Subject: Mortara Affair

This broadside (9" x 12") announces the formation of a committee in Baltimore to address the Mortara Affair. The text calls for a letter to be drafted and sent to the President of the United States, urging him to join with France and other European powers in condemning the actions of the Papal States. The broadside likely dates to October or November 1858. The image shows a printed text, the details of which are not fully legible in the provided image. A manuscript draft of the committee meeting is noted as existing in separate records (2006.12.26.03445).

Broadside letter (9" x 12") from S. N. Carvalho and thirteen other Jewish leaders of Baltimore to the President of the United States, dated November 28, 1858. The letter requests the President's intervention in the Mortara Affair, urging him to join other world powers in condemning the Papal States' actions. Published in Baltimore, Maryland.

Handwritten minutes from a January 23, 1859 meeting of the Committee on the Mortara Affair, held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The minutes, penned and signed by S. N. Carvalho, detail the committee's activities regarding the Mortara Affair, including a reference to a letter sent to President Buchanan.

This is a first edition of a play, published in 1860 by Bloch Israelite Office in Cincinnati, Ohio, that dramatizes the infamous Mortara Affair. The Mortara Affair involved the abduction of a six-year-old Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, by Papal authorities in 1858 because he had been secretly baptized as a Catholic infant. The play explores the religious and political ramifications of this event, which sparked international outrage and protests. The bookplate of the Hamilton Hebrew Sabbath School is present in this copy.

Newspaper clipping from the *National Intelligencer*, published in Washington, D.C. on November 30, 1858. The clipping features an excerpt from a letter by Abraham Hart regarding the Mortara Abduction Case, urging President Buchanan to intervene. It also includes the reply from Secretary of State Lewis Cass refusing to do so. This represents one of the earliest instances of concerted lobbying by American Jews.

This eight-page pamphlet, published anonymously in New York City on November 29, 1858, defends the Catholic Church's actions in the Edgardo Mortara case. The pamphlet, inscribed "With the compliments of 'Fair Play'" argues for the "liberty of a child of being a Christian and not forced compulsorily to be a Jew." It portrays the Pope's intervention as a "grandest moral spectacle." The case involved Edgardo Mortara, a Jewish boy baptized by his Catholic nanny, who was subsequently taken from his family by Papal authorities to be raised Catholic. The pamphlet represents a contemporary perspective on a highly controversial event that fueled anti-Catholic and antisemitic sentiments in the United States and Europe.