Abduction of the Child of Mortara by the Inquisition.

A rare circular letter from the Board of Representatives of the United Congregations of Israelites of the City of New York. Addressed to Congregation Beth Israel, Baltimore, Maryland, concerning the Mortara Affair. The abduction of six-year old Edgardo Mortara from his home in Bologna, Italy, and his subsequent forced conversion to Catholicism, with the connivance of Papal authority, appalled the Jews across the globe. The American Jewish community joined the outrage expressed by world Jewry demanding the return of the child to his parents. Despite extensive agitation, the Pope would not relent and the child was in fact never returned. Indeed “Pius” Mortara died as an ordained priest in a Belgian abbey in 1940, aged 88 years. The Board of Delegates of American Israelites was the first Jewish civil and political rights organization in the United States. It was established in 1859 due to the need for a unified Jewish response to the infamous Edgardo Mortara kidnapping. The present letter was dispatched to inform congregations that the Board has deputed Gershom Kursheedt to act on the community’s behalf. It asks Baltimore’s Sephardic community to join “and add the weight of your influence to a combined movement to obtain the restoration of the child to his parents.” In April of that year Kursheedt would accompany Sir Moses Montefiore to Rome on an ultimately unsuccessful mission to meet with the Pope. For more on the involvement of the Jewish Community of Baltimore in the Mortara Affair, see Kestenbaum Sale 79, lot 176. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortara_case; D. Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (1997); B. W. Korn, The American Reaction to the Mortara Case (1957).