 The Mortara case was, in the view of Timothy Verhoeven, the greatest controversy to surround the Catholic Church in the mid-19th century, as it "more than any other single issue ... exposed the divide between supporters and opponents of the Vatican". Abigail Green writes that "this clash between liberal and Catholic worldviews at a moment of critical international tension ... gave the Mortara affair global significance — and rendered it a transformative episode in the Jewish world as well". Mortara himself suggested in 1893 that his abduction had been, for a time, "more famous than that of the Sabine Women". In the months before Pius IX's beatification by the Catholic Church in 2000, Jewish commentators and others in the international media raised the largely forgotten Mortara episode while analysing the Pope's life and legacy. According to Dov Levitan, the basic facts of the Mortara case are far from unique, but it is nevertheless of particular importance because of its effect on public opinion in Italy, Britain and France, and as an example of "the great sense of Jewish solidarity that emerged in the latter half of the 19th century [as] Jews rose to the cause of their brethren in various parts of the world". The Alliance Israélite Universelle, whose formation had been partly motivated by the Mortara case, grew into one of the most prominent Jewish organisations in the world and endures into the 21st century.
