The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara

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Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2008 M12 30 - 368 páginas
Soon to be a major motion picture from Steven Spielberg. 

A National Book Award Finalist


The extraordinary story of how the vatican's imprisonment of a six-year-old Jewish boy in 1858 helped to bring about the collapse of the popes' worldly power in Italy.

Bologna: nightfall, June 1858. A knock sounds at the door of the Jewish merchant Momolo Mortara. Two officers of the Inquisition bust inside and seize Mortara's six-year-old son, Edgardo. As the boy is wrenched from his father's arms, his mother collapses.  The reason for his abduction: the boy had been secretly "baptized" by a family servant.  According to papal law, the child is therefore a Catholic who can be taken from his family and delivered to a special monastery where his conversion will be completed. 
   With this terrifying scene, prize-winning historian David I. Kertzer begins the true story of how one boy's kidnapping became a pivotal event in the collapse of the Vatican as a secular power.  The book evokes the anguish of a modest merchant's family, the rhythms of daily life in a Jewish ghetto, and also explores, through the revolutionary campaigns of Mazzini and Garibaldi and such personages as Napoleon III, the emergence of Italy as a modern national state.  Moving and informative, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara reads as both a historical thriller and an authoritative analysis of how a single human tragedy changed the course of history.

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Páginas seleccionadas

Contenido

Jews in the Land of the Popes
13
Days of Desperation
32
The House of the Catechumens
55
Pope Pius IX
74
A Servants Sex Life
91
Meeting Mother
109
The Church Strikes Back
129
A Matter of Principle
143
The Inquisitors Trial
205
Defending the Inquisitor
222
The Rites of Rulers
238
New Hopes for Freeing Edgardo
247
Edgardos Escape
256
Afterword
299
Acknowledgments
305
Archival Sources and Abbreviations
329

Sir Moses Goes to Rome
162
The Inquisitors Arrest
184
The Case Against the Inquisitor
195

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Acerca del autor (2008)

David I. Kertzer is the Paul Dupee, Jr. University Professor of Social Science and professor of anthropology and Italian studies at Brown University, where he served as provost from 2006 to 2011. He is the author of nine books, including The Popes Against the Jews, which was a finalist for the Mark Lynton History Prize, and The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has twice been awarded the Marraro Prize from the Society for Italian Historical Studies for the best work on Italian history. He and his wife, Susan, live in Providence, Rhode Island.

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