The setting itself is exciting, and Kertzer focuses most of his narrative on the events around the year 1848, a year of revolutions, upheavals, rebellions, and regime change in Europe. The Papal States and the War against Liberal Reformers As we shall see, however, Kertzer’s interpretations of these facts ignore important context, and he falls into the trap of repeating a variety of myths about medieval government and “Enlightenment” regimes. When it comes to relating the basic facts of the events surrounding the Papal States in the mid-nineteenth century, it is difficult to find much fault with Kertzer’s work. This time it is the internal politics of the Papal States, and how those politics influenced the regime’s relations with the great powers of Europe. With his most recent book, 2018’s The Pope Who Would Be King, Kertzer returns to the topic of the late Papal States and of the man who ruled at the time of the Mortara kidnapping: Pope Pius IX, aka “Pio Nono.”Īs with the Mortara book, Kertzer once again focuses on a topic that is rarely examined at any length in the English language.

He has written a number of books over the past twenty years combining the topics of Jews, popes, and the modern Italian state. Since the success of Mortara book, Kertzer has not strayed far from the subject matter. There’s an important lesson here for historians: if you can find an obscure but compelling historical episode to specialize in, it might pay off in a big way. The film project-explicitly based on Kertzer’s book-was still moving forward as of February of this year.

This is no small thing since a number of filmmakers-including Steven Spielberg- have expressed interest in dramatizing the Mortara case on film. The book covers the until then rarely mentioned case of an Italian Jewish boy who was illicitly baptized by the housekeeper, and then kidnapped in 1858 by Papal State authorities on the grounds that Jews in the Papal States could not be permitted to raise a Christian child.īecause so few books or in-depth articles have been written on the topic in English, Kertzer now enjoys a position as perhaps the preeminent expert on the case. Historian David Kertzer made a name for himself with his 1997 book The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara. The Pope Who Would Be King: The Exile of Pius IX and the Emergence of Modern Europe

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