The Jewish Experience of the Crusades and the Crusade Chronicles
🏰 The First Crusade in particular, but also the Second and Third Crusades, shattered the Jewish communities of the Rhineland Valley, profoundly altering the patterns of Jewish life in Ashkenaz.
Please note: Crusader anti-Jewish violence entails especially difficult events, which are discussed below.
Audio (Paid Feature)
You can find an audio version of this newsletter here.
In this issue:
The Christian Crusader movement, from its inception in 1095 and further campaigns that lasted through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, led to outbreaks of mass violence against Ashkenazi Jewish communities. The violence particularly affected the Rhineland Valley cities and towns, which had just become established and continued to grow and flourish, but it also targeted Jews throughout greater Ashkenaz. The nature of the anti-Jewish violence was extreme and depraved, leading many Jews to desperate acts memorialized in a genre of writing unique to this period in Ashkenaz: historiographic chronicles. As a result of the decimation of the Rhineland communities, the center of Jewish life shifted away from Germany and towards France for a time, until the partial revival of the German communities. Below, we’ll explore the proximate causes of the Christian movement that wrought so much pain upon a just-matured Ashkenazi Jewry, the effects of the Crusades, and the records medieval Jews left us of their difficult experiences.
The First Crusade: Causes and Responses
Among the standout features of eleventh-century Christian life in northwestern Europe were the growth of urban centers, along with their attendant burgher middle class, and the consolidation of Church power alongside manifold expressions of Christian faith, including the development of the Benedictine monastic movement. This demographic and cultural growth, and especially the types of social interactions endemic to cities, also led to popular unrest, pervasive physical violence, and the appearance of an urban underclass. When the call to crusade—the retaking of Jerusalem by Christians from the hands of Muslims—came from Pope Urban II in late 1095, it galvanized the populace and enlisted Frankish aristocracy, including the noble classes of what are today France and Germany.
Jerusalem and the Land of Israel had been ruled by Muslims since the first half of the seventh century, so its status was not new. However, the takeover of the Land of Israel by Seljuk Turks, relatively recently converted to Islam and exploiting the disintegration of the former Abbasid caliphate, changed the balance of power between Islam and (Byzantine) Christianity. The Byzantines turned for military support to the Latin pope, who answered with not only support but a call for a mass movement of Christians to the Holy Land to overtake it. The widespread response of different strata of Christian society reigned in the turbulence latent in the Christian West by harnessing it for a directed purpose.
Unfortunately, while massing in the Rhineland in preparation for travel east, groups of Christians decided to seize the opportunity to attack the infidels already in their midst: Jews. In northwestern Europe, Jews were practically the only religious minority and their low social status and legal precarity made manifest the Christian claim to supersession. This made them a vulnerable target. Despite some attempts at ensuring Jews’ physical safety on the part of local ecclesiastical officials, Christian mobs succeeded in decimating multiple Rhineland Jewish communities. The extreme violence led Jews to acts of heroism and martyrdom. These included self-sacrifice rather than face torture and/or forcible conversion, even extending to parents killing their own children and themselves to protect them from the violence of the mob.
These desperate acts resulted in a small but potent genre of literary response: the composition of historiographical chronicles. As I wrote about in discussing R. Avraham Ibn Daud, premodern conceptions of the historical differ from ours in important ways, although, as I argued there, they are not dichotomous. This is on full display in the Crusade chronicles, which do not seek to preserve historical fact in the way that modern academic historians do, and yet evince a great deal of interest in, and understanding of, the significance of historical events. The question of the historicity of the chronicles, of which we possess three, has engendered much debate among Jewish historians.
Even thornier questions present themselves with regard to the dating, authorship, and relationships among the three extant chronicles, each of which is discussed below. A striking fact is that all three contain parallel passages, raising the question of whether one is the source for the others, or that they are all relying in part upon a lost source, or perhaps that they are adaptations of a single text, what textual scholars refer to as an “Urtext” (ur from the German, “original”). Dr. Robert Chazan, z”l, emphasizes that these are all too simplistic to capture the complex relationships among different units of the chronicles, but places the Mainz Anonymous and what he terms “the Trier unit” of the Chronicle of Shlomo bar Shimshon as the earlier sources—that is, closest to the events of the spring and summer of 1096.
The Mainz Anonymous
The Mainz Anonymous is so called because it is of unknown authorship and centers upon the community of Mainz—one the important and established Shu”m communities—though it relates events that befell Speyer and Worms as well giving attention to events in northern France. We do not today possess the entire text, but some portion of it, which concentrates on the events of late 1095 through 1096. It has been argued persuasively, again by Chazan, that the Mainz Anonymous is the work of a single author writing close to the time of the events themselves. It is written consistently in the third person, at least the section that is extant today. The harrowing instances of suicide and infanticide are recounted in searing detail, with extensive reference to the language and motifs of Tanach; for instance, the story of R. Meshullam ben R. Yitzchak, calls out to his wife, Tzippora, that he wishes to kill their young son, poignantly called Yitzchak, to keep him from the violent mob. She replies: “Slaughter me first, so that I shall not witness the death of the child.”
The Chronicle of Shlomo bar Shimshon
Unlike the Mainz Anonymous, the Chronicle of R. Shlomo bar Shimshon is a composite work that has reached our hands in its entirety. Its editor in fact incorporates R. Shlomo’s chronicle itself as the main part of a larger work telling of persecutions suffered by Ashkenazi Jews, including in Blois, France in 1171. It includes an editorial prologue and epilogue, which frame a large section about the events of 1096 in Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, then events in Cologne, and events in a number of locales, most prominently Trier. There is also an extended section in defense of those forcibly converted to Christianity. It was probably compiled in the 1140s, during the events leading to the Second Crusade, which likely prompted its compilation.
An example of the interpretive material of the compiler is the perceptive reasoning given for the actions of the Crusaders: “It came to pass that, when they traversed towns where there were Jews, they said to one another: ‘Behold we journey a long way to seek the the idolatrous shrine and to take vengeance upon the Muslims. But here are the Jews dwelling among us, whose ancestors killed him and crucified him groundlessly. Let us take vengeance first upon them.’” Note that the dialogue is written from a Jewish perspective—the Crusaders certainly did not refer to their own holy sites as idolatrous shrines—but seeks to present a cogent explanation for the Crusaders’ motivation, still upheld by historians today.
The Chronicle of Eliezer bar Natan
The most widely-cited Crusade chronicle is that of R. Eliezer bar Natan, a unitary work embellished by poetry. The four poems that frame the narrative are alphabetic acrostics that spell out the author’s name, Eliezer bar Natan. It is not definitively known whether this is the famed R. Eliezer bar Natan who lived in a reconstituted Mainz in the twelfth century. However, the attribution to the prominent halachist and paytan (liturgical poet) leant the work prestige and likely contributed to its dissemination. Like the Chronicle of R. Shlomo bar Shimshon, which its closely resembles and at times lifts verbatim, the Chronicle of Eliezer bar Natan moves from Speyer to Worms, then to Mainz and finally Cologne. Chazan considers it to be the latest of the chronicles and based upon the Chronicle of Shlomo bar Shimshon, though others have argued for its use of common sources.
Another Way of Remembering: Piyut
Although I’ve focused here on the unique Crusade chronicles, it is important to emphasize that the chronicles themselves were not popular texts: two exist in single copies, while one is attested by four copies, two of them modern. In other words, they were not much copied in the Middle Ages and were largely known from excerpts in later, sixteenth-century historiographical works, especially R. Yosef ha-Kohen of Avignon’s Emek ha-Bacha, which cited parts of the Chronicle of Eliezer bar Natan; those parts were subsequently incorporated into R. David Gans’ Tzemach David. They did not speak to medieval audiences in the same way that they have reached and touched modern audiences. Instead, the vehicle most meaningful for commemoration for medieval Jews was piyut—liturgical poetry.
This body of poetry often cast the violence of the Crusades as or against exemplars from Tanach, in particular, the Akeidah (Binding of Yitzchak). While literary and refined, there is often a rawness to the piyut of the Crusades and other paroxysms of violence in Ashkenaz during the period:
אלקים אל דמי לדמי
1אל תחרש ואל תשקט למתקוממי
בקשהו דרשהו מיד מחרימי
בל תכסה ארץ בכל מקומי…טף ונשים השלימו יחד לעקד
טלאים המבקרים בלשכת בית המוקדO G-d, do not let my blood rest in peace!
Do not be silent. Give my enemy no respite.2
Avenge my blood, require it at the hand of my destroyer.
Let not the earth cover it, wherever it is shed.…Tender children and women gave themselves up to the binding,
like choice lambs in the Chamber of the Hearth.R. David bar Meshullam of Speyer, trans. T. Carmi in The Penguin Book of Hebrew Prose, p. 374 (see here for nikkud)
An anonymous piyut states baldly:
אדרבה בצר רוחי בפני מעוט קהלי
אקונן ואתאבל כי דדי המר לי
החרישו והבינו מלולי ופלולי
מי-יתן לי שומע לי…טועים בשער נאספו יחד
להכרית שם שארית המיחד
ילדים רכים כנגדו ענו בקול אחד:
שמע ישראל ה’ אלקינו ה’ אחדI shall speak out the grief of my spirit before my small congregation.
I shall wail and lament, for the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me.
Be silent, hear my words and my prayer.
If only He would hear me!The Crusaders [literally: the mistaken] massed at the gateway
To blot out the name of His remnants.
Small children cried out to Him with one voice:
‘Hear O Israel, the L-rd is our G-d, the L-rd is One!’Anonymous piyut about the martyrs of Mainz, trans. T. Carmi in The Penguin Book of Hebrew Prose, p. 372
As glimpsed above, piyut from the Crusader period did not shy away from references to the events that occurred in Ashkenaz. Some piyutim, however, are unusually direct in recounting the horrors:
אספר מעשה בלט בתי הגדולה
בת שלוש-עשרה שנה היתה צנועה ככלה.
למדה כל התפלות והזמירות מאמא
צנועה וחסידה ונעימה וחכמה…ונהרגה עם אמה ועם אחותה בליל כף בית כסלו
בהיותי יושב על שלחני שלו.
באו שנים מתועבים והרגון לעיני
ופצעוני ותלמידי וגם בני.Let me tell the story of my eldest daughter, Bellet:
She was thirteen years old, and chaste as a bride.
She had learnt all the prayers and songs from her mother,
Who was modest and kind, sweet and wise…On the night of the twenty-second of Kislev,
As I was sitting peacefully at my table,
Two wicked men broke in and killed them before my eyes;
They also wounded me, and my students, and my son.R. Eliezer bar Yehuda of Worms, trans. T. Carmi in The Penguin Book of Hebrew Prose, pp. 387-388
This is but a small portion of the moving poem written in the wake of violence surrounding the retaking of Jerusalem from the Crusaders by Salah al-Din (Saladin) in 1187. The author was a member of the Kalonymos family and his detailing of the learning, piety, and loving nature of his wife and two young daughters not only memorializes their lives, but also gives us a glimpse into the lives of women and girls in medieval Ashkenaz that has endured through its painful beauty.
Reads and Resources
For an overview of the events of 1096, see Robert Chazan’s European Jewry and the First Crusade (University of California, 1996), among others of his books. It includes extensive translations of the Mainz Anonymous (which he terms the “S” source in this book) and the Chronicle of Shlomo bar Shimshon (“L”), from which the translations cited above are taken.
For a deep and, in my nerdy opinion, immensely readable examination of the Hebrew Crusade chronicles, Chazan’s God, Humanity, and History is unparalleled (University of California, 2000).
If you’re seeking an overview of the main medieval Crusades themselves to understand the background, I recommend Jean Richard’s The Crusades, c. 1071-c.1291 (Cambridge Medieval Textbooks, 1999).
ע”פ תהלים פג ב.
Based closely on Tehillim 83:2.
Heartbreaking. The predecessors to בעיר ההריגה.
fabulous. I always knew bits and pieces but this puts it all together in a nice and orderly fashion. It tells a narrative. Yasher koach!