers who then release the boy.
Jephthah then finds his love--the nun Cornelia--who has been tortured
and driven mad by the inquisitors. When Cornelia sees how badly wounded
Jephthah is, she collapses and dies from shock. Jephtah crawls to her
and dies next to her.

Herman Moos’ agenda in this terrible play is self-evident. First, he
wishes to portray Jews as the saviors of mankind. Second, he wants to
warn Jews about the dangers of associating with gentile women, third, he
seeks to indict the Catholic Church and the Catholic religion, and
finally he seeks to enlist the sympathy and support of Protestants.

The authors of both of these plays-- Sejour and Moos-- have little
regard or interest in the true facts of the Mortara Affair. And in some
ways this is understandable. The intended audiences--both in France and
in America--were well aware of the actual events. The goal of each
playwright is not to summarize but to editorialize--and each author is
catering to the needs and desires of a specific, personal audience.
Sejour serves the needs of his Emperor and Moos reflects the editorial
position of his literary patron. One author is a devout Catholic who
seeks incremental change and the other is a radical émigré Jew who fears
the powers that caused his family to flee Europe in the first place.

The "real" Edgardo Mortara was never returned to his family. After being
educated in the House of Converts in Rome, Mortara was enrolled in the
College of the Basilica of St. Peter and was regarded by Pius IX as his
personal ward. The Pope took the young Mortara with him to numerous
Church functions. In 1871, Mortara was ordained as a priest and assigned
to Belgium. The Roman Times--an English journal published in
Rome--reporting on Mortara’s appointment to the priesthood--concluded
that "of all the many events which have gradually undermined the
influence of the Romish church, no one incident has done so much to
hasten its downfall, both as a temporal and spiritual power as the
abduction of Edgardo Mortara." A Catholic historian--writing at the end
of 19th century--quoted Pius IX as having said to Mortara-- "Oh, if you
only knew how much you have cost me!"

Father Mortara died in 1940 at the age of 88 in Belgium, two months
before the country was invaded by the Nazi armies. Ironically, the very
same Church that had steadfastly refused to release Mortara to his
family-- turned over 500 priests and nuns who had been born Jewish to
the Nazis. Had Mortara not died of old age, he would have been gassed in
Auschwitz.