Mortara case

On the night of 23 June 1858, the police of the Papal States came to the house of Salomone and Marianna Mortara in Bologna and took away their six-year-old son Edgardo. A Christian servant, Anna Morisi, said she had secretly baptized him when he was gravely ill as a baby, and the law of the Papal States did not allow a baptized child to be raised by Jews. On the order of the inquisitor of Bologna, Father Pier Gaetano Feletti, the boy was taken to Rome, where Pope Pius IX took him under his own protection. The pope refused all appeals: from the family, from Sir Moses Montefiore, who travelled to Rome in 1859, and from governments including Napoleon III's France.

Edgardo was raised a Catholic, became a priest and died in Belgium in 1940. The case outraged Europe and America and weakened support for the pope's rule over his lands; Bologna left papal rule in 1859–1860. It also led Jews to organize to defend each other: the Alliance Israélite Universelle was founded in Paris in 1860, and the Board of Delegates of American Israelites in 1859.