Rhineland massacres

Though no Crusades explicitly targeted Jews, the fervor for holy war sometimes turned into an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in Europe, even though both ecclesiastical and secular authorities condemned it. The focus on the crucifixion story and violence against enemies of the Christian faith during the Crusades, as exemplified by the preaching of Pope Urban II in 1095-96 and Bernard of Clairvaux in 1146-47, needed little misconceptions to be translated into animosity towards Jews. In parts of France and Germany, Jews were perceived just as much of an enemy as Muslims: they were held responsible for the crucifixion, and they were more immediately visible than the distant Muslims. Many people wondered why they should travel great distances to fight "non-believers" when there were already "non-believers" closer to home. It is also likely that the Crusaders were motivated by their need for money. The Rhineland communities were relatively wealthy, both because they were isolated and because the Jews were not restricted as Catholics were against moneylending. Many Crusaders had to go into debt in order to purchase weaponry and equipment for the expedition; as the Catholic Church strictly forbade usury, many Crusaders inevitably found themselves indebted to Jewish moneylenders. Having armed themselves by assuming the debt, the Crusaders rationalized the killing of Jews as an extension of their Catholic mission. There had not been so broad a movement against Jews by Catholics since the 7th century's mass expulsions and forced conversions. While there had been regional persecutions of Jews by Catholics—such as in Metz in 888, a plot against Jews in Limoges in 992, a wave of anti-Jewish persecution by Christian millenarian movements (which believed that Jesus was immediately to descend from Heaven) in 1000, and the threat of expulsion from Trier in 1066. These are all viewed "in the traditional terms of governmental outlawry rather than unbridled popular attacks." Also many movements against Jews (such as forced conversions by King Robert the Pious of France, Richard II, Duke of Normandy, and Henry II, Holy Roman Emperor around 1007–1012) had been suppressed by various popes and bishops. Sigebert of Gembloux writes that before "a war in behalf of the Lord" could be fought, it was essential that the Jews convert; those who resisted were "deprived of their goods, massacred, and expelled from the cities." Some Jews dispersed eastward to escape the persecution. On top of the general Catholic suspicion of Jews at the time, when the thousands of French members of the People's Crusade arrived at the Rhine, they had run out of provisions. To restock their supplies, they began to plunder Jewish food and property while attempting to force them to convert to Catholicism. the events of 1096 in the Rhineland "occupy a significant place in modern Jewish historiography and are often presented as the first instance of an antisemitism that would henceforth never be forgotten and whose climax was the Holocaust." ==Volkmar and Gottschalk==

, Budapest, Hungary In the spring of 1096, small bands of knights and peasants, inspired by the preaching of the Crusade, set off from various parts of France and Germany (Worms and Cologne). The crusade of the preacher Volkmar, beginning in Saxony, persecuted Jews in Magdeburg and later, on May 30, 1096, in Prague in Bohemia. The Catholic Bishop Cosmas attempted to prevent forced conversions, and the Catholic hierarchy in Bohemia preached against such acts. The priest Volkmar and his Saxons also met a similar fate from the Hungarians when they began pillaging villages there because "sedition was incited". ==Emicho==

and Count Emicho attacks Mersbourg (Wieselburg, Moson). In the battle, the Crusaders are panic-stricken when several ladders collapse under their weight. The largest of these crusades, and the most involved in attacking Jews, was that led by Count Emicho. Setting off in the early summer of 1096, an army of around 10,000 men, women and children proceeded through the Rhine valley, towards the Main River and then to the Danube. Emicho was joined by William the Carpenter and Drogo of Nesle, among others from the Rhineland, eastern France, Lorraine, Flanders and even England. Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, absent in southern Italy, ordered the Jews to be protected when he learned of Emicho's intent. After some Jews were killed at Metz in May, John, Bishop of Speyer, gave shelter to the Jewish inhabitants. Still, 12 Jews of Speyer were slain by Crusaders on May 3. News of Emicho's crusade spread quickly, and he was prevented from entering Mainz on May 25 by Bishop Ruthard of Mainz. Emicho took an offering of gold raised by the Jews of Mainz in hope to gain his favor and their safety. Despite the example of the burghers, many ordinary citizens in Mainz and other the towns were caught up in the frenzy and joined in the persecution and pillaging. Jewish chronicler Eliezer ben Nathan paraphrased Habakkuk 1:6, writing "cruel foreigners, fierce and swift, Frenchmen and Germans...[who] put crosses on their clothing and were more plentiful than locusts on the face of the earth." ==Later attacks on Jews==

, 1099 Later in 1096, Godfrey of Bouillon also collected tribute from the Jews in Mainz and Cologne; he was ordered by Henry IV to abstain from killing the Jews. Saint Louis University Professor Thomas F. Madden, author of A Concise History of the Crusades, claims the Jewish defenders of Jerusalem retreated to their synagogue to "prepare for death" once the Crusaders had breached the outer walls of the city during the siege of 1099. The chronicle of ibn al-Qalanisi mentions that the building was set on fire while the Jews were still inside. The Crusaders reportedly hoisted their shields and sang the Adoramus te while they circled the burning complex. However, a contemporary Jewish letter written shortly after the siege does not mention the burning synagogue. Playing on the religious schism between the two sects of Judaism, Arabist Shelomo Dov Goitein speculates that the reason the incident is missing from the letter is that it was written by Karaite Jews and the synagogue belonged to Rabbinic Jews. Following the siege, Jews captured from the Dome of the Rock, along with native Christians, were made to clean the city of the slain. Tancred took some Jews as prisoners of war and deported them to Apulia in southern Italy. Several of these Jews did not make it to their final destination as "Many of them were [...] thrown into the sea or beheaded on the way." The Karaite Jewish community of Ashkelon reached out to their coreligionists in Alexandria to first pay for the holy books and then rescue pockets of Jews over several months. The First Crusade ignited a long tradition of organized violence against Jews in European culture. Jewish money was also used in France for financing the Second Crusade; the Jews were also attacked in many instances, but not on the scale of the attacks of 1096. In England, the Third Crusade was the pretext for the expulsion of the Jews and the confiscation of their money. The two Shepherds' Crusades, in 1251 and 1320, also saw attacks on Jews in France; the 1320 Shepherds' Crusade also attacked and killed Jews in Aragon. ==Catholic Church's response==

The massacres were condemned by the leaders and officials of the Catholic Church. The Church and its members had previously carried out policies to protect the presence of Jews in Christian culture. For example, the 25 letters regarding the Jews of Pope Gregory I from the late 6th century became the primary texts for the canons, or Church laws, which were implanted to regulate Jewish life in Europe as well as to protect it. These policies did have limits; the Jews were granted protection and the right to their faith if they did not threaten Christianity and remained submissive to Christian rule. These regulations were enacted in a letter by Pope Alexander II in 1063. Their goal was to define the place of the Jews in Christian society. The Dispar nimirum of 1060 is a papal policy concerning the Jews. It rejects acts of violence and punishments of the Jews, and it enforces the idea of protecting the Jews because they were not the enemy of the Christians. The policy aimed to create a balance of privilege and restrictions on Jews so that the Christians did not see their presence as a threat. In 1120 the papal bull Sicut Judaeis was enacted by Pope Calixtus II, Archbishop Ruthard of Mainz tried to save the Jews by gathering them in his courtyard; this was unsuccessful as Emicho and his troops stormed the palace. Ruthard managed to save a small number of Jews by putting them on boats in the Rhine. After the First Crusade, there was a continued effort made by the popes to protect the Jews, so that violence that occurred in the Rhineland Valley would not reoccur. In 1272, Pope Gregory X stated that the Jews "are not capable of harming Christians, nor do they know how to do so." There is debate on Bernard's motivations: he may have been disappointed that the People's Crusade devoted so much time and resources to attacking the Jews of Western Europe while contributing almost nothing to the attempt to retake the Holy Land, the result being that Bernard was urging the knights to maintain focus on the goal of protecting Catholic interests in the Holy Land. It is equally possible that Bernard held the belief that forcibly converting the Jews was immoral or perceived that greed motivated the original Rhineland massacre: both sentiments are echoed in the canon of Albert of Aachen in his chronicle of the First Crusade. Albert's view was that the People's Crusaders were uncontrollable semi-Catholicized country-folk (citing the "goose incident," which Hebrew chronicles corroborate) who massacred hundreds of Jewish women and children and that the People's Crusaders were themselves slaughtered by Turkish forces in Asia Minor. ==Jewish responses==

Sigebert of Gembloux wrote that most of those Jews who converted before the crusader threat later returned to Judaism. The Hebrew chronicles portray the Rhineland Jews as martyrs who willingly sacrificed themselves in order to honor God and preserve their own honor (to die for Kiddush Hashem). The Rhineland Jews looked to historical precedents since Biblical times to justify their actions: the honorable suicide of Saul, the Maccabees revolt against Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the suicide pact at Masada, and the Bar Kochba revolt were seen as justifiable deaths in the face of a stronger enemy. Despite this, the suicidal and homicidal nature of the Rhineland Jews' actions largely separated the events of 1096 from previous incidents in Jewish history. While the events at Masada most closely parallel the events which occurred during the Rhineland Massacres, it is important to note that the dramatic suicides which were committed during that event were often downplayed by Rabbinic scholars, even to the point of Masada's total omission from some Rabbinic histories. The Biblical moment that was most commonly evoked by chroniclers of the Rhineland Massacres was the binding of Isaac, to which several allusions appear throughout the major primary sources, the Mainz Anonymous, the Soloman bar Simson Chronicle, and the Eliezer bar Nathan Chronicle (though allusions to this moment persist beyond these sources, and even in to more modern interpretations). Several 20th century Jewish authors have related the events of 1096 to an underlying theme of human sacrifice. A particularly scathing response was written by Ezra Fleischer, in which he examines of Yuval's claims and responds to them. The article ends with the words "It is the kind of article that would have been better if it had not been written than written, and if it had been written - it would have been better if it had not been printed, and if it had been printed - it would have been better if it had been forgotten as soon as possible". Historian Jeremy Cohen disagrees with Yuval for a different reason. He argues that Yuval treats the descriptions found in the chronicles of the massacres as if they represent the views of the victims themselves. In contrast, Cohen contends - and demonstrates through an intertextual literary reading - that these chronicles were written in the early 12th century by the descendants of those who survived the massacres. As such, he claims, they reflect the thoughts and perspectives of the survivors, not of those who gave their lives for kiddush ha-shem. Historians have disagreed about whether there was a halakhic justification for the mass suicide during the Rhineland massacres. Haym Soloveitchik states that the issue of voluntary martyrdom to avoid committing sins in halakhic literature is highly questionable, and acorrding to that the Poskim should have determined that "all the martyrs [...] were not only not "holy," but were "self-killers," and murderers". Later, according to Soloveitchik, the rabbis, out of respect for the victims, had to justify these horrific acts "with a few deft twists, a tenable, if not quite persuasive" of the Halakha. In contrast, Avraham Grossman, Israel Ta-Shma and other researchers state that the suicides acted according to the Jewish law as it was known to them. According to them, Ashkenazi Poskim attributed halakhic importance to the legends that appear in the Talmud (Aggadah), many of which involve suicides in order to avoid committing sins. Therefore, the act of suicide during the Rhineland massacres was anchored in the halakhic perception of the Ashkenazim, and they acted according to Jewish tradition, as they perceived it. Prior to the Crusades, the Jews lived in three major areas which were largely independent of each other. These were the Jews who lived in Islamic nations (still the majority), those who lived in the Byzantine Empire and those who lived in the Catholic West. With the persecutions that began in around 1096, a new sense of awareness about the persecution of the Jewish people as a whole took hold across all of these groups, reuniting the three separate strands. In the late 19th century, Jewish historians used the episode as a demonstration of the need for Zionism (that is, for a new Jewish state). ==References==