Biography
Attracting national attention for his 1997 book, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction, followed by the bestselling 2001 book, The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, David Kertzer has become America’s foremost expert on the modern history of the Vatican’s relations with the Jews. His book, Prisoner of the Vatican, published in November, 2004, has garnered rave reviews and been selected as one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly. Based on newly available papal archives, it tells the previously unknown story of how the popes attempted to overthrow the new Italian state and retake Rome in the late nineteenth century. Kertzer's latest book, Amalia's Tale, published in March of 2008, tells the story of an illiterate Italian woman who contracted syphilis from a baby in a local nurse home and, consequently, embarked on a long legal battle against the medical establishment and the aristocracy.
In 1992 David Kertzer became the Paul Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science at Brown University, where he has been professor of both anthropology and Italian Studies. In 2006 he was named Provost of Brown University. He had previously been the William Kenan Professor of Anthropology at Bowdoin College, and a visiting faculty member at the Universities of Catania and Bologna in Italy, and both the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.
Kertzer is the recipient of many honors: Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, two Fulbright fellowships, various National Science Foundation and National Institutes for Health research awards, a fellowship year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavior Sciences, Stanford, and a residency at the American Academy of Rome. In 2005 he was elected to be a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
In addition to writing and editing many books, and co-founding and co-editing the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Kertzer has written many opinion pieces for newspapers--such as The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Baltimore Sun. His popular journalism includes a cover story that appeared in TV Guide: an anthropologist's view of the Super Bowl. He has published three op eds in the New York Times, one in 1998 on the opening of the Inquisition archives, a second in 2000 on Pope John Paul II’s apology to the Jews, and a third in 2002 on contemporary Muslim anti-Semitism.
His book, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, played a central role in the controversy over the beatification of Pope Pius IX. In 1858, on orders of the Inquisition, a six-year-old Jewish boy was taken from his parents in Bologna, then part of the Papal States. A servant girl had allegedly baptized him—although the parents knew nothing of it—and so, the inquisitors ruled, the boy was Catholic and could not remain with a Jewish family. When the police tore the terrified boy from his father’s arms, a dramatic saga began. Despite international protests, Pope Pius IX refused to give the child back, and in fact became a surrogate father for him. The resulting furor contributed the following year to the fall of the Papal States. In the summer of 2000, major articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post (in a long front page piece), Time magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere cited Kertzer’s work in connection with the beatification controversy. In September 2000, two days before Pope John Paul II presided over the ceremony, Kertzer debated one of the archbishops at the Vatican responsible for the beatification, on a live, nationally broadcast Italian radio program. He also appeared on a special segment about the controversy aired nationally in early September on PBS (“Religion and Ethics Newsweekly”).
The Popes Against the Jews is a response to the 1998 Vatican Commission report on Church responsibility for the Holocaust. That report, produced at the Pope’s request, and eleven years in the making, concluded that the popes had always acted kindly toward the Jews, and that the Church bore no responsibility for modern anti-Semitism. Using never before consulted materials from the Inquisition archives, and from various other Vatican archives, Kertzer showed why the report is best considered the product of wishful thinking. He shows how the popes actually treated the Jews when they had power over them—as they did in Rome until 1870—and how in subsequent decades the Vatican worked covertly to help build a modern anti-Semitic movement. The book was glowingly reviewed in the daily New York Times, the Sunday New York Times, the Economist, and many other publications in the U.S., Britain, Germany, and Italy. It was the subject of a seven-minute segment on NPR by Sylvia Poggioli.
A stage version of The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara has been written by Alfred Uhry, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Driving Miss Daisy,” “Last Night at Ballyhoo,” and other award-winning plays. It opened at Hartford Stage in 2002. A new version of the play was performed at the Guthrie Theater, in Minneapolis, from Nov. 4 to Dec. 17, 2006.