Reviews

Amalia's Tale

A Poor Peasant, an Ambitious Attorney, and a Fight for Justice

 

Reviews

 

Publishers Weekly [starred review], October 26, 2007

In this absorbing account, Amalia Bagnacavalli’s tale is a horrific one. An impoverished Italian peasant in the late 19th century, Amalia was hired as a wet nurse and contracted syphilis from the infant assigned her by a Bologna foundling home. She in turn spread the disease to her husband and their baby daughter and sons. Her plight was common, Kertzer notes, in a Europe plagued for centuries by poverty, prostitution, venereal disease and legal-religious mores that forced unwed mothers to give up their newborns to institutions where they would be nursed by strangers. But Amalia took the very modern step of suing the foundling home and its aristocratic board, helped by a young lawyer eager to impose a scientific, bureaucratically controlled regimen on an antiquated welfare system. Amalia’s court victory over the Italian medical establishment was no feel-good triumph of justice: her lawyer screwed her out of every penny of the huge settlement she won, and the system of bottle-feeding prompted by her suit killed most of the foundlings subjected to it. Like Kertzer’s much-praised The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, Amalia’s story is a rich social history, in which new values clash with old in an Italy wracked by the fitful march of progress.

Washington Post Book World, March 2, 2008
By Jonathan Yardley

Difficult though it may be to imagine from the vantage point of 2008, little more than a century ago Europe was still under the thumb of syphilis. In Bologna, the northern Italian city that is the focus of David Kertzer's study of one especially dramatic case, "soldiers . . . were a common source of women's infections, as were other men who visited prostitutes and passed the disease on to their lovers," but that was only the beginning. Throughout Italy, cities sponsored homes for foundlings, which "for centuries . . . had taken in hundreds of thousands of babies abandoned by their parents at birth." Pasteurization had not been invented, so cow's milk was unsafe. To feed the babies, the homes hired poor women from the countryside to breast-feed them. Many of these babies had been born with syphilis, which they passed on to the women. Kertzer writes:

"That syphilis could be transmitted through wet-nursing had been known practically from the time that the disease first appeared in Europe, and it was mentioned in a Latin medical text of 1498. The constant contact of the babies' mouths with their nurses' nipples put the women at extreme risk. As the nineteenth-century French syphilologist Alfred Fournier put it, 'Nothing is so dangerous to its surroundings as a syphilitic infant.' With syphilis so widespread -- it is estimated that 10 percent of all the men in Europe's cities had the disease -- foundling home directors were desperate. . . . Making the problem worse, these women often caused wider contagion in their isolated hometowns. . . . At a public health conference in 1875, a public health doctor from St. Petersburg, Russia, reported that in one peasant community in his district, eight women who had served as wet nurses in the city's foundling home returned to their own homes with syphilis and ended up infecting sixty people."

One woman who found herself caught in this trap was Amalia Bagnacavalli, who "lived in a little hamlet called Oreglia, part of the larger mountain town of Vergato, whose hamlets lay scattered across a vast area" not far from Bologna. She was 23 years old, married to a man several years her senior, with a one-year-old daughter. In 1890, with her family sorely impoverished, she rode the train to Bologna and then walked to "an institution known as the Bastardini, the home of the 'little bastards.' " She applied for work as a wet nurse, was subjected to a medical examination and found free of syphilis, then presented with a "scrawny, whimpering infant" who had around her neck a medallion identifying her as Paola Olivelli.

Not until she boarded the train back to Vergato did Amalia look really closely at the baby: "What she saw made her shudder. The baby's body was malformed, her chest strangely twisted. And something else was wrong. At the foundling home Amalia had noticed that Paola's eyes seemed suspiciously filmy. Now that she got to look more closely, Amalia realized that the baby was blind." Back at home, the baby cried constantly and "would barely suckle at Amalia's breast." Soon, "not only wasn't Paola eating, but her nose was constantly running and, more worrisome still, began to emit a strange yellow fluid that ran down her lip" and her "breath had a pungent smell."

So Amalia took Paola to Carlo Dalmonte, Vergato's town doctor, who had seen all too many cases of syphilis among babies brought from the Bologna foundling home, the women who suckled them, the children and husbands and lovers of these women. He "told the frightened Amalia never to nurse the baby again, and he made her promise to take Paola back to the foundling home without delay." She did so the following day. Soon a "strange sore" appeared near her left nipple. She returned to Dalmonte, who wrote a medical certificate saying he had detected an initial syphiloma on her breast. He also stated the cause -- Amalia "had been given syphilis by the foundling Paola Olivelli" -- and he "urged her to get a lawyer and sue."

This was almost unheard of. Amalia was poor, ignorant and utterly powerless. The foundling home was a charitable undertaking of Bologna's rich, educated and powerful, in particular "its president, Count Francesco Isolani, one of Bologna's leading noblemen." But, as Kertzer is at pains to document, in the late 19th century, Italy was in the midst of profound political and social change. The old order of balkanized city states and an almighty Vatican had been replaced by the Risorgimento, a movement for the country's political unification. By 1871, Rome fell to the army of an Italy united for the first time and became the capital, while "the defeated pope, Pius IX, retreated to his Vatican palaces as a self-styled prisoner." Reform was in the air, and workers and peasants began to clamor for their rights:

"The tale of Amalia Bagnacavalli is the story of people living amid this historic upheaval. Her story can scarcely be imagined any earlier in Italian history. It would have been inconceivable that an illiterate peasant woman could take legal action against one of Bologna's foremost aristocrats and one of the major urban institutions of her time -- the Bologna foundling home. For all this to take place, a host of major changes had to appear. There had to be an established legal system that would allow such a suit to be filed and pursued. There would have to be a crusading lawyer who, motivated by a new ideology and social ambitions unleashed by the loosening of aristocratic control, would champion her cause. And there would have to be a change in legal philosophy in the courts, with lowly workers seen as having certain basic rights."

From Amalia's point of view, the crucial figure was Augusto Barbieri, a 28-year-old lawyer who saw himself -- and was seen by his peers -- as part of "an enlightened elite whose mission was to transform Italy into a modern country." A "man of strong convictions, he liked to see himself as a champion of more scientific government, a protector of the poor. But he was also deeply ambitious." His young practice had yet to take off, and he seems to have realized at once that taking on Count Isolani -- better yet, beating Count Isolani -- would make him a public figure, attracting more clients to his office and perhaps giving a push to the political aspirations he nurtured.

Between the time Amalia came to his office and the final resolution of the case, a full decade passed. Amalia's little girl died from syphilis, her husband Luigi contracted the disease, other children with whom she became pregnant died at, or soon after, birth. Her "life had become a tale of woe." She had absolutely no understanding of all the legal maneuvering that surrounded her, and she had little more than a pittance to live on. She persisted in the vague hope, encouraged by Barbieri, that a pot of gold lay at the end of this strange rainbow, but she was far too innocent to have any real idea what it would be or what it would mean to her.

As it evolved over the years, Amalia's case pitted her and Barbieri against "the entire medical establishment of Bologna." After one particularly disheartening setback, Barbieri seemed to have "nothing but his own righteous anger and his long-suffering client." Although he had told her that he would not collect his fee until a final judgment had been rendered in his favor, he took out loans to pay witnesses and other expenses.

The case was a roller coaster. There were victories, defeats, appeals and, in the end, a negotiated settlement with the foundling home that left Amalia virtually as penniless as she had been when it all started. She and Luigi received 22,500 lire -- a stupefying sum for anyone of their class -- but had to turn it all over to Barbieri to settle their debts. "How," Kertzer asks, "did Amalia and Luigi react to this news? Did they use the rich palette of profanity their mountain dialect provided to denounce their erstwhile defender? Did they remind him of all the assurances he had given them over the years, how many times he had told them that they should trust him completely?"

We can't know, for Barbieri did not record this in his otherwise voluminous records. But what we do know, as Kertzer says at the end, "is that back then, as today, when the world of the rich collides with that of the poor, it is rarely the rich who suffer."

Kertzer, a respected anthropologist and scholar of Italian history who is provost of Brown University, practices in Amalia's Tale what he calls "serious history for a general audience," and he places narrative ahead of footnote-by-footnote documentation. As he admits, this may well disturb some in academia who are chained to apparatus, but it will please the general reader who seeks a glimpse into a part of the past about which we know virtually nothing. Kertzer is correct to say that now, with "HIV-positive mothers" passing AIDS to infants, Amalia's story has continuing pertinence. He has told that story well.

New York Post book review, Sunday March 16, 2008
SPOILED MILK
By William Georgiades

In August 1890, peasant woman Amalia Bagnacavalli traveled from her mountain village to Bologna in northern Italy to meet with Augusto Barbieri, a 28-year old lawyer. Their meeting spawned an unlikely 10-year odyssey in which the illiterate Amalia and her politically-minded attorney took on the medical establishment in Bologna and effectively changed the laws governing the treatment of wet nurses, while reaping a huge settlement.

Author David Kertzer's achievement with "Amalia's Tale" is to render an obscure and fascinating case as a riveting courtroom drama that touches on medical, legal and charitable ethics on the cusp of the 20th century. "Today too we witness the drama of a terrible disease passed between baby and the breast, but now it is infants, not the women who are nursing them, whose lives are at risk, threatened with infection by HIV-positive mothers," Kertzer points out. "Today the kind of legal action that Amalia took, which then had no name, has become so common that it is part of a well-known category, the medical malpractice suit."

Abandoned babies were such a huge problem in Italy that a series of Foundling hospitals were set up to attend to them. But then so many of those babies born with syphilis ended up passing it on to their wet nurses, young peasant women such as Amalia who were paid nine lire a month to nurse. (The train ride from Amalia's hometown to Bologna was five lire.) "The nineteenth century was something of a high-water mark for syphilis in Europe," Kertzer explains.

This was not an isolated issue - in the 1880s "34 former wet nurses had approached the hospital claiming they had been infected with the disease," while "276 foundlings had been struck with syphilis." The Bologna Foundling Hospital had a policy of paying for the treatment of the illness, on the quiet. The treatment included the use of mercury, which had a number of awful side effects.

At the heart of it all is Amalia, utterly baffled by the labyrinthine legal proceedings the author renders with such readable simplicity here. At the end of their case, Amalia and her husband Luigi are called into Barbieri's office only to be informed that they can take no part in the ultimate settlement of 22,500 lire. It is an affecting scene, all the more so because it spells out the attorney's gradual cynicism - the passion for social justice at 28 has curdled to a bullying opportunism within 10 years, devastating the couple who trusted him completely.
 

Reviews

Prisoner of the Vatican

The Popes' Secret Plot to Capture Rome from the New Italian State

Reviews

Publishers Weekly, September 2004 (starred review)
"Modern Italy was founded... over the dead body of Pope Pius IX," writes Kertzer, author of the National Jewish Book Award-winning The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (also a National Book Award finalist), in this riveting and fast-paced chronicle of the rise of the Italian state and the Vatican's forgotten battle against the nationalists to retain power over Rome. In 1870, Victor Emmanuel II, king of a newly united Italy, sought an agreement with Pius IX in which the pope would rule the Tiber's right bank while the king would govern the left bank. When the pope rejected this arrangement, Italian troops seized power in Rome and Pius IX sought refuge in the Vatican palaces, declaring himself a prisoner. Led by Garibaldi and aided by Catholic France, the nationalists gained control in 1878, and so angered were nationalists at Pius IX that in 1881 protesters almost succeeded in dumping his corpse into the Tiber. The animosity between the pope and the state continued until 1929, when Mussolini and the Vatican signed a concordat in which the Vatican recognized the legitimacy of the Italian state and the Vatican was granted the rights of a sovereign state. Kertzer, given access to newly opened Vatican archives, tells a first-rate tale of the political intrigues and corrupt characters of a newly emerging nation, offers history writing at its best, and provides insight into a little-known chapter in religious and political history. 16 pages of b&w photos, 5 maps. Agent, Ted Chichak. (Nov. 15)

Kirkus, September 1, 2004 (starred review)
Contrary to history books, the Middle Ages didn't end with the Renaissance in Italy. They lasted until Septeember 20, 1870, when "Europe's last theocratic government was ended."

So writes Kertzer (History/Brown Univ.; The Popes Against the Jews, 2001, etc.) in this rousing tale of clerical skullduggery and topsy-turvy politics, laced with plenty of cross-border intrigue. Pope Pius IX had made no secret of his hatred for democracy, nationalism, and other moderninzing political forces sweeping Europe in the mid-19^th century, and for good reason: a united secular Italy, the dream of Garibaldi and his red-shirted legions, could mean only that papal power would wane, and Pius counted as a great blasphemy the modern notion that "Church and state should be separate or that the papacy could survive and even flourish without owning its own land."

Even if the Savoyard king opposing Pius was unimpressive ("Lazy and pig-headed, he had little sense of his own limits, which were considerable"), and even if Italy, "a patchwork of states and duchies propped up by foreign forces," was ill-equipped for unification, the leaders of the Vatican sensed that they were on the losing side of history and that the increasingly whittled-away Papal States were not long for the world. Thus a campaign of intrigues, some involving assassination attempts on revolutionary and monarchical leaders, some seeking the intervention of France and Austria, the two leading Catholic powers of the time, against the Italian government. Even as such efforts failed, the Vatican promulgated a new doctrine--that of papal infallibility. Vatican scheming against the Italian state continued even after Pius's death, writes Kertzer, and it was not until after WWI that a successor pope lifted the ban against Catholics' serving in parliament or even voting. Whereupon the Vatican, eager now to battle socialism, forged a pact with Mussolini, granting it sovereign-nation status and requiring that Catholicism be Italy's sole and official religion.

An insightful airing of dirty cassocks within papal politics, from a masterful, controversial scholar.

America: The National Catholic Weekly, November 8, 2004
In light of the present worldwide prestige of the papacy, it comes as a shock to realize that less than a century and a quarter ago an anticlerical mob tried to interrupt Pope Pius IX’s funeral procession, determined to throw the pope’s corpse into the Tiber. And it seems like ancient history to recall that Pius IX and the four popes who followed him, from 1870 to 1929, all styled themselves “prisoner of the Vatican” and refused to leave its confines in protest against the new Italian state that had taken from them the Papal States and the city of Rome. All of them, Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, Benedict XV and Pius XI (until he signed the Lateran treaties) denounced in decreasingly hostile terms the new Italian state. They endorsed Pius IX’s argument that the anticlerical state had stolen what he called the Patrimony of St. Peter, and they hoped that their denunciations, their disapprovals and their forbidding of Catholics to participate in national elections (up to 1919) would bring the Italian state down.

But in fact, as David Kertzer demonstrates in this lively narrative, the popes had no material force at hand and could rely only on their spiritual suasion of Catholics, both in Italy and abroad, to achieve their aim of restoring the papal territories to their control. One way of doing this was to apply diplomatic pressure on foreign powers, to play the game of diplomacy, pitting one state against another, hoping to use the allegiance of the Catholics in those states (France, Germany and Austria) and their fear of one another in the increasingly dangerous world of alliances and imperialistic ventures that eventually erupted into World War I.

Author of the rightfully acclaimed The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, the story of the shameful abduction of a young Jewish boy by Pius IX, and the polemically anti-papal The Popes Against the Jews, Kertzer in this work concentrates on the pontificates of Pius IX (1846-78) and Leo XIII (1878-1903). He uses a wide array of sources, including abundant documentation from his research in the Vatican archives. His narrative is filled with telling anecdotes and colorful descriptions of the various characters involved in the struggle, including the leaders of Italian unification, the Italian monarchs, the anticlerical Italian politicians, foreign diplomats and both intransigent and accommodating cardinals and bishops - not all clerics supported the popes in their aims.

The pontificate of Pius IX is well known. Hailed as the liberal pope at his accession in 1846, he turned intransigent after the 1848 revolution in Rome forced him into exile, and he returned to Rome with a decades-long condemnation of what he termed the modern world. He lost the Papal States to the forces of Italian unification but was protected in Rome by the troops of French Emperor Napoleon III until those troops had to be pulled out to defend France against the Prussians in 1870, just after the First Vatican Council had proclaimed papal infallibility. Pius hoped that the European Catholics would pressure their governments to restore Rome to him. Roman anticlericals, free now from papal control, agitated against the Pope. Just as eagerly, papal supporters rallied to his defense, intensifying the continuing clerical/anticlerical conflict.

What is not as well known are the papal politics of Pius’s successor, Leo XIII. On this Kertzer’s narrative sheds new light. Appearing as a more progressive pontiff, Leo seemed at first to signal a change from Pius’s intransigent policies, but then he began to vacillate between Vatican die-hard opponents of any concessions to the Italian state and bishops who wanted compromise, so that their faithful, as well as themselves, could become Italian patriots. When he selected as his secretary of state the intransigent Mariano Rampolla, it was a sign that the die-hards had won. Rampolla and the nuncios then began to play the diplomatic game to win concessions. Their chief tactic was to threaten to have the pope go into exile as a means of pressuring foreign governments to back the restoration of the papal territories. Germany, France and Austria all feared that the Catholics in their domains would force their governments to war with Italy to prevent the ignominy of a papal exile. At the same time, each of the European powers saw the opportunity of taking advantage of an Italian state weakened by conflict over such a papal exile. But it was not a consistent game. The shifting fortunes of the various nations with one another, in the rivalry of international politics and of alliances, led the states to change policies from time to time. And the papal diplomats were not above considering conspiring with Italian republicans to overthrow the Savoy monarchy and establish an Italian federal republic, in which the papal lands could once again be restored.

With the death of Leo in 1903, the papal diplomatic initiative was pushed into the background as the new pope, Pius X, became more concerned with doctrinal matters, and his successors, Benedict XV and Pius XI, gave up the hope of a restoration of papal temporal power, finally acknowledging the loss of papal lands in the Lateran Pacts of 1929. The increasing growth of papal prestige after 1929 became proof that the Italian anticlericals were right: the papacy did not need its former territories to be independent; and if Rome is no longer under papal political control, it is, if nothing else, the cultural center of the Catholic, and hence, papal, world. José M. Sánchez

José M. Sánchez, a professor of history at St. Louis University, is the author of Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust.

The Tampa Tribune, November 14, 2004
Book Reveals Pope's Plot To Seize Rome From New Italian State.
By MARK F. LEWIS Special To The Tampa Tribune.

PRISONER OF THE VATICAN: The Pope's Secret Plot To Capture Rome From The New Italian State. By David I. Kertzer . Houghton Mifflin. 368 pages. $26.

For anyone viewing the current status of the Vatican being peacefully surrounded by Italy, it might be difficult to imagine that this situation was anything but harmonious from the latter half of the 19th century to more than 50 years later.
Using recently uncovered documents, David I. Kertzer, author of "The Popes Against The Jews," has written a fascinating history of the early days of Italian unification and the conflicts that arose between its secular government and the jurisdiction of the Holy See.
The historical time line begins in September, 1870, when Italian troops entered the city of Rome and took its secular control out of the hands of Pope Pius IX. The new government then took the highly charged ceremonial step of moving the capital there from Florence the next year. These events began a 59-year period during which no pope left the confines of the Vatican , a circumstance that gave rise to the book's title, an appellation that the pope used to gain sympathy for his plight.
Aware of the political and public relations nightmare that would ensue if the pope was removed from the city, King Victor Emmanuel II proposed a compromise, suggesting that Rome be split into two domains separated by the Tiber River.
This seemingly reasonable suggestion was rejected by the pope. Less than 10 years after publishing "Quanta Cura" and the "Syllabus of Errors," which established in print the infallibility of his rule and prevented Catholics from participating in the political process, the pope viewed this state of affairs as a "battle between God's forces and those of the Devil."
Instead of trying to work with the new secular leadership, he turned for support to Catholics in other European countries and their secular rulers. It was during this time that he also first considered the possibility of leaving Rome: "Nothing would more dramatically destabilize the new Italian State than the pope's living in exile, calling on the world's leaders to restore him to his rightful home."

The presence of two "sovereigns" living within a mile of each other in Rome caused many awkward diplomatic situations for foreign leaders who wanted to visit the city. The pope's continuous threats to leave Rome, which were carried forth by Pius' successor, Leo XIII, kept Europe on edge for many years.
Using the Vatican 's meticulous records, Kertzer shows the extent to which inquiries were made to foreign governments about both refuge for the pope and aid in his quest to be returned to power in Rome.
Ironically, it was Mussolini who ended the tension in February, 1929, and in July of that year, the pope was "freed" from the Vatican walls.

The book's subtitle may overstate the severity of the pope's plans, yet "Prisoner Of The Vatican" unearths a story that wasn't previously well- known: "The most basic fact of the creation of modern Italy - that its greatest foe was the pope himself - is one that cannot easily be mentioned."

Mark F. Lewis is a prosecutor at the Hillsborough state attorney's office.

Booklist, November 15, 2004:
Another illuminating papal chronicle from the author of The Popes against the Jews (2001). When the Papal States were conquered and Italy was first unified as a nation in 1861, the pope, and consequently the Roman Catholic Church, lost land, influence, and power. Basing his research on recently recovered Vatican documents, Kertzer recounts how both Pope Pius IX and his successor, Pope Leo XIII, colluded with other members of the clergy and with rival European powers in an unsuccessful effort to dismantle the new Italian State and seize Rome. Proclaiming himself a "prisoner of the Vatican" in 1870, Pius IX undertook what would become for himself and subsequent pontiffs a 59-year exile within the confines of the Vatican . Populated with a colorful cast of authentic historical figures, this fascinating slice of papal and Italian history will intrigue and enlighten both scholars and the merely curious.

Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.

OnMilwaukee.com, December 3, 2004:
By Bobby Tanzilo.

Know an Italophile or history buff? Either will love David Kertzer's new book, "Prisoner of the Vatican: The Popes' Secret Plot to Capture Rome from the New Italian State." Kertzer, a respected scholar, explains how the young Italy of the late 19th century was embroiled in a public and secret battle with the Vatican over the fate of Rome. Not dry history, "Prisoner of the Vatican" is a lively, page-turning read.

Providence Journal, December 12, 2004.
Papacy power play. Brown professor follows the decline of the Papal States in 19th-century Italy.
By Tony Lewis.

The story of Italy's unification in the late 19th century usually focuses on the romantic figure of Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose statue graces many a park up and down the peninsula. Less well-known is Victor Emmanuel, the new country's first king, who lies buried in the Pantheon in the very heart of Rome.

But what is hardy recognized at all, according to Brown social science Prof. David I. Kertzer, is the extent to which the Papacy worked to defeat Italy's unification movement, and the lengths to which the Vatican went to regain territory absorbed into the new country.

In Prisoner of the Vatican, Kertzer -- author of The Popes against the Jews (2001) and 1997 National Book Award finalist for The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara -- illuminates one of history's darker corners, and with a flair for the dramatic that turns this detailed work into a suspenseful and even captivating read.

Thanks to access to secret Vatican archives, Kertzer is able to provide something like a day-by-day account of the political and military maneuvering that led to the collapse of the Papal States -- a broad swath of central Italy under the pope's control for centuries -- and the surrender of Rome to the king's forces in 1870. Eschewing compromise and entirely tone deaf to the zeitgeist, Pope Pius IX saw the Church's dominions gradually contract around him until he could describe himself as "a prisoner of the Vatican."

There's little question that the pope miscalculated on several levels. Playing an all-or-nothing game, he rejected repeated offers from his reluctant enemy, Victor Emmanuel, and sought to enlist the support of foreign countries -- Catholic France and Austria, in particular -- against the fledgling Italian state. When these ploys failed, Pius and then his successor, Leo XIII, threatened to flee Italy and live in exile.

Kertzer's approach is both micro- and macroscopic. On the one hand, he presents his cast of characters in sweeping, even theatrical, detail, and yet dwells at length on the international ramifications of the Vatican's chess game, its belief that "nothing would more dramatically destabilize the new Italian state than the pope's living in exile, calling on the world's leaders to return him to his rightful home."

Throughout, there are illuminating and fascinating portraits, of the Jesuits, of the anticlerical Garibaldi, of Pius himself, the reactionary who insisted for the first time on papal infallibility. And of idiosyncratic events, like Pius' tumultuous funeral procession, which almost saw his coffin tossed into the Tiber, and the dedication of the statue of Giordano Bruno in Rome's Campo dei Fiori in 1889, where Bruno had been burned at the stake by the Inquisition hundreds of years earlier.

Aside from some superficial comments on modern Italy that appear as parting shots in the Epilogue, Prisoner of the Vatican combines meticulous scholarship with lively writing and brings welcome attention on a neglected corner of history.

Tony Lewis is a frequent reviewer in Dartmouth.

Newark Star-Ledger, Sunday, December 12, 2004
Speaking Volumes: The war against unity.

Modern Italy was unified in 1870 when the national government annexed Rome and the Papal States despite protests from Pope Pius IX. The new nation almost didn’t survive, as the pope struggled to get other European countries to invade Italy to restore the papal lands. For the following six decades, the popes portrayed themselves as captives of the Italian government, trapped in the confines of the Vatican.
In “Prisoner of the Vatican: The Popes’ Secret Plot to Capture Rome from the New Italian State” (Houghton Mifflin, $26), anthropologist and historian David I. Kertzer writes a gripping account of this almost-unknown story. The saga pits Pius IX against Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of Italy, who was forced by Italian patriots like Giuseppe Garibaldi to take Rome, a city he didn’t want. With new Vatican documents, Kertzer draws a vivid picture of Pius IX as he tries to keep his temporal power, and explores the dramas and follies of Italian unification.
Kertzer, 56, was born in New York City and earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from Brandeis University. A professor of social sciences, anthropology and Italian studies at Brown University, he is the author of “The Popes Against the Jews,” “The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara” and four earlier books. Kertzer is researching a book in Bologna, Italy, on Mussolini and the Vatican. He spoke to New York-based freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone.

What kind of characters were Pope Pius IX and Victor Emmanuel II?
They were both larger-than-life figures. Pius IX was probably the most important pope in modern history, a deeply religious figure who could be gregarious and affable, but who had a terrible temper and believed that he spoke God’s will. Pius believed that God ordained him to be both pope and king of the Papal States. He was pitted against Victor Emmanuel II, who was the Savoyard king. The king was very impolitic and fancied himself a great military leader, when he was really a disastrous one. Some say he was in the right place at the right time. Victor Emmanuel was afraid of the pope and did not want to be in Rome when the pope was there. The king was reluctant to take Rome, but was pressured by the Italian nationalists, who thought you couldn’t have Italy without Rome as its capital. Victor Emmanuel didn’t speak Italian that well. He spoke French and the Piedmontese dialect. He also never wanted southern Italy as part of his kingdom, but Garibaldi forced him to take it in. Garibaldi himself viewed the papacy as a cancer on humanity to be extirpated. This look at Italian unification is not a story that most people seem to know, even in the general outlines. I am always amazed at people’s reaction: “Gee, I didn’t know that Italy was formed in a pitched battle with the pope.”

What were the threats to Italian unification?
There was good reason to believe that Italy wouldn’t last. Many other European countries considered the likelihood that the country would disintegrate. At the same time, the popes were working overtime to undo Italian unification. That is something that is unknown today. The new Italian government had a great fear that the pope would flee Rome. They realized that this would be the greatest blow to their ability to continue, and that other countries would attack them to restore the pope to power. If some other country had been disposed to take the pope in, he would have left.

Pius IX, Leo XIII and the popes for the next six decades portrayed themselves as prisoners of the Vatican. Where they really prisoners?
For 59 years, the popes would not recognize the legitimacy of the Italian state. Part of it was the posture that they could not set foot on Italian soil, because it was the soil of the usurper. There was nobody keeping the pope in. The Italians said that he was free to leave. The government never took the position that they would keep the popes from leaving.

A lot of the newly available papal materials portray the 19th-century popes in an unflattering light. Why was the Vatican so open with its archives?
The Vatican deserves a lot of credit. To a considerable extent, they are very open about their history and are very serious about it. They keep meticulous records, even on things that in retrospect seem embarrassing. Not everybody at the Vatican is happy with what I’ve written with access to the Vatican archives, but those people in the positions with the most influence realize that it is important to be studying this history.

What does your training as an anthropologist bring to your studies of Italian history?
For one thing, anthropologists are really interested in understanding worldviews and getting in the skulls of the people they are working with, and not to cast judgments on them from their own ethnocentric perspectives. I think people in the (Roman Catholic) church will see that the church was treated with respect and that there was an attempt to see things from the church’s point of view. Pius behaved the way he did because it was what he believed in, and that it was God’s will.

Do you see any parallels between the 1878 College of Cardinals that elevated Pope Leo XIII during the unification crisis and the eventual election of a successor to the ailing Pope John II?
You really have to be a real Vaticanologist to follow the ins and outs of what is going on in the Vatican now. First of all, the difference is that back in the 1870s, the majority of cardinals were Italian. The Italians could determine everything. Today that is no longer the case.
There are some important similarities. Pope Pius IX was pope for 35 years, the longest of any pope in history. The current pope, John Paul II, has been pope for 25 years. The result in both cases is that almost all the cardinals appointing the successors were appointed by that pope. In that sense, the conclave to appoint a successor to John Paul will be similar to that of Pius. In 1878, there were 64 cardinals. There are now double that. John Paul has picked almost all the cardinals and has picked conservative cardinals.

From the book.
On Victor Emmanuel II, the first King of Italy:
Barrel-chested, sporting a handlebar mustache and a furry patch of beard on his chin and intimidating those around him with his bluster, Victor Emmanuel II came from a lineage that was related by marriage and descent to all of the kings and dukes in Italy he had overthrown. Uninhibited and often crude, eccentric, and disorganized, the monarch was not one for diplomatic niceties. He was used to saying what he meant – and in fact likely to voice whatever came into his head – much to the discomfort of his aides. He mixed a certain joviality with the haughtiness befitting a Savoyard king. Lazy and pig-headed, he had little sense of his own limits, which were considerable. Yet behind his much vaunted military bearing lurked a basic timidness and awkwardness, an inchoate recognition of his social inadequacy.

Boston.com, January 2, 2005
Church vs. state
By Andrew M. Greeley

Prisoner of the Vatican : The Popes’ Secret Plot to Capture Rome From the New Italian State . By David I. Kertzer . Houghton Mifflin, 357 pp., illustrated, $26.

On Sept. 20, 1870 , the pope ceased to be head of the Papal States . In fact the Papal States had disappeared. The army of the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel , had entered the Eternal City and in effect deposed the pope as the temporal ruler of Rome , wiping out a rule that in some fashion had lasted for 1,500 years. David I. Kertzer ’s “Prisoner of the Vatican ” is a narrative history of the events before the fall of Rome to the House of Savoy and the two decades thereafter. The story Kertzer tells is even-handed. It is propaganda neither for Pius IX nor Emmanuel . Author of “The Popes Against the Jews,” Kertzer might not seem to be disposed to be fair to the papacy. Nevertheless he has succeeded in writing a fair and fascinating book.

I was surprised by three elements in the story.

Many of the European leaders who might have come to the pope’s aid did not do so because they disapproved so strongly of the definition of papal infallibility. The precision that entered the document before it was voted on (in matters of faith and morals for the whole church and as head of the whole church) never seemed to catch up with the European elites.

The leaders of the new Italy were willing to give the pope all the land west of the Tiber , the so-called Leonine City , as his personal domain -- a Vatican City solution with a much larger slice of land. Pius IX turned them down. So he and his successors were “prisoners of the Vatican ” until the Lateran Treaty of 1929.

Finally the pope and his cardinals seemed to have been confident for many years that just as invaders were expelled at other times in history, this dubious Italian monarchy would be turned out too.

Most Catholic historians today would say that the loss of the temporal power over Italy was a blessing in disguise. Few Catholics would be eager to seek the return of the Papal States , Kertzer observes in conclusion: “Today there is no doubt in Rome who is the most powerful leader. One man alone…is seen as embodying society’s deepest aspirations, a man whose every act is the object of adulatory front-page coverage in the press, even of the left.”

The pope seemed to lose in 1870 and vicious anti-clericals like Garibaldi seemed to have won. Yet the papacy, by giving up power, however unwillingly, actually became more powerful. It is a puzzle the next pope should ponder when he considers whether to continue the authoritative centralism of the present style of papal governance.

There is a major problem with the book, however. Its subtitle is “The Popes’ Secret Plot to Capture Rome From the New Italian State.” The press release that accompanied my review copy emphasizes the “plot.” In the first 271 pages there is nary a word about the plot. Then the last chapter is entitled “The Pope’s Secret Plan.” However, I can’t find the words “a plot” anywhere in the chapter. Nor is any real plot described. Leo XIII , Pius IX ’s successor, did frequently discuss with his cardinals the possibility of going into exile and perhaps finding support for the restoration of temporal power from another country. These discussions were secrets to neither the Italian government nor to other European countries or anyone who read newspapers in Italy . Nothing ever came of these discussions. The pope stayed in Rome . Whether his conversations with the cardinals and his attempt to find support from other European countries (a lost cause) could be fairly called a plot is problematic at best. Even the author does not call it a plot in this brief chapter, which seems to be a last-minute addition to the book.

Some might suspect that the subtitle and the chapter are the result of a plot by the publisher to sex up the book with a little “papal conspiracy.” Perhaps books that beat up on the papacy sell better than those that don’t. If this is what happened it is a shame. Such a publisher’s plot would deface what otherwise is fair and balanced history.

Andrew M. Greeley, a priest, is on the staff of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and the Sociology Department at the University of Arizona. He is the author of “The Making of the Popes 1978” and a novel “White Smoke.”

 

The Seattle Times, Sunday, January 9, 2005
“Prisoner of the Vatican”: A pope’s last stand and the birth of the new Italy
By Robin Updike

When, on Sept. 20, 1870, Italian troops finally broke through Rome’s walls and claimed the city as part of the new Italian state, Pius proclaimed himself a “prisoner of the Vatican.” Denouncing the “usurper” state, he retreated into the Vatican complex and, spurning the government’s entreaties, refused to come out.

Since the mid-20th century, Italy and the Vatican have been inextricably linked. Tourists visit Vatican City, which at 100 acres is the world’s smallest sovereign state, while sightseeing in Rome. And the popular image of Italy today is of a Catholic country with a special and close bond to the pope, who has throughout most of the history of Christianity made his home on the left bank of the Tiber, the river that bisects Rome.

But in his riveting and fast-paced history, “Prisoner of the Vatican,” David I. Kertzer uses historical documents only recently released by the Vatican to tell the startling story of how late-19th-century popes plotted against the unification of Italy and its sovereignty. Such was the animosity between the pope and the fledgling Italian state, which began its rocky road to unification in 1859, that by the late 1880s Pope Leo XIII was actively enticing France, Germany and Austria to invade Italy and seize power from the fragile Italian monarchy and the state’s semi-independent, elected officials.

Kertzer, a Brown University professor of social science, anthropology and Italian studies, sets the tone of his extraordinary story with its first sentence: “Modern Italy, it could be said, was founded over the dead body of Pope Pius IX.” And in his epilogue, Kertzer, who has written other books on the intersection of religious and political history, notes that Sept. 20, 1870, the day the Vatican lost Rome to a secular government led by politicians and a king, “was the date the Middle Ages was finally laid to rest. Europe’s last theocratic government was ended.”

In between those bookends, Kertzer describes intrigue, spying, disinformation and public-relations campaigns worthy of any contemporary spy novel. There are scenes that today seem remarkable, such as when Victor Emmanuel II’s army of northern Italians and nationalists shot cannonballs through the walls of Rome to seize it from the Vatican. And Kertzer recounts official edicts from the pope forbidding Catholics to believe in freedom of speech, freedom of the press or freedom of religion. Indeed, the pope forbade Catholics to vote in elections, since that implied a separation of church and state. The pope officially did not allow Catholics to vote in state elections until 1919.

Until Victor Emmanuel II unified what is now modern Italy in 1870, Italy had been a patchwork of smaller sovereign states. Cutting like a great sword through the center of the Italian peninsula were The Papal States, a rich swath of land that swept from Rome north to Bologna. These lands were owned by the Catholic Church and ruled by the pope. It is no wonder that when secular revolutionaries such as Giuseppe Mazzini, the new nation’s political theorist, and Giuseppe Garibaldi, the unification’s military hero, inspired the secular nationalism that caused the overthrow of The Papal States, the pope was greatly displeased. Pius IX was suddenly a monarch with very little territory. Losing Rome to Victor Emmanuel’s army was the final insult to his temporal authority.

A stubborn, proud man, Pius IX was blind to the changing political world around him. He refused to acknowledge the new Italian state or the fact that a large segment of the population was disillusioned with the Catholic Church. In a public-relations campaign rivaling any in history, Pius IX became a self-styled “prisoner of the Vatican,” essentially putting himself under house arrest within the walls of the Vatican for the rest of his life. Yet his campaign to portray himself the victim of the new Italian state did not succeed. During his funeral procession through the streets of Rome in 1881, hostile anti-clerical crowds nearly dumped his coffin in the river.

And to the dismay of Pius IX and his successor Leo XIII, even the politically aggressive Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of Prussia, declined to make war against Italy in the late 19th century to save the honor of the Pope. The church did not make peace with the Italian government until 1929, when the Vatican agreed to recognize the legitimacy of Mussolini’s fascist government.

Kertzer is a vivid writer with a talent for bringing out dramatic details and a thorough historian, and this book is filled with footnotes for those who may challenge his often shocking facts.  For most readers, this book will be a fascinating look at a segment of Italian history that apparently is still so discomfiting that Italian schoolbooks rarely mention it. And for all readers, Kertzer’s portrayal of the power struggle between religious and secular institutions will strike a disquieting chord in the context of today’s world.

RobinUpdike is a freelance arts writer and an Internet editor.

Reviews

The Popes Against the Jews

The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism

Awards

• Toronto Globe & Mail named Popes Against the Jews one of the seven best books in history published in 2002
• Finalist for The Mark Lynton History Prize, 2002. Read the Press Release.

Quotes

• "Important....Fascinating....[A] riveting piece of historical detective work."
  -The New York Times
• "Scrupulous....Significant and compelling."
  -The Washington Post
• "The material is dynamite."
  -The Times [London]
• "Riveting."
  -The Toronto Globe and Mail
• "The Popes Against the Jews...demolishes the findings of 'We Remember'."
  -The Boston Globe
• "This reviewer is grateful to Kertzer for having written such a compelling narrative. His thesis is shocking and disturbing....An important book."
  -The Irish Times
• "Kertzer [has the] extraordinary ability to present the most painful, religiously radioactive material with a coolness that makes his findings...devastating....Its superb, meticulous scholarship is a benchmark by which other books on the subject must now be judged."
  -The Forward
• "[A] profoundly well-documented book....It is a work of brilliant narrative quality, an oppressive, unremitting and enraging report on what may be the most lethal period of official and quasi-official Catholic anti-Semitism."
  -Providence Journal
• "Important.... [Kertzer] challenges much of the received wisdom about the Holy See's role in the evolution of modern anti-Semitism.... Commands serious attention."
  - The New Leader
• "A powerful and shocking book."
  - Times Literary Supplement
• "Finely written.... Kertzer's book is valuable. It shows the extent to which anti-Semitic fanatics were tolerated in the Catholicism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It makes a case that calls for an answer."
  - The New York Review of Books
• "Brilliant.... Wonderfully written and jarring, it reads like a terrifying novel"
  - Choice
• "Kertzer's bill of indictment is a formidable one—a reminder of what a mighty institution may choose to overlook when sitting in judgrnent on itself."
  - The Economist
• "For any Catholic, the book makes profoundly uncomfortable and shameful reading.... As a contribution to the rapprochement between Catholicism and Judaism, [The Popes Against the Jews] has an. important role to play."
  - The Independent

Op-Ed

• The Washington Post "Popes and Polemics" By Paul Baumann
• New York Times Editorial / Op-Ed article: "The Modern Use of Ancient Lies"

Reviews

• New York Times by Richard Bernstein
• Sunday New York Times by Garry Wills
• New York Review of Books by Owen Chadwick
• Perlentaucher.de - Reviews of German edition
• L'Unione Sarda
• NonfictionReviews.com by Rob Hardy
• H-Catholic Review
• Canadian Jewish News by Bill Gladstone
• The Forward by A. James Rudin
• Faculty Book Spotlight Brown Alumni Website
• European History - Review of British edition by Robert Wilde

London Diplomat, March/April 2002
by Lord Janner
David Kertzer's book is a devastating review of the part played by popes, priests and prelates in the centuries leading up to the ultimate tragedy of the Holocaust. Carefully researched, often from documents which have only now become available from Vatican archives, it is both the most gripping and most depressing volume I have read in years.

Choice, 2/1/2002
by S. H. Webb Wabash College
This is not a perfect book, but it just might be a great one. Kertzer (social science and anthropology, Brown Univ., and author of The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, CH, Nov'97) takes issue with the Catholic commission that produced "We Remember," a document that blames the holocaust on nationalism, not religious intolerance. The Catholic Church has long distinguished between anti-Judaism and antisemitism, arguing that the Church fostered only negative religious views of Jews, not the more dangerous stereotypes. That distinction now can be laid to rest. Taking the focus off of Pius XII, Kertzer examines the 19th-century roots of Catholic antisemitism. He brilliantly connects Church prejudices to anxiety about modernity. The Jews benefited greatly from the rise of modern nation-states, and Catholic officials resented that. As the Catholic political agenda was blocked, Catholic leaders scapegoated the Jews. ...Wonderfully written and jarring, it reads like a terrifying novel. This book definitely belongs in every academic library.

Library Journal, 11/2001
by Jim Doyle, Sara Hightower Regional Lib., Rome, GA
Kertzer expands on a theme he first developed in The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (LJ 5/1/97). In his latest book, he exposes a trail of anti-Semitic papal policies and practices that stretched from the French Revolution to the era of the Final Solution. Kertzer argues that the modern popes and their minions helped create and perpetuate an anti-Semitic Catholic culture that facilitated the eventual extermination of six million European Jews. He asserts that despite occasional denunciations of the persecution of the Jews, the Roman Curia for political and theological reasons persistently demonized the European Jews by accusing them of such heinous crimes as the ritualistic murder of Christian children. His thesis is grounded on a thorough examination of recently released Vatican archival material and a penetrating analysis of Catholic journals and newspapers. Kertzer reveals a far more systemic pattern of papal anti-Semitism than even John Cornwell confronts in Hitler's Pope (LJ 5/15/99). His book promises to stir up considerable controversy and belongs on the shelves of both public and academic libraries.

Publishers Weekly, 8/27/2001
A number of excellent studies have recently addressed the political and social role of the Catholic Church in Europe during the Holocaust. Along comes a book that explores the church's role in setting the stage for that Holocaust. If the title of The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism isn't enough of a hint, David Kertzer spells out his thesis in the introduction: Although "the Vatican never approved the extermination of the Jews... the teachings and actions of the Church, including those of the popes themselves, helped make it possible." Kertzer argues that centuries of the church's demonization of the Jews paved the way for genocide.

Kirkus Reviews, 8/1/2001
A careful examination of the role of the Catholic Church in persecution, pogroms, and, eventually, the Holocaust. In 1987, Pope John Paul II ordered the Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews to investigate whether the church was in any way accountable for the slaughter of millions of Jews earlier in the century. The commission returned, 11 years later, with a carefully worded report admitting that the church had been guilty of "anti-Judaism," that is, opposition to the Jewish religion, but not of anti-Semitism, opposition to the Jewish people. Comforting though it may have been to worried clerics, the commission's finding was an evasion of historical reality, argues Kertzer (History/Brown Univ.; The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, 1997). He charges that the Vatican's leaders instead engaged in a conscious campaign to denounce Jews "not only as enemies of the Church but as enemies of the nation, not only as threats to the Christian religion but to Christian people." As late as the mid-19th century, he wri! tes, the church demanded that Jews within Italy be confined to ghettos and limited to selling used goods for a living; when a Tuscan duke considered allowing the Napoleonic emancipation of the Jews to stand, Pius X angrily reminded him that "the spirit of the Church . . . has always been to keep Catholics as much as possible from having any contact with the infidels." That spirit drove generations of hate-mongers, as Kertzer shows, and with only rare exceptions, such as the comparatively liberal Benedict XV, the popes of the 19th and 20th centuries actively gave ideological and material aid and comfort to the persecutors of Europe's Jews. Their acts of complicity culminated in mass murder-an outcome, Kertzer suggests, that was all but inevitable. On firmer ground than John Cornwell's error-plagued Hitler's Pope, and far better written, Kertzer's study is nonetheless likely to be challenged.

Reviews

The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara

Awards

• 1997 National Book Award finalist for nonfiction
• Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish-Christian relations

Reviews

Publishers Weekly, 3/31/1997
The few resident Jews in the declining temporal papacy under Pius IX in 1858 were outraged but not surprised when a six-year-old boy in Bologna, Edgardo Mortara, was seized by the police and removed from his parents' home. The Vatican's justification for the abduction was that Edgardo had been secretly baptized by a maid who feared he might die, and church dogma taught that a Christian child could not be raised by Jews. Despite protests that erupted as far away as the U.S., Pius IX would not relinquish the child, called him his son and arranged for his education as a priest. As Kertzer (Sacrificed for Honor) observes, committed Catholics saw religious matters with far different lenses than did the helpless Jewish minority, whose presence in Italy nevertheless predated Christianity. The theocratic papal state resisted all entreaties to relinquish the boy, creating pressures not only to liberate Edgardo, but to liberate all Italy from reactionary political regimes. When "Pio Edgardo" was 15 and a celebrity, Pius IX wrote to him, "You are very dear to me, my little son, for I acquired you for Jesus Christ at a high price." The price would be the acceleration of Italian unification and the collapse of the Vatican's political power in Italy. Kertzer's compelling narrative, purportedly the first full account of the affair to be published in English, is a dramatic sampling of a fanaticism and its pain emerging in religious guises. Edgardo, who eventually became a monk, died at 88 in 1940.

Library Journal, 5/01/1997
by Harry V. Willems, Southeast Kansas Lib. System, Iola
Kertzer (Sacrificed for Honor, Beacon, 1993) has uncovered fascinating new information about the unification of Italy. He recounts here the kidnapping of a six-year-old Jewish boy from Bologna who was then raised as a Catholic under the supervision of Pius IX. The incident altered both Italian and church history. What Cavour, Garibaldi, and Victor Emmanuel II could not accomplish in the halls of Versailles and London, and even on the battlefield, the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara did by arousing antichurch feeling in the cause of national unification. This case is an example of the Catholic Church's institutionalized suppression of the Jews. Kertzer weaves the story into a vivid tapestry that will be appreciated by historians and Italian specialists. Recommended for academic and public libraries with 19th-century revolutionary European or Jewish studies collections

Kirkus Reviews, 4/01/1997

A dramatic and heart-wrenching tale that reveals a great deal about the battle between conservative and progressive forces in mid-19th-century Europe. Kertzer, the author of the ground-breaking work Sacrificed for Honor: Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control (not reviewed), turns his attention to a smaller but no less poignant story. In 1858, authorities of the Papal States in Bologna abducted the Jewish child Edgardo Mortara from his family. Reports had reached the Inquisition in Rome that when Edgardo was an infant he had been secretly baptized by the Mortaras' Catholic servant girl. The law of the Papal States was very clear: A Christian child was forbidden to be brought up in a Jewish household. Liberal circles in Europe were outraged and mobilized. Kertzer skillfully weaves the larger historical, social, religious, and cultural forces at work into the story, without allowing these elements to overwhelm his protagonists. Although cases of children being abducted by the Church and forced to convert were not unusual, the timing of the Mortara case could not have been worse for the pope. Pius IX was—upon his election to the Chair of St. Peter—considered a liberal who might lend his temporal and spiritual power to the movement for Italian national unification. He was soon caught between the implacable forces of modernism and the Church's obstinate refusal to enter the modern world. Kertzer's challenging thesis is that the Mortara case became the catalyst for the end of papal power in Italy. Anticlerics in Italy, Protestants and Jews in Britain and America, even Napoleon III (staunch defender of papal power) joined in criticizing the abduction. Arrayed against these groups was the dark power of the Inquisition and the pope's obsessive desire to maintain his temporal power at the expense of a united Italy. A moving, dramatic study of the clash between the sacred and the secular.

Choice, 11/1997
by S. D. Benin, University of Memphis
In March 1940, a month before Nazi troops entered Belgium, an 88-year-old monk died at the abbey in Bouhay. Born in Bologna as Edgardo Mortara, this monk, as a six-year-old Jewish child, had been kidnapped from his family after unsubstantiated reports of his baptism by a Christian servant surfaced. He was sent to Rome and raised and educated there under the special eye of Pope Pius IX. Although such kidnappings were not extraordinary in European Jewish communities, this case occurred against the backdrop of a changed and changing political climate. The case attracted the attention of the Rothschilds, Sir Moses Montifiore, Napoleon III, and even some Americans, and turned international public opinion against the Vatican. It came to symbolize the revolutionary campaigns of Mazzini and Garibaldi, and the attempt to terminate the political dominance of the Catholic Church and found a modern, secular Italian state. Kertzer tells this disturbing tale with great sensitivity and skill, as he locates it within its historical context. He has illuminated a very dark recess of Jewish-Catholic relations, and in so doing, has shed additional light on the troubled history of Jewish-Christian relations.

Booklist, 5/15/1997
by Jay Freeman
In June 1858, police in Bologna, Italy, "kidnapped" a six-year-old Jewish boy, tearing him away from his distraught parents. Edgardo Mortara had been secretly baptized by a Gentile servant girl years before, according to the police. In accordance with the law forbidding "Christian" children from being raised by Jews, Edgardo was removed and began his strange odyssey that led from the struggles for Italian unification to the eve of the Holocaust. Although this is a work of nonfiction, Kertzer's chronicle has the sheer power, lyrical prose, and delicious sense of irony one expects in a great epic novel. As Edgardo's fate unfolds, we witness the long struggle between liberalism and conservatism and between secular and religious authority. Edgardo, his family, his patron and surrogate father Pius IX, and such notables as Napoleon III and Moses Montefiore move in and out of the narrative like gifted actors in a grand saga. Of course, the story is real, and it is a compelling one that merges the bizarre and tragic fate of one family with the evolution of modern European society.

Reviews

Politics and Symbols

The Italian Communist Party and the Fall of Communism

Reviews

"Kertzer's book should be read by all political scientists, whether they are specialists in Italian communism or comparative European politics, or are interested in party behavior in general. . . . Kertzer provides welcome food for thought. Strongly recommended for general audiences, specialists, and students."
—Choice

“The powers of symbols, the magical power of words: Kertzer’s book offers an extraordinary illustration of the formidable impact of words and signs in the political universe.”
—Marc Abeles, L’Homme

“The story which unfolds is rich in drama and pathos, and David I. Kertzer tells it with great flair.”
—Donald Sassoon, Times Literary Supplement

“An intriguing, well written, and provocative book that deserves to find a readership beyond specialists in Italian history and politics.”
—Alexander De Grand, Political Science Quarterly

“David I. Kertzer in Politcs and Symbols develops an interesting and informative account of the demise of the Italian Communist Party.”
—Richard W. Wilson, World Politics

Reviews

Sacrificed For Honor

Italian Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control

Awards

Runner-up, 1995 Goode Award (book on family), American Sociological Association.

Reviews

Choice, 12/1993
An engaging, deeply researched history of institutionalized infant abandonment in 19th-century Italy. Kertzer combines local studies with statistical generalizations and ably places them in sweeping comparative and historical perspective. The book complements John Boswell's The Kindness of Strangers (1988) and Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (CH, May'78). Kertzer explores social norms and ideologies through the prism of the "the Wheel"—a device linking the foundling home and the outside world, contrived so as to permit anonymous abandonment of infants. He wisely notes several causes for institutionalized infant abandonment, but stresses the Catholic Church's overriding concerns for family honor and the infant's soul as distinct from its welfare; hence the book's forceful but overly pointed title. Of special interest is the discussion of efforts to cope with unintended consequences and perverse incentive effects in the system of "reproductive control." An epilogue suggests that this history sheds fresh light on current controversies over reproductive rights and policies in the US.

Reference and Research Book News, 11/1993
Looking at the complex history of unwed mothers and their babies in Italy, Kertzer illuminates today's controversies in connection with reproductive rights, abortion, child care, and welfare—a wide range of issues that seriously need the light shed by clear, imaginative studies such as this one.

Publishers Weekly, 6/21/1993
Pregnant single women in 19th-century Italy, threatened with the loss of their own and their families' honor, gave their babies to foundling homes, where hundreds of thousands of children died from starvation and disease. In this shocking and engrossing study, Kertzer, a historian and anthropologist at Brown, blames the Catholic Church for its central role in nurturing a system that controlled women's sexuality, exempted men from parental responsibility and consigned infants to death. Midwives were recruited by church and state officials to inform on illicit pregnancies. Many foundling homes devised programs under which unwed mothers, in order to pay for their own infants' care, were forced to serve as wet nurses for other children. Kertzer draws loose parallels between the system of legalized infant abandonment, which spread throughout southern Europe, and contemporary debates on abortion and the role of church and state in defining the social good.