Kidnapped [Rapito]

The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara

Directed by Marco Bellocchio
Produced by Beppe Caschetto and Simone Gattoni
RAI Cinema and Kavac Film (and three other companies)
With support from Regione Lazio
2023¹

Painting by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, 1862
Courtesy of Jüdisches Museum der Stadt Frankfurt am Main and Wikimedia ²

Reviewed by Judith Roumani³

This film recounts the dramatic story of Edgardo Mortara, the Jewish boy born in Bologna in 1850, who as a baby was secretly baptized by his family’s maid, unbeknownst to his parents. When he was six, the papal police arrived at his home and kidnapped the boy from his parents, conveying him immediately to the pope in Rome, who consigned him to the House of the Catechumens for a Christian education and a rebaptism. His parents, despite support from liberal governments and institutions across Europe, were never able to retrieve their son. The boy’s biography and its historical context have been the subject of a rigorous historical study and book by the American scholar David Kertzer, and by Italian scholars.⁴ The screenplay is by the director, Marco Bellocchio, and by Susanna Nicchiarelli.

There is much material for the cinema in the basic, tragic story of the Jewish boy torn from his family at the age of six. The story as well as the affecting scenes of the Jewish child being abducted from his parents and his later incarnation as a Christian teenager tear at the heart. The child actor’s role is beautifully played, as well as that of Edgardo as a confused but devoutly Christian young man. The tragic incident takes place at a pivotal time in European, especially Italian history. The forces of modernization are finally emerging in Italy, previously a hotchpotch of small kingdoms, and on the cusp of unification. The central part of Italy, though, is still ruled by the papacy, which constitutes not only a religious authority but a secular authority with its own police and army, still ruling central Italy from Rome to Bologna. Jews have been emancipated but not in the eyes of the church, which still sees them all as candidates for conversion to Christianity.

The film deserves credit for bringing this situation home to us, played out in excruciating, slow motion. We see how the boy is taken to the House of the Catechumens, a closed prisonlike structure where Roman Catholic beliefs are drummed into the heads of Jewish children, mostly taken, no doubt, from the Ghetto of Rome, whither Jews had been returned, after a brief period of liberation. The painful process, the indoctrination of children as young as six, seems to be always successful. A restrained portrayal might have been fully successful and made its point about the overbearing, insistent nature of church persecution of Jews over the centuries and into the modern age.

The parents of Edgardo protest to whomever they can, but meet only a blank wall from church authorities. In Britain and France, Jewish and liberal authorities are horrified, but cannot prevail on the pope to change his mind. This pope, Pius IX, was the last one to rule with secular powers, in over a thousand years. In the rest of Italy, and in Rome itself the movements for secularism, democracy and equal rights, as well as Italian unity, were sweeping away the remnants of medieval feudalism, including the power of the Catholic Church.

The film suffers though, in my view, from an urge to insert melodrama, which seems unnecessary when recounting a historical process which was inherently so fraught with real drama. For example, there is a relationship between the pope and the young adult Edgardo of psychological oppression, demonstrated in the film with a scene where Edgardo in an excess of zeal in expressing his love and admiration for the pope, when attempting to kiss the hem of his garment, accidentally knocks him over. The pope immediately punishes Edgardo by having him kiss the floor in front of him. Then, deciding that that was not enough of a punishment for the clearly penitent Edgardo, in front of a large crowd of dignitaries the pope has him actually lick the floor. This implies a perverse cruelty and desire to humiliate the boy of Jewish origin, or even some other kind of perversity. After the pope has died, and his funeral cortege is proceeding across the bridge to his burial, as his disciples accompany the coffin, a crowd that has gathered is shouting “Throw the pig of a pope in the river!” and actually attempts to do so. This is historically accurate. But Edgardo, caught up in the tussle, seems for a moment to join the crowd in its shouts, implying that he is momentarily recognizing his psychological enslavement to this now-dead would-be father figure. In my view, we did not need these touches of melodrama, to underscore the tragic kidnapping of the soul of a Jewish boy. Pope Pius IX, the longest-reigning pope ever, died in 1878, when Edgardo would have been about 28, but in the film at this point he still seems to be a teenager.

Edgardo’s contacts with his family over the years also became increasingly awkward and untenable on both sides. His brother, who fought for Mazzini , Garibaldi and the enlightened forces for Italian unity, and participated in the successful breach of Porta Pia to enter Rome in 1870, tried to free Edgardo from his spiritual prison (a dramatic scene in the film), but the twenty-year old Edgardo refused to be liberated at that point. Like the pope, he chose a self-imposed imprisonment, and refused to return to his family.⁵ In the film, as Edgardo’s mother, broken from grief, is lying on her deathbed, Edgardo comes to visit her. She is grateful until she realizes that he is hiding a small bottle of water in his pocket, and is actually trying to baptize her. She refuses adamantly, with her last breath, saying she was born a Jew and will die a Jew. Did this actually happen in such a melodramatic way? We know that Edgardo became a missionary, and attempted to convert his family (a phenomenon that was still a scourge of Jewish families who had already lost a member to conversion) but would he have ridden roughshod over all family sensitivities at the moment of his mother’s death?

Such doubts cropped up often in my mind as I watched this nevertheless lauded film. In my opinion, a little more restraint and faithfulness to an already searingly tragic history would have enhanced this tragic film. It does perform a service though in bringing the history of Catholic-Jewish relations in Italy to a public that most likely would not have been aware of the abuses of the not-so-distant past. Reportedly, some voices in the Catholic press in Italy are defending Pope Pius IX, though. Such reactionary views have struck the chief rabbi of Rome, Rabbi Riccardo Disegni, who commented in a letter to the newspaper La Repubblica “The official defenses of Pius IX and his persecutory apparatus, which are appearing these days from many parts of the Catholic world, are, if not astonishing, at least worrying.”⁶

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1 The film was a candidate for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival of 2024. It did not win, but won numerous other awards, e.g. for best screenplay.

2 This painting has its own story. Created by the German Jewish painter not long after the affair, in 1862, it was lost for about 100 years but must have been brought to the UK early in the 20^th century. It was rediscovered in an antique shop in 1962, and was auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York in 2013, purchased by an anonymous individual and most probably donated to the above Jewish museum in Germany. David Kertzer points out that several aspects are not historically accurate: there are the inquisitor, a priest, and a nun present at the moment of kidnapping, whereas in fact only the papal police were there, the home is more sumptuous than the Mortara’s would have been, and especially that the child Edgardo is dressed in a tallit, which his fairly assimilated family would probably not have done. Maya Benton, “The Story behind the Painting which is the basis for Steven Spielberg’s next film,” Tablet, Dec. 18, 2013. Steven Spielberg did not actually make this film after all, reputedly because he could not find a suitable child actor.

3 Judith Roumani is the editor of Sephardic Horizons. The Italian translation of her book, Tra Pitigliano e Grosseto: Gli anni della Shoah in Toscana meridionale (Livorno, Salomone Belforte, 2025) has just been published. (Original English: Jews in Southern Tuscany during the Holocaust: Ambiguous Refuge).

4 David Kertzer recounts the history in his excellent The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (New York: Thrift Books, 1996) , researched in local archives and in the Vatican Secret Archives. A play and an opera have been based on his book. The film is based though on the later work by an Italian scholar, Daniele Scalise, Il caso Mortara (Milan: Mondadori, 1997).

5 Kertzer describes and documents how Edgardo’s mother, and his father, devoted their lives to freeing him, and the father especially made many trips to Rome and many appeals to the pope. Though he had the backing of Western Europe’s liberal press, he never succeeded in swaying the pope, who if anything became more adamant, the more he felt embattled. According to Kertzer, the Mortara case was extremely significant in contributing to the restricting of the Catholic Church’s secular power in Europe and its limitation to the religious field.

6 May 29th, 2023, quoted in Georgia L. Gilholy, “Italian Film Sparks Debate on Jewish Child Kidnapped by 19^th-Century Pope,” JNS.org.