The Mortara Case, by Abe Silberstein – 25 October 2023

From The London Review of Books Blog

On 8 October, the day after Hamas militants from Gaza penetrated Israel in an unprecedented invasion and killed an estimated 1400 people, I went to the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. A few days earlier I had bought a ticket for Marco Bellochio’s new movie, Kidnapped, with a vague idea of reviewing it. Now, having had little sleep the night before, compulsively checking social media and refreshing news sites, I all but abandoned any critical intentions.

Kidnapped (Rapito) tells the story of the Mortara case. In 1858, papal officials seized a six-year-old Jewish child from his family in Bologna after learning that he had been secretly baptised as an infant by the household maid. The legally sanctioned kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara was a major source of controversy for the Catholic Church, which the movement for Italian unification leapt on as yet another reason to relieve the pope of his temporal authority. But for the Jewish community and Edgardo’s family, it clarified the condition of Jewish powerlessness. Edgardo was brought up in a seminary in Rome and eventually ordained as a priest. He died in Belgium in 1940, at the age of 88, two months before the Nazi invasion.

Bellochio’s career-long feud with the Church is obviously present in Kidnapped. Yet what I found most affecting is the film’s sensitive portrayal of Jews in Bologna and the Roman Ghetto. Bellochio and his co-writer, Susanna Nicchiarelli, clearly took pains to understand and accurately convey the practices of the community. Edgardo’s father (played by Fausto Russo Alesi) enjoins him to recite the Shema every night as a way to remember his Jewishness, which is surely what any Jewish father would say in such circumstances. It filled me with both pity and anger to watch the Jewish leaders of the Roman Ghetto bowing before Pius, kissing his red leather shoes, even as he berates them for daring to ask after their abducted kin.

The latest Israel-Hamas war has now been going on for more than two weeks. After the shock and devastation of the initial attack, which killed at least hundreds of Israeli civilians, including children, the underlying power discrepancies between Israel and the Palestinians it subjugates have brutally reasserted themselves. Israel dropped more than six thousand bombs in the first week of the war. The Israeli Air Force has devastated entire neighbourhoods, wiped out families and damaged critical infrastructure. The Gaza Health Ministry, which is run by Hamas, has reported over five thousand deaths, 40 per cent of them children.

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Abe Silberstein is a writer, critic, and doctoral student in the joint program in Hebrew and Judaic Studies and History at New York University.

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