by Susan Jacoby
The question is why it was so important to the Catholic Church, on the cusp of its third millennium, to pretend that civic equality had been established between Jews and Christians not only long before the Holocaust but before the civic emancipation of Jews in Italy and Germany; before the surge of late-nineteenth-century French anti-Semitism that produced the Dreyfus case; and before the increase in the number and destructiveness of pogroms in Eastern Europe and Russia, which drove millions of Jews to seek refuge in America after 1880. There is no single answer to this question, in part because of the church’s desire, at the end of the twentieth century, to conflate fascism and communism as secular ideologies, having nothing to do with and antagonistic to all religion. In this scenario, secularism—not Nazism, or the silence and collaboration of many Christian bystanders—was the real villain in the murder of millions of Jews and also in the war that killed millions of others—many of them Christians. That vast subject has engaged scholars of widely varying political and religious views for decades, and it is beyond the scope of this book. But one part of the explanation for the church’s position is its own historical attitudes and practices regarding the conversion of the Jews. In stating that by the beginning of the nineteenth century Jews had achieved equal standing in most states, the church makes no acknowledgment that, in the regions controlled by the Vatican itself, the Inquisition, directed by the pope himself, was still inflicting conversion on Jews. The conversions were forced by the same methods that French Catholics under Louis XIV had used on Huguenot children—dragging them from their homes. And what could be a better indicator of the lengths to which the church was prepared to go to gain even one soul for Catholicism than the behavior of its officials toward Jews in the only physical territory directly controlled by the pope?
The nineteenth-century Roman Inquisition did not steal thousands of children, as the persecutors of the Huguenots did; the toll probably amounted to no more than a few dozen. Most of these tragedies were instigated, as was the Mortara case, by the stealth baptism of a Jewish child by a Gentile servant or even a childhood friend. The baptism of Jewish children by Gentile servants occurred in many countries, but the ceremony had no civil consequences in most places. For cowed Jews living under the power of the Vatican in the Papal States, involuntary baptism had quite a different, practical significance. In some instances, a Jewish child was taken because his or her father had voluntarily presented himself for instruction in the Catholic faith. Under the law in the Papal States, the police—who fused civil and religious authority—were then permitted to remove the man’s wife and minor children from the ghetto for instruction. A wife could leave if, after thirty-nine days of Catholic proselytizing, she was still not convinced of the truth of Catholicism, but she could not take her child with her. The child would have been baptized, thereby rendering him (like six-year-old Edgardo Mortara) a Catholic forever in the eyes of the church. Such a converted soul could never be returned to the pernicious influence of a Jewish mother or family. The Vatican’s Inquisition archives, which were opened to scholars for the first time in 1998, reveal many earlier cases that, because they unfolded in a different political climate, never attracted the international attention that the Mortara case did. One of these was the experience of twenty-four-year-old Jeremiah Anticoli, who presented himself for instruction in 1815 and was told that his wife and seven-month-old baby must be “offered” Catholic instruction as well. That night, police entered the ghetto and took away nineteen-year-old Pazienza Anticoli and her baby, Lazzaro. Pazienza refused to convert and was released after the requisite thirty-nine days. Her husband, who lost his enthusiasm for becoming a Catholic when he found out that his wife refused to join him, returned to her in the ghetto a few days later. The real tragedy, as usual, was that they would never see their baby again. As Kertzer presents the account from the Inquisition archives, “Just a few days after Pazienza and Lazzaro had been brought to the House of the Catechumens, the boy had been baptized….Lazzaro the baby Jew became a Christian and was given a new name that symbolized his new identity. He was now Bernardo Maria Fortunato Andrea Cardeli.”2 Fortunato indeed.
The House of the Catechumens, a dreary facility near the Church of Madonna dei Monti in Rome, was founded in 1543 by Pope Paul III and was intended to take in both Jewish and Muslim candidates for conversion. The building was always occupied mainly by Jews, since the Moorish presence in Rome was much smaller than the Jewish population. The House of the Catechumens had separate sections for men, women, and baptized Jewish men who wished to study for the priesthood. “As priests,” Kertzer observes, “the former Jews were particularly valued by the Church for their ability to proselytize among their ex-brethren, familiar as they were with life in the ghetto and Jewish traditions. However, Jewish converts were considered to be unsuited for pastoral duties, and not permitted to become parish priests.”3
This distinction between priests who were born Catholic and priests who were converted Jews is a telling indicator that conversion, however religiously sincere, was never quite enough to make a Jew equal to a Gentile in the eyes of the church. Protestants who converted to Roman Catholicism, as many notable Anglican clerics did in nineteenth-century England, were considered perfectly suitable for the usual priestly duties. That even the taking of Catholic Holy Orders did not expunge the taint of Jewish birth in the Papal States provides yet another piece of evidence for the connection between anti-Judaism, based on religion, and anti-Semitism, based on modern nationalism and racist ideology.
Those who voluntarily entered the House of the Catechumens—a place most Roman Jews would have gone to any lengths to avoid passing—were, overwhelmingly, men. Like Anticoli, most were in their twenties and came from poor families. Conversion to Catholicism offered poor Roman Jews a chance to make a living outside the ghetto, just as conversion to Protestantism offered wealthier, educated German Jews a chance to enter state and university jobs open only to Christians. The lure of improved economic circumstances was the common element in many “voluntary” conversions of Jews from such vastly different cultural backgrounds as those in Germany and the Roman ghetto. Most (though not all) Jewish women who converted did so because they lacked Pazienza’s courage in standing up to her husband—and they did not have the heart to leave their forcibly baptized children behind in the House of the Catechumens.
That those children would live out their lives as Catholics—that many baptized as infants would know nothing about their origins as Jews—was a given. At age six, Edgardo Mortara would certainly have been in no position to resist round-the-clock religious indoctrination—even if he had initially been terrified by his removal from his parents’ home. And Pius IX took a personal interest in the boy—an interest that, coupled with the pontiff’s rigid and sincere concept of his religious duty, would make him impervious to international pressure. Not even the protests of the French government, whose troops had returned Pius to Rome and toppled the Roman Republic, would move the pope. The protests of liberal newspapers throughout Europe, and as far away as the United States, only stiffened his resolve. The Vatican countered with stories in the Catholic press, which was becoming a force in both European and American cities with growing Catholic populations. The articles painted a portrait of a joyful little Edgardo, now that he was removed from the malign influence of his Jewish parents and neighbors, who had fully absorbed the divine grace of baptism and wanted nothing so much as to remain a Catholic.
Edgardo was raised in a seminary and ordained in 1873, at age twenty-one. Pius IX, his surrogate father, established a lifetime trust to ensure Pio Edgardo Mortara’s future support. He spent his life preaching throughout Europe, generally telling the story of how baptism by a servant girl had saved him from the error of life as a Jew. In Mortara’s sermons, Pius IX was the saintly hero who stood up to the world—all of the secular, godless heretics who would have had him returned to his parents—and saved him for Christ. Pio Edgardo lived many more decades, spending most of his tim
e after World War I in an abbey in Bouhay, Belgium. He died on March 11, 1940, at age eighty-eight, just two months before Nazi armies occupied Belgium. Had Pio Edgardo still been alive when the storm troopers marched in, he would likely have been torn from his monastery, as the German Catholic convert Edith Stein was from her Dutch convent, and sent to his death as a Jew at Auschwitz.
The Mortara case is a milestone in the secular history of conversion not because it typifies the pressure on Jews and Judaism in the early modern era—the Papal States can hardly be viewed as typical—but because it embodies the persistence of political enforcement of religious faith in Western history. That this case also proved to be the beginning of the end for direct forced conversion underlines the length of time needed for societies to attain anything like true religious choice. Pius IX’s obduracy even in the face of entreaties from the French government, which was still upholding the pope’s anachronistic secular authority, helped lead, after Italian unification, to the shrinkage of temporal papal power to Vatican City. Moreover, the notion that a child could be supernaturally transformed, without his knowledge, by being sprinkled with water by a Catholic—any Catholic—exemplified the theological absolutism at the core of the church’s teaching on conversion. Pius IX, in a meeting with the French ambassador, told the Duke de Gramont that Edgardo could never be returned to his parents, because the child himself had embraced Christianity. He declared, “It is impossible for the head of the Church, for the Representative of Jesus Christ on earth, to refuse this child, for he begged me with an almost supernatural faith to let him share in the benefit of the Blood that Our Lord shed for his Redemption.” Adding that he had reflected on the case intensively, the pontiff declared, “My decision is irrevocable.”4 The idea that one man possesses the authority to decide what another can and should believe seems preposterous even in this formal diplomatic exchange: it was no longer palatable even to European monarchists. By overreaching, Pius IX sealed his fate with the secular governments of the West—whether monarchies or developing democracies.
That Edgardo Mortara’s kidnapping was a forced conversion at the start is evident to anyone who does not share the belief that a sprinkling of baptismal water, wanted or unwanted, whatever the age of the baptized, is a binding religious contract. But there is also no doubt that Mortara, after years of being educated by Catholic priests, and becoming one himself, fully believed in the Catholic faith. Thus is an initially forced conversion transformed into the “voluntary” embrace of a new faith. The malleability of memory—the tendency of the human brain to absorb and accept the messages it receives over a long period of time—blurs the line between forced and voluntary conversion in every era; it fully justifies skepticism about apparent religious choices that may not have been “chosen” in the beginning.
Mortara’s development into the devout Catholic priest Pio Edgardo is simply an extraordinary example of an ordinary phenomenon. It also explains, on more than one level, the disappearance of this important case, from both Italian secular and general Western history, for more than 125 years. It is understandable that the Catholic Church, in its more ecumenically inclined twentieth-century incarnation, would not have wanted to draw attention to a notorious intervention in a Jewish family—an intervention that strikes modern readers as belonging more to the Middle Ages than to the nineteenth century. Before the post-Holocaust era, when the church began to re-examine its historical behavior toward Jews, Pius IX’s successors would have been reluctant to condemn their predecessor for the Mortara affair, out of a combination of embarrassment and agreement that the only good Jew was a converted Jew. These two conflicting points of view, if you believe that Catholicism is the only true religion, are not mutually exclusive. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that it was Pius IX who conferred the dubious gift of papal infallibility on his successors by pushing through the new dogma at the First Vatican Council in 1870.
For Italian Jews, as Kertzer suggests, the aftermath of the Mortara kidnapping raised different issues involving their image of themselves and their religion. The church’s reports about the young boy’s love of Catholicism, followed by the preachings of the obviously devout adult priest, may have turned the case from an insult into a source of deep shame. Kertzer argues that the controversy “became a kind of public test of the relative merits of the two religions. It was a test the Jews lost.” It made no difference that “Italian Jews were well aware of the psychological pressures exerted on the small boy and had no trouble coming up with a secular explanation of his ultimate decision to abandon his family and Judaism….This did not make the transformation any more palatable.” The kidnapped child who had once been seen by Jews as an innocent victim “became a man who was disdained, whose character had to be discredited. He could not be happy, he could not even be fully sane, for were he happy and sane, it would reflect poorly on the religion of the Jews. It was best not to talk of him at all.”5
There is no supernatural mystery about why a six-year-old boy—removed from home and his parents, placed under the tutelage and constant scrutiny of caretakers preaching another religion, and personally singled out by a protector of power and charisma, Pius IX—would “choose” to embrace his new life as a Christian. Nor is there a mystery about why the drama of socially—if not physically—forced psychological conversion has played out so many times, on a larger scale, in Western history. The common element in these dramas has always been theocracy, whether Catholic or Protestant (Muslims having behaved in a more tolerant fashion than Catholics when they controlled much of Iberia). It made no difference whether the conversions took place in Spain after the Reconquista; in regions of France or what is now Germany as civil power alternated between Catholics and Protestants; in an England where, beginning with Elizabeth I, it was much better to be a Protestant belonging to the state-established church; or, on a vast scale, in tsarist Russia with the Russian Orthodox Church as the state religion. In any of these places before the Enlightenment, initially forced conversion could turn into real faith, especially after enough generations passed for families to forget their heritage naturally. What is remarkable about the history of the forcibly converted Jews in Spain and Portugal, including those who eventually settled in the New World, is not that so many forgot all traces of their heritage but that some retained remnants now being unearthed among people whose Sephardic Jewish descent was a family secret for hundreds of years.
If the history of the Roman Catholic initiation of forced conversion seems to occupy a disproportionate amount of space in this oft-told tale, it is only because, since the early Christian era, the Catholic Church was in charge of more land and people in the West for a longer period of time than any other faith. Had John Calvin’s theocrats been in control of Europe from 400 to 1500, the horrors inflicted on individuals, and the repression of religious expression in large populations, would tell us the same story about forced conversion—with different actors. The Protestants had less time than the Catholics to try to control people’s souls.
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There is no doubt, however, of the special place still occupied by Jews in the entire narrative of conversion in the Western world. Even though conversions to gain social and professional advantages cannot be described as “forced” in the same sense that conversions under the Inquisition were forced, such conversions certainly cannot be seen as unpressured. Spineless, perhaps. Disrespectful of their heritage, sometimes. Opportunistic, most of the time. But opportunistic abandonment of Judaism was not always accompanied by the deeply conflicted attitudes displayed by many German Jewish converts to Christianity over many generations.
Disraeli, for instance, always distinguished between religious Judaism, which he viewed (or said he viewed) in the conventional Christian way as the prelude to Jesus’s fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, and his Jewish ancestry. He saw his Jewish forebears with an esteem that can only be described as romantic (as evinced in several of his novels). It is impossible to imagine Disraeli writing som
ething as contemptuous of Jews as Heine’s poem “The New Jewish Hospital in Hamburg.” It may well be more than a coincidence (a point overlooked by an extraordinary number of English biographers) that Disraeli’s father had him baptized at the age when, had his son been preparing for life as a religious Jew, he would have been studying for his bar mitzvah. As described in many biographies of England’s first (and only) prime minister of Jewish descent, Isaac D’Israeli’s decision to baptize all of his children was partly the result of dissension within his synagogue, which was divided between followers of the Reform movement imported from Germany, and Orthodox Jews who resented the changes in traditional forms of worship. But D’Israeli (who always spelled his name with the apostrophe, clearly indicating “of Israel”) was obviously aware that many avenues of achievement, most notably in public life, would be closed to his children if they did not convert to the Church of England. This is not to say that Benjamin Disraeli’s father dreamed that his thirteen-year-old son might become prime minister, but he wanted his children to have more opportunities than they would have as Jews.*3 At age thirteen, Disraeli would have been fully aware of the secular implications of his baptism.
Exactly how sincere or devout a Christian Disraeli really was cannot be determined from his life after he began his climb to the top of “the greasy pole.” He presented himself, as anyone of his background would have had to do to pursue a successful career, as a committed Anglican, but always as one who acknowledged his origins, who believed that Jews and Christians should have equal legal rights, and who, in a celebrated 1847 debate in the House of Commons, enraged many members of his own party by suggesting that their opposition to Jewish emancipation on religious grounds was really a cover for anti-Semitism in the modern sense. “If one could suppose that the arguments which we have heard…are the only arguments that influence the decision of this question,” a furious Disraeli argued, “it would be impossible to conceive what is the reason of the Jews not being admitted to a full participation….But you are influenced by the darkest superstitions of the darkest ages that ever existed in this country. It is this feeling that has been kept out of this debate; indeed, that has been kept secret in yourselves….”6 Disraeli was confronting his good Christian colleagues with something that no one wants to hear if he considers himself a broad-minded, tolerant person—the possibility that, deep down, he is a bigot.