Anti-Semitism Goes to the Movies

Marco Bellocchio’s Kidnapped! The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara and Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy are both recent films that deal with historic instances of anti-Semitic prejudice that, in their own day, captured the attention of the European press. The subject of the first is the kidnapping of a six-year-old Jewish boy by the papal authorities, who insisted that he be raised a Catholic. The second tells the story of the French Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus’s imprisonment on trumped-up charges of espionage.