
The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara
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Narrated by:
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Arthur Morey
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By:
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David I. Kertzer
About this listen
Bologna, 1858: A police posse, acting on the orders of a Catholic inquisitor, invades the home of a Jewish merchant, Momolo Mortara, wrenches his crying six-year-old son from his arms, and rushes him off in a carriage bound for Rome. His mother is so distraught that she collapses and has to be taken to a neighbor's house, but her weeping can be heard across the city. With this terrifying scene - one that would haunt this family forever - David I. Kertzer begins his fascinating investigation of the dramatic kidnapping, and shows how the deep-rooted antisemitism of the Catholic Church would eventually contribute to the collapse of its temporal power in Italy.
As Edgardo's parents desperately search for a way to get their son back, they learn why he - out of all their eight children - was taken. Years earlier the family's Catholic serving girl, fearful that the infant might die of an illness, had secretly baptized him (or so she claimed). Edgardo recovered, but when the story reached the Bologna Inquisitor, the result was his order for Edgardo to be seized and sent to a special monastery where Jews were converted into good Catholics. His justification in church teachings: No Christian child could be raised by Jewish parents.
The case of Edgardo Mortara became an international cause célèbre. Although such kidnappings were not uncommon in Jewish communities across Europe, this time the political climate had changed. As news of the family's plight spread to Britain, where the Rothschilds got involved, to France, where it mobilized Napoleon III, and even to America, public opinion turned against the Vatican. The fate of this one boy came to symbolize the entire revolutionary campaign of Mazzini and Garibaldi to end the dominance of the Catholic Church and establish a modern, secular Italian state.
A riveting story that has been remarkably ignored by modern historians, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara will prompt intense interest and discussion as it lays bare attitudes of the Catholic Church that would have such enormous consequences in the 20th century.
©2016 David I. Kertzer (P)2016 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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By: Wade Davis
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Those Wild Wyndhams
- Three Sisters at the Heart of Power
- By: Claudia Renton
- Narrated by: Claudia Renton
- Length: 15 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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They were confidantes to British prime ministers, poets, writers, and artists, their lives entwined with the most celebrated and scandalous figures of the day, from Oscar Wilde to Henry James. They were the lovers of great men - or men of great prominence... They lived in a world of luxurious excess, a world of splendor at 44 Belgrave Square and later at the even more vast Clouds, the exquisite Wiltshire house on 4,000 acres, the "house of the age", designed in 1876 by the visionary architect Philip Webb - the model for Henry James' The Spoils of Poynton.
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SLOW START BUT STICK WITH THIS ONE
- By The Louligan on 01-22-19
By: Claudia Renton
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The Manuscripts Club
- The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts
- By: Christopher de Hamel
- Narrated by: John Lee, Christopher de Hamel
- Length: 17 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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The illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages are among the greatest works of European art and literature. We are dazzled by them and recognize their crucial role in the transmission of knowledge. However, we generally think much less about the countless men and women who made, collected and preserved them through the centuries, and to whom they owe their existence. This entrancing book describes some of the extraordinary people who have spent their lives among illuminated manuscripts over the last thousand years.
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Manuscripts Through the Centuries
- By Tbaley on 12-02-23
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The Buried
- An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution
- By: Peter Hessler
- Narrated by: Peter Hessler
- Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawn by a fascination with Egypt's rich history and culture, Peter Hessler moved with his wife and twin daughters to Cairo in 2011. He wanted to learn Arabic, explore Cairo's neighborhoods, and visit the legendary archaeological digs of Upper Egypt. After his years of covering China for The New Yorker, friends warned him Egypt would be a much quieter place. But not long before he arrived, the Egyptian Arab Spring had begun, and now the country was in chaos.
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A Fascinating, Funny, and Moving Account of Egypt
- By Jefferson on 07-23-19
By: Peter Hessler
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Vulgar Favors
- The Assassination of Gianni Versace
- By: Maureen Orth
- Narrated by: Dan Woren, Maureen Orth
- Length: 18 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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On July 15, 1997, Gianni Versace was shot and killed on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion by serial killer Andrew Cunanan. But months before Versace’s murder, award-winning journalist Maureen Orth was already investigating a major story on Cunanan for Vanity Fair. Culled from interviews with more than four hundred people and insights gleaned from thousands of pages of police reports, Vulgar Favors tells the complete story of Andrew Cunanan, his unwitting victims, and the moneyed world in which they lived . . . and died.
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ONE OF THE BEST TRUE CRIME BOOKS IN MY LIBRARY!
- By Steve on 10-29-17
By: Maureen Orth
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The West
- A New History in Fourteen Lives
- By: Naoíse Mac Sweeney
- Narrated by: Shaheen Khan
- Length: 14 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Prize-winning historian Naoíse Mac Sweeney delivers a captivating exploration of how “Western Civilization”—the concept of a single cultural inheritance extending from ancient Greece to modern times—is a powerful figment of our collective imagination. An urgently needed emergent voice in big history, she offers a bold new account of Western history, real and imagined, through the lives of fourteen remarkable individuals.
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Extraordinary!!
- By Carlos Forray on 10-03-23
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The Order
- By: Kevin Flynn
- Narrated by: Gibson Frazier
- Length: 20 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Two courageous investigative journalists deliver an insider’s account of the “silent brotherhood”—the most dangerous radical-right hate group to surface since the Ku Klux Klan. They claim to be patriots, as American as apple pie, but they are this nation’s deadly brotherhood—hate groups that package their alienation against the federal government under such names as the Aryan Nation, the Order, and other white supremacist militias.
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Not very interesting
- By Anonymous User on 03-05-25
By: Kevin Flynn
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Where We Meet the World
- The Story of the Senses
- By: Ashley Ward
- Narrated by: David Morley Hale
- Length: 12 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Our senses are what make life worth living. They allow us to appreciate a sip of an ice-cold drink, the sound of laughter, the touch of a lover. But only recently have incredible advances in sensory biology given us the ability to understand how and why our senses evolved as they have. In this book, biologist Ashley Ward takes listeners on a breathtaking tour of how our senses function. Ward looks at not only the five major senses—vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch—but also a host of other senses, such as balance and interoception, the sense of the body’s internal state.
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You Can’t Taste Soy Sauce with Your Testicles!
- By Jefferson on 03-22-24
By: Ashley Ward
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There Will Be Fire
- Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes That Changed History
- By: Rory Carroll
- Narrated by: John Keating
- Length: 14 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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A bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army exploded at 2:54 a.m. on October 12, 1984. It was the last day of the Conservative Party Conference at the Grand Hotel in the coastal town of Brighton, England. Rooms were obliterated, dozens of people wounded, five killed. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in her suite when the explosion occurred; had she been just a few feet in another direction, flying tiles and masonry would have sliced her to ribbons. As it was, she survived—and history changed.
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A Very British Point of View
- By CaitB on 07-25-23
By: Rory Carroll
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In the Shadow of Liberty
- The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States
- By: Ana Raquel Minian
- Narrated by: Cynthia Farrell, David Shih, Marie-Françoise Theodore, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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A probing work of narrative history that reveals the hidden story of immigrant detention in the United States, deepening urgent national conversations around migration.
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Important information
- By W. R. on 10-03-24
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Young and Damned and Fair
- The Life of Catherine Howard, Fifth Wife of King Henry VIII
- By: Mr. Gareth Russell
- Narrated by: Jenny Funnell
- Length: 15 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Written with an exciting combination of narrative flair and historical authority, this interpretation of the tragic life of Catherine Howard, fifth wife of Henry VIII, breaks new ground in our understanding of the very young woman who became queen at a time of unprecedented social and political tension and whose terrible errors in judgment quickly led her to the executioner's block.
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Magnifent scholarly work
- By Linda Erlich on 08-08-17
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Jewels
- A Secret History
- By: Victoria Finlay
- Narrated by: Victoria Finlay
- Length: 14 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Throughout history, precious stones have inspired passions and poetry, quests and curses, sacred writings and unsacred actions. In this scintillating book, journalist Victoria Finlay embarks on her own globe-circling search for the real stories behind some of the gems we prize most. Blending adventure travel, geology, exciting new research, and her own irresistible charm, Finlay has fashioned a treasure hunt for some of the most valuable, glamorous, and mysterious substances on earth.
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Great historical stories
- By John from NorCAL on 05-25-25
By: Victoria Finlay
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Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test
- How Behavior Evolves and Why It Matters
- By: Marlene Zuk
- Narrated by: Jaime Lamchick
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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For centuries, people have been returning to the same tired nature-versus-nurture debate, trying to determine what we learn and what we inherit. In Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test, biologist Marlene Zuk goes beyond the binary and instead focuses on interaction, or the way that genes and environment work together. Driving her investigation is a simple but essential question: How does behavior evolve?
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Good information, but reader distracts from it.
- By Jeremy Proctor on 02-13-23
By: Marlene Zuk
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The 108 Upanishads
- An Introduction
- By: Roshen Dalal
- Narrated by: Suchitra Gupta
- Length: 16 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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This book is a thoroughly researched primer on the 108 Upanishads, philosophical treatises that form a part of the Vedas, the revered Hindu texts. These Upanishads contain the most crystallized bits of wisdom gleaned from Hinduism. Roshen Dalal explains the concepts at the core of each Upanishad clearly and lucidly. Moreover, her vast, diverse philosophical and theological readings add priceless scholarly context to this comprehensive and fascinating volume.
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Obsessive categorization
- By Hasan on 01-19-20
By: Roshen Dalal
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The Pope at War
- The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler
- By: David I. Kertzer
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 17 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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When Pope Pius XII died in 1958, his papers were sealed in the Vatican Secret Archives, leaving unanswered questions about what he knew and did during World War II. Those questions have only grown and festered, making Pius XII one of the most controversial popes in Church history, especially now as the Vatican prepares to canonize him.
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Intellectually dishonest
- By ReviewAmazon384 on 04-08-23
By: David I. Kertzer
Excellent history
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Heart Breaking & Upsetting
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Interesting but way too long
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Too much detail
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