The Rhineland massacres of 1096

Rhineland Massacres of 1096 are, too many demonstrative (if retrospective) of early anti-Semitism. While to others they are examples of the inevitable culmination of Christian hatred toward all Infidels, spurned on by the supposed wrongs done by the Muslims, in taking up arms against Christians. The fervor of the period created a collaborative excuse to rid the "Christian" world of all who did not believe in Christ and of all who transgressed against Christians and Christian beliefs. Mixed messages of church fathers, stressing the need to refrain from random violence against the Jews, as people who would likely eventually see the light and accept Christ as the Messiah were overcome by using these same texts and traditions to support violence as a result of a general dislike for the manner in which Jewish practical business applications affected Christians.

Popular revivals, overarching attempts at reformation of Christian ideologies and institutions, public expressions of penitence, real physical and mental conflict all combined to create an undercurrent of social, cultural and political woe, which culminated in greater conflict, against all who strayed from the beloved doctrines of the Christians.

During the spring months of 1096, a number of major Jewish communities across northern Europe were threatened by violence. In most instances, the anti-Jewish hostility proved fairly weak and the forces of law and order strong. In a few cases, the anti-Jewish animus among allied burghers as well as crusaders was potent, and the forces committed to law and order proved ineffective. In such cases, the result was a stunning bloodbath, with a few of the most important Rhineland Jewish communities destroyed almost in their entirety. 47"

These early pogroms, as they were titled later, were as one can see violent in nature but for the most part demonstrative of local legal acceptance of tolerance, as in most places where violence was threatened local law enforcement was able to squelch the problem. Yet, as the history goes there were a few places, not to be belittled, where the regional forces were either sympathetic to the Christian/Crusader cause or had the unfortunate status of limited real control and the massacres and mass forced baptisms not only occurred but were witnessed upon and supported to some degree, furthering the common man's involvement in the crusader mentality and simultaneously cementing Jewish angst and cohesion.

Yet, one must also explore why the Rhineland Massacres became a regional trend, known about across Europe, as is attested to by the French Jew's warnings to their Rhineland Jewish neighbors.

"When the Jewish communities in northern France heard [of the development of crusadingardor], they were seized by consternation, fear, and trembling, and they reacted in time-honored ways. 48 They wrote letters and sent emissaries to all the Jewish communities along the Rhine River, [asking] that they fast and seek mercy for them from him who dwells on high, so that they [the Jews] might be saved from their [the crusaders'] hands. 49"

There was no significant change, in the official church stand, or for that matter the secular legal stand against the Jews, though it had never been particularly favorable. Yet, it is unrealistic to develop a line of reasoning that supports more than isolated incidence of individual church leaders espousing against Jews, by supporting a line of reasoning that the church fathers. Those like Bernard Clairvaux, the great monastic reformer, who stressed practical objection to Jewish lending practices were not altering a thousand years of church doctrine regarding tolerance toward the Jews. Secular and church leaders alike, "…regarded the Jews as deviants from the truth, but, unlike other deviants such as heretics, rather ungraciously forbade steps being taken against them."

The call, by a "secular" Christian leader (not a church father or Bishop but an emperor who viewed himself as the imperial messiah) to destroy the Jews and infidels came many years after the Rhineland Massacres.

The call to take action against the Jews was an isolated sentiment that spread through a general dislike for the way in which Jews became fundamentally successful in any given region of Europe. The reality was that certain individuals, some of high repute and others simply men of action with little power but that of persuasion swayed mob mentality actions of reformation with their immediate target being the most convenient mark, "the infidels within."

Mass calls for violence against the Jews spread, again as a response to crusade mentality, as time went by and as circumstances of fear and unrest continued through the whole of the crusader periods. In other words, when things were relatively peaceful, economic, medical and agricultural peace was present the Jews were fairly safe, but when any one or all of the above trends went bad so did the sentiment against the Jews, as the partial source of God's supposed wrath upon the Christians. One must look at the trend toward unsanctioned anti-Semitic violence, with isolated sanctioned situations, as a move toward the "culture" of the crusader mentality, individualisms and proactive application for both spiritual and physical gain and the avoidance of a potential Christian downfall.

The ideology to fight all those "others," through one's own hands that pervades the crusade periods is secondary to (though influenced by the clergy) and is in many ways indicative of the Rhineland Massacre, as well as later actions against the Jews, the more practical opportunistic sentiments of the crusader spirit. The question then becomes how and why does a fiercely independent movement, coalesce into a mass movement a mob mentality that results in massive mobs of violent marauders, striking down all who are seen as convergent to themselves. In many ways the answer to this question is demographic and like the Black Death massacres against the Jews responsive to internal interpretations, espoused not so much by the clergy but as an obvious extension of singular right to life and prosperity. If the life and prosperity of the Christian Majority was threatened the Jews were an obvious target. The anti-Semitic sentiment is used primarily as a justification, after the fact, rather than as a source of impetus for action.

This work will make a bold attempt to place the Rhineland Massacres into a context of the time. To do this one must ask the question, do the events constitute a mark of the beginning of anti-Semitic actions on the part of Christians, as a result of an official writ or line of reasoning on the part of the church, or if the situation is simply another example of Christian fervor in a time of heightened religious and social strife, that just happened to be perpetrated against the most opportune, local victim? Jewish settlement, patterns can be seen as proof that the Rhineland Massacres were evident of opportunism, as well as proof that at least a minimal increase in Jewish numbers seen in the region made them potential targets for challenged status.

In the ninth century there were only a few dozen Jewish families in Germany, probably a few hundred in the tenth. It has been estimated that there were as many as 4,000 to 5,000 Jews by the end of tenth century, and 20,000 to 25,000 on the eve of First Crusade at the end of the eleventh. Even in the largest Jewish communities, however, Jews typically comprised no more than one to three percent of the total city population. The number of Jewish communities, each rather small in size, increased dramatically during the second half of the thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth centuries, before the massacres and persecution of the Jews during the Black Death (1348 to 1350). Jews were dispersed throughout Germany in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when we find numerous small Jewish communities and traces of Jews in areas out- side larger cities and in rural areas. In the high Middle Ages Jewish settlement was particularly widespread in the Rhineland, Upper Germany, and Franconia, though much thinner in Bavaria

In other words the Jewish settlement pattern in the region at least marginally supports the idea that the Jews increased settlement may have made them a marked target for "reform" but it also proves that the Rhineland Massacres did not so mark the Jewish psyche that they simply refrained from settlement in the region. In fact the massacres may have spurned settlement, during periods when peace and tolerance were more consistently accepted as such places (and people) became meccas of spiritual history. A consummate scholar on the period and the author of several secondary works of crusade history, particularly the first crusade period remarks that it is time to reevaluate the impetus and reality that let to the Rhineland Massacres. His reasoning is indicative of modern reasoning to do so, as a response to the repetition of history that is experienced during the sanctioned Nazi revitalization of anti-Semitism to an extreme and violent degree.

Much has transpired between 1096 and 1996. From the vantage point of 1996, how does 1096 look to us? Indeed, how has it looked to Jewish observers over the span of nine intervening centuries? For some subsequent Jewish observers, 1096 never loomed particularly large; for some, it was but one catastrophe among many; for yet others, it constituted one of the pivotal incidents of the Jewish past, worthy of recollection alongside the destruction of the two Jerusalem temples, the riots of 1391 on the Iberian peninsula, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, and the Polish pogroms of 1648-49. The shifting perceptions of 1096, particularly when seen against the backdrop of the historical

"reality, have much to teach us."

The development of the Rhineland Massacres, often looked at in history as a linear first example of official Jewish mass persecution by the Christians, wavers in importance to the modern scholar, as well as the modern Jew and Christian. Was it a warm up for mass persecution, or a warm up for crusade actions against the Muslims? Historically it is safe to say that it is all of these things, an important period in Jewish and Christian history. One that would have served as a good lesson for detractors of reinvigoration of anti-Semitism that pervaded not only the Nazi mentality but that of much of western thought, notorious anti-Semites existed all over the world during the rise of the Nazi regime. In fact the WWII genocide could be seen as a modern reincarnation of the mob mentality that pervaded the crusade period, a cyclical resurgence of hatred, rather than a linear one.

We can also learn much by studying the place of 1096 within the history of anti-Jewish behaviors and attitudes. Does the Rhineland tragedy supply the key to understanding subsequent Christian persecution and Jewish suffering? Does crusader hostility serve as an archetype of Christian animosity, as a harbinger of the hatreds that punctuate the nine centuries between then and now? Does it represent a classic case of Christian antisemitism, whatever that vexing term might mean? Quite reasonably, contemporary students of the Jewish past maintain that the Jews whom they study were not simply victims. Rather, these Jews must be understood as active agents on the world scene, responding vigorously -- often within fairly constricted parameters -- to the challenges confronting them. The behaviors of 1096 constitute an important, albeit extreme example of activist Jewish response to persecution. Does it provide us with a paradigm of Jewish reaction to a hostile environment? Is it fair to see the Jewish martyrs of 1096 as models for Jewish behavior? Should we condemn those Jews who did not achieve the heroic level of Rhineland Jewry? These are some of the larger questions raised by the crusading attacks in the Rhineland during the spring months of 1096 and by the remarkable Jewish responses to crusader violence. A nine-hundredth anniversary provides a reasonable and appropriate occasion for recollecting the realities of 1096 and for probing the multiple meanings of the brief but intense events of that Rhineland springtime.

The role of the Rhineland Massacres of 1096 in the history of Judaism and anti-Semitism in general has varied over the years, as scholars, retrospectively attempt to source the nature of the anti-Semitism of the 20th century that ended with the loss of more than half of the Jewish population in Europe during the Nazi regime's cruel and destructive attempt to wipe them off the face of the earth. Scholars have sought to demonstrate that the thread of anti-Semitic ideologies runs deep in the history of the Western world and many see a direct connection between the first crusade and the Rhineland Massacres of 1096 as one of the first officiated examples of Semitic hatred applied in physical terms. While others argue that the period was a logical demonstration of tensions between the three major faiths of the period, when Christianity and Islam and the conflict between them, as well as their demonstrative ruling interests culminated into an all out assault on all who deviated from each one's message and legal standing. While some have chosen to view the period as the beginning of the Jewish ideology as "other" supporting both the negative aspects of anti-Semitic acts, such as the establishment of fear and instability while at the same time stressing the cohesive power of a new Jewish ideology of persecution.

In the view of Ben-Sasson, the unifying characteristic of this millenium-long period was the rule of Islam and Christianity and the inevitable conflict that such rule created with the Jews. In this lengthy period, the events of 1096 loomed very large. For Ben-Sasson, the second sub-period of the Jewish Middle Ages was initiated by the Rhineland massacres. The impact of the events of 1096 was purportedly twofold, external and internal: "The massacres of 1096 considerably changed the political status of the Jews and affected their religious and social thinking." Externally, 1096 signaled the onset of insecurity, enhanced limitation, and growing tension between the Jews and their Christian neighbors. Rationalism, which according to Ben-Sasson had flourished during the prior period, gave way increasingly to mystical tendencies; the election of the Jewish people and the meaning of exile came to occupy a larger place in Jewish thinking; categorical rejection of competing faith systems became a more pressing priority.

According to Ben-Sasson, reiterated in Chazan's full length discussion of the period surrounding 1096 and the First Crusade, is one note that is demonstrative of the changing ideologies of the Jews and the fact that those who lost their lives and were therefore venerated in the period became the spine of Jewish ideologies of persecution and served to cohere the faith together, even today. This sentiment is upheld by Jewish tradition, that marks the Rhineland massacres as a central demonstrative period where Jewish martyrdom became a cohesive social ideology. "Hebrew sources call one group of cities where large and important Ashkenazic communities were annihilated 'cities of blood,' (82) and the commemoration of these martyrs became an important source of Jewish solidarity, as it had in the aftermath of the Crusade massacres of 1096. (83)"

Particularly noteworthy is the veneration for the martyrs of 1096. They represent to Ben-Sasson, and more generally to Zionist historiography, exemplars of the most intense commitment to Jewish life and Jewish peoplehood. Their extreme affirmation of the faith of Israel and their concomitantly unflinching rejection of any and all alternatives represent a high point in historic expression of Jewish identity and perserverance.

The attitudes of the early Christian fathers and the reformers who inspired the crusades against the Infidels (Muslims) were decidedly mixed, while on the one hand being demonstratively apposed to attacking Jews directly as a result of the fact that the Christian tenant affirms that such men will eventually convert and accept Jesus and also because the Jews unlike the Muslims had not taken up arms against the Christians. Yet, at the same time the reformer Bernard Clairvoux, stressing all of the above makes mention that in a practical sense the Jewish practice of money lending for interest (usury) was attacked as inappropriate and unsupportable. The mixed messages as the fervor of the period likely stressed the differences between the Christians and Jews and reiterated action rather than restraint, on the part of Christians.

Before and after the Rhineland Massacres of 1096, there have been those who have strong buy in to persecution (or at least debate) mentality and restraint and self-reflection for ills.

But when the preaching against the evils of usury extended itself to anti-Jewish activity and a court priest (court of Champagne?) involved in Fulk's campaign against the Jews asked Adam c. 1198 to supply him with suitable material, he turned down the request in exceedingly harsh terms. 62 Adam berates his correspondent for wanting to combat Jews while he himself is so utterly devoid of the qualities his sacerdotal condition demands of him.

Adam, demonstrates a consistent stand, on the part of reason to look closer at what the individual is trying to prove by debating Jewish faults, when in reality he should be inciting self-reflection and paying closer attention to his own role, which he is obviously neglecting, if he has nothing better to do than pick a fight with Jewish doctrine.

According to Adam, disputing Jews was an obvious waste of time. God in his justice had punished Jews with internal blindness. Their hearts are obdurate and until the day that the plenitude of peoples would enter the kingdom, they will remain blind. Discussing truth with Jews constitutes a blindness equal to theirs. People who take on debates with Jews do so for their own vainglory. Priests should know better than to indulge in such inane vanity. They should seek to regain the image of God's likeness. They should not just mouth Christian doctrine, they should practise what they preach and be an example of good Christian living. Their unrighteous behaviour and impious handling of the sacrament make them worse than Jews. The Jews killed Jesus out of ignorance; these Christians were killing the Christ they feigned to worship. Adam ends by claiming that his correspondent should leave disputing with Jews alone, that is not his business. Reforming Christians and himself, who are worse than Jews, through word and deed, is. 63

Rational thought, albeit obviously anti-Semitic serves as a constant reminder of how the Christian mind repeatedly returns to seek external cause for internal woes. The Rhineland Massacre, was an extreme furtherance of relatively minor, though clearly negative, assaults on the Jews, how they live and what they believe. There is no right or wrong answer to be found in the questions of sentiment, but behavior, marked by violent action was clearly demonstrative of the crusader mentality, extended to the most convenient social deviant in Rhineland, the "other" that was the most readily accessible even to those marauders that did not have the resources to get on the bandwagon and join the official crusades. Periods of spiritual fear, that were exhibited in later crusades, such as when the people felt they were going to lose against the Muslims, spurned even greater calls for Jewish persecution.