Latest attempt at Mortara story
V STEVEN SPIELBERG spent years planning a movie on the story of Edgardo Mortara, a Jewish boy who in 1858 was kidnapped by the Italian Inquisition and forcibly converted to Catholicism. But the casting of Edgardo apparently proved an insurmountable problem and he finally abandoned the project.
But when celebrated Italian director Marco Bellocchio heard of his decision, he promptly took up the challenge and decided to make his own version.
Six-year-old Edgardo was taken by the Carabinieri police from his family home in Bologna on June 23 1858, on orders from Rome because, allegedly, the boy had been secretly baptised by a Catholic servant. As a Christian it was illegal for him to live in a Jewish household and the Inquisitor’s actions were said to have been sanctioned by the Pope.
The taking of Jewish children by the Church because of alleged baptism was fairly common in Italy in the 19th century but the Mortara case was unique because of the political situation of the time: the Pope was not just a religious leader but also a political ruler whose territories, the Papal States, were threatened by the movement for a united Italy.
Jews had no freedom of speech in the Vatican-controlled territories but they did in the Kingdom of Piedmont, the state driving Italian reunification, as well as in France, Britain and the US. The case caused an international outcry; the Mortaras were supported by the Rothschilds, the US and British press and, dangerously for the Pope, by Napoleon III of France, hitherto one his few allies.
The war between the Pope (who took a personal interest in Edgardo’s ‘conversion’) and the Mortara family, who for years tried to get him back, saw the Inquisitor himself tried for the kidnapping but finally acquitted. Edgardo ended up a Catholic priest and repeatedly tried to convert his own mother, who refused to the end saying, “I was born a Jew, I will die a Jew”.
No wonder Spielberg, the master storyteller, was attracted to a story
The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, painting by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, 1862.
Marco Bellocchio with so many fascinating elements: religious and personal freedom, political intrigue and an exciting historical setting. Bellocchio, who made his name at 25 with the iconoclastic Fists in the Pockets but later moved to more commercial projects, will be taking a different approach.
Whereas Spielberg’s movie was to rely mainly on US historian David Kertzer’s book The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, Bellocchio’s film, on which he worked during the Covid-19 lockdown, will be based on “historic reconstruction” using documents of the time including court records, which will hopefully shed light on one of the crucial events, the trial of the Inquisitor.
At the heart of the movie, provisionally called The Confession, will be “the mystery of the conversion”, which Bellocchio — no friend of the Church — views more as a terrible violence perpetrated on an innocent child, torn from his family in the name of religious fanaticism and antisemitism.
Bellocchio intends to film in Bologna and Rome, “even if the places [where the actual events took place] are no longer there”. The protagonists will speak a range of languages: a mix of Hebrew and Bologna dialect for the Mortara family, Latin for the Vatican characters and French for Napoleon III. Only a few years ago subtitles would have been seen as a death sentence for a movie with international ambitions.
The taking of Jewish children by the Church was common’