A Ritual of Faith
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
On a June night in 1858, a marshall appeared at Momolo Mortaro’s door in Bologna and announced, “Your son Edgardo has been baptized and I have been ordered to take him with me.” He was acting in accordance with church law, which applied to those living in the rapidly shrinking Papal States: it was illegal for Jews to raise a baptized child. The Mortaros insisted that their child had never been baptized and was therefore still Jewish, but the church said it had information that the ritual had been performed secretly several years earlier. They whisked the boy off to Rome, never to return to his family.
Such legal abductions were not uncommon at the time; in fact, the practice began in 1220 with the Inquisition. When a Jewish child was “revealed” to be Christian through secret baptism, the usual suspect was a Christian household servant. Although it was illegal for Catholics to work in Jewish ghettos, the church tolerated the practice, leading to considerable anxiety in Jewish households under papal control. (In the Jewish ghetto of Ferrara, a city near Bologna, Catholic servants were required to sign notarized statements when they left a household saying they had never baptized a member of the family.)
This isn’t to say that a great domestic drama couldn’t have been written, a drama necessarily infused with the political realities of Jewish subjugation under Catholic rule. But such a drama would require fleshed-out characters maneuvering through complicated emotional terrain, and novice playwright Levinson can’t provide either. Instead he creates generic figures posturing in schematic scenes, each of which illustrates a single plot point or idea. In the first scene, we learn that David regularly breaks Sabbath to go fishing with his son, which makes the Orthodox Yaacov issue some veiled threats. In the next scene an officer arrives and reads an edict requiring the surrender of the boy within 24 hours. Then we see Yaacov asking Father Santini for leave to prove that Aaron couldn’t have been baptized properly. Next the officer comes back and tears the child from his father’s hands. Meanwhile pretty much the only thing we learn about Leah is that she wears a babushka.
