Subject: JUICE History 10 - The Crusades
Date:    Wed, 3 Jun 1998 00:31:21 +0000
To:      "Hebraic Heritage Newsgroup"<heb_roots_chr@geocities.com>

From:          JUICE Administration <juice@wzo.org.il>
To:            history@wzo.org.il
Subject:       JUICE History 10

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                  World Zionist Organization
                Jewish University in CyberspacE
          juice@wzo.org.il         birnbaum@wzo.org.il 
                     http://www.wzo.org.il 
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Course: Medieval Jewish History
Lecture: 10/12
Lecturer: Prof. Howard Adelman

In the course of the next two lectures we will examine the emergence of
popular violence against the Jews during the First Crusade, the development
of a new demonic image of the Jew in Europe, changes in the legal status of
the Jews, and the ultimate wholesale destruction of Jewish communities
during the fourteenth century.  As we have tried to show throughout these
lectures, such violent attitudes were not inherent aspects of
Jewish-Christian relations or a regular feature of Jewish life in all
locations until a relatively late period.  It is for these reasons that we
will look carefully at various suggestions concerning origins of the
violence against the Jews during the First Crusade.  After these two
lectures, the next, and final lecture will present major aspects of European
Jewish culture, showing that even during this period the Jews sustained
communal, literary, cultural, and religious creativity.

A. The First Crusade

Pilgrimages in Europe and to Jerusalem had been a feature of Christianity
throughout the centuries.  In Europe, during the ninth and tenth centuries
Christians began to reconquer territory from Muslims in Spain, Sardinia,
Sicily, and north African, in the course of which they began to open up the
Mediterranean Sea to Christian commerce again, especially merchants from
Italian port cities.  At this time, Europe suffered from a serious lack of
leadership because of the Investiture Struggle, a battle over the right to
make church appointments between the reform minded popes, Gregory
(1073-1085), and then Urban II  (1088-1099), and the emperor, Henry IV
(1056-1106), which led to civil wars,  Henry's prolonged campaigns in Italy,
and his humiliation by the pope at Canossa in 1077. Jerusalem at this time
was ruled by Muslims from Egypt who made various attacks on Christians
there, sometimes with Jewish participation, including the burning of the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the murder of the Christian Patriarch of
Jerusalem in 966. In 1071 the Seljuk Turks from Iraq and Persia took
Jerusalem and defeated the Byzantine forces of the eastern Christian empire
ruled from Constantinople.  Pilgrims from Europe to Jerusalem brought back
atrocity stories about the treatment of Christians there. The emperors of
Byzantium also made appeals to the popes for help to fight against the
Turks. As a result, in 1095 the First Crusade was called in Clermont in
central France by Pope Urban II, a French Clunaic monk, who stirred up much
enthusiasm for the Crusade with tales of Muslim atrocities and promises the
participants of indulgence for past sins, freedom from servitude and prison,
release from debt, hope for new opportunities, and ecclesiastical
protection.  Urban thus created, perhaps unintentionally, violent, popular
mass migrations across Europe led by members of the lower nobility, not the
kings. 

Three Hebrew accounts, written between 1096 and 1152, by Solomon bar Samson,
Eliezer bar Nathan, and an anonymous chronicler from Mainz, describe the
violence against the Jews during the Crusades and their reactions.  These
accounts reflect the style of contemporary Latin chronicles, some of which
confirm aspects of their contents as well. 

In Jewish history the First Crusade marks a traumatic turning point in the
rise of popular violence against the Jews. The first attacks against the
Jews took place along the Rhine in Rouen, Metz, and Trier.  The major
attacks against the Jews were mounted in Speyer, Worms, and Mainz.   In
Speyer, where, as mentioned earlier, the Jews had been invited to settle
there by Bishop Ruediger in 1084 and had received another generous charter
ratified by the Emperor Henry IV in 1090, the Jews were attacked by
crusaders and burghers, apparently local Christians, on May 3, 1096 (8
Iyyar).  They had been  warned of impending danger and were protected by
John, the bishop of the city, Ruediger's successor, who punished some of
their attackers by cutting of their hands. Thus many were saved, without,
the chronicle noted, probably because of the rarity of such protection, the
Jews having to bribe the bishop. As a result, only eleven Jews were killed
in Speyer (Chazan 133-4, Marcus, no. 23).

In Worms, where the Jews had received a charter from the king, the bishop
may have felt less of an obligation to protect them. Nevertheless, he took
some Jews into his castle while they entrusted their possessions to their
Christian neighbors. The burghers and crusaders launched an attack on the
Jews, in the course of which they raised libels against the Jews, which
included exhuming a corpse and claiming that the Jews had shriveled it with
boiling water and were about to use it to poison the water supply, possibly
the first such charge against them.  On May 5 or 18 (Iyyar 10 or 23), a
battle was waged against the Jews in the course of which some chose death in
an act of mass suicide, while others chose to convert to Christianity, often
doing so to regain their children and to bury their dead.  On May 20 or 25,
(Iyyar 25 or Sivan 1) the crusaders and burghers attacked the court of the
bishop where the remaining Jews were protected.  The Jews first fought back,
but after an extended battle, realized that they did not have a chance and
turned to kill their own children in God's name, in the course of which
about 800 Jews  died (Chazan 134-6).

News of the massacres in Speyer and Worms reached the Jews of Mainz, a major
Jewish community along the Rhine, who turned to the bishop for help. In
exchange for the payment of bribes, he offered them protection, and they
entrusted their possessions with the local Christians, some of whom would
defend the Jews.  But after the Jews killed a crusader, the burghers joined
the crusaders in attacking them.  Afterwards, Emicho, a leader of the
crusaders, arrived in Mainz, the Jews tried to negotiate with him and to
bribe him.  However, on May 27, 1096 (Sivan 3), the burghers opened the
gates of the city to Emicho, but the Jews put on their armor, gathered their
weapons, and prepared to fight him and his forces.  After the bishop's men
abandoned the Jews in their battle, they continued to fight, but some,
seeing that they would lose, according to the Jewish chronicles, chose to
die at the hands of the enemy in order to ascend to eternal paradise.  But,
according to the Latin chronicle, they killed each other rather than die at
the hands of the enemy. Some Jews first cursed the crusaders and even
managed to kill a few of them, but finally 1100 Jews died in Mainz (Chazan
136-141). The crusaders then went to kill Jews in Cologne, Regensberg, Metz,
Prague, and Bohemia. Between five and ten thousand Jews were killed during
the First Crusade in Germany. 

Historians have offered conflicting interpretations of the origins of the
violence against the Jews during the First Crusade and of its impact
afterwards.  These fall into four basic categories, none of which alone
sufficiently explains all the phenomena.


1.  Religious.  This obvious view was put forward during the 1870s by, among
others, the leading Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz who argued that the
violence against the Jews was the result of the cumulative impact of hostile
Christian attitudes towards the Jews.  For example, one crusader, Count
Ditmar, would not leave Germany until he killed a Jew, and another,  Godfrey
of Boullon, wanted to avenge the blood of Jesus with the blood of the Jews.
This religious interpretation can be questioned for several reasons:  The
traditional protective attitude of the papacy towards the Jews, as exhibited
in the attitude of Gregory the Great, still dominated, and accordingly
leaders of the Church, including bishops, cardinals, and popes, protected
the Jews.   Pope Urban II, who called for the Crusade, may not have intended
any violence against the Jews. Although at this time discussion increased
about Jewish culpability for the crucifixion, some Christians, however, did
argue for limiting the blame placed on the Jews. The chief difficulty of a
religious explanation of the violence against the Jews during the First
Crusade revolves around that fact that Jews and Christians had maintained
relations for a thousand years without having reached this deadly level of
hostility.

2.  Economic. In response to Graetz,  in 1875 William Roscher (1817-1894)
put forward this interpretation which saw the Crusades as a national
movement of economic emancipation from the Jew's perceived monopoly on trade
and considered it necessary for the creation of cities in Europe, a view
that would later influence Werner Sombart and Max Weber. The main criticism
of this view  is that in actuality the Jews had no monopoly on trade.
Moreover, merchants would not have been so vicious to other merchants, a
behavior that put all merchants at risk, especially since during and after
the Crusades Jewish and Christian merchants did cooperate with each other on
the economic level. The intentions of the violent masses were not economic;
the results, however, may have been. The First Crusades opened new trade
routes between the west and the east, and as a result the Jews lost their
unique place in world commerce. The hatred they experienced, however, was
not due to their commercial activities and certainly not to moneylending, an
activity in which Jews were not yet engaged and against which no complaints
arose until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Until then, others, such
as the Lombards of Italy, did most of the moneylending.

3.  Social-Psychological.  This view was advocated in the work of Salo Baron
and Ben Halpern.  They argued that the First Crusade were the first
premeditated, widespread, concentrated popular action against Jews, which
arose as a result of a group psychosis that developed at a time of stress.
The hostility, therefore, was based on the needs of the masses, not
religious or other issues.  As evidence for these views they pointed to the
fantastic images of the Jews that gripped the masses after the First
Crusade, including the accusations that the Jews killed Christians and used
their blood for ritual purposes.  The first ritual murder accusation against
the Jews emerged during the 1140's, either in Norwich, England in 1144, far
from the violence of the Crusades (Marcus, no. 24; Chazan, pp. 141-144,
151-156), or Wuerzburg, Germany in 1147. These dates, however, are still
fifty years after the First Crusade.  The blood libel, that Jews used blood,
usually of pre-pubescent Christian boys, to make Passover matzot developed
later, appearing first in 1235 (in Fulda in the Germanic lands). According
to this social-psychological interpretation of the violence during the First
Crusade, these accusations were projections upon the victims of the thoughts
and deeds for which their persecutors were not punished.  When the masses
during the First Crusade were not condemned by the authorities for their
actions against the Jews, they began to hate their victims to justify what
they knew had been wrong to do and feared that the Jews would take revenge
against them. The fundamental impediment to this view is that these demonic
images of the Jews emerged after the First Crusade and this explanation,
therefore, presents the effects of the violence against the Jews as its
cause.  In other words, this social-psychological explanation may explain
subsequent hostility against the Jews, but not the origins of the violence
during the Crusades.

4.  Political/Legal.  Guido Kisch, a historian of German-Jewish law, put
forward this interpretation which tries to show that, because in the
Imperial Landfriede of Mainz issued by Henry IV in 1103  and in the
Sachsenspiegel, the Landrecht of 1224-1232, the Jews received special
protection as a group, a long with women and clerics, and were prohibited
from carrying weapons, rather than protecting the Jews, such restrictions
amounted to limitation on their freedom.  Gradually as a result, he argued,
the Jews would be defined as "servi camera" or "kammerknecht," servants of
the royal chamber, a status that he saw as a sign of their legal
deterioration during the middle ages. Again, such a change in the status of
the Jews reflects more the effects of the violence of the Crusades rather
than a cause of it, although such special protection, like the provisions
allowing them to live in walled sections of the city may have indicated that
already by this time the Jews were particularly vulnerable.

There is thus no simple answer for the reason for the violence against the
Jews during the First Crusade.  That such violence required explanations
from so many historians  indicates that it was neither normal nor taken for
granted, but constituted an innovation.

In 1099 the Crusaders captured Jerusalem, placing as many Jews as they could
in a synagogue and setting it on fire.  However, newly discovered Geniza
documents indicate that this was not the end of Jewish settlement in
Jerusalem. After the First Crusade, those Jews who had converted to
Christianity under duress were allowed by several Christian rulers as well
as rabbinic authorities such as Rashi, the leading rabbi of the period about
whom we will speak shortly, to revert to Judaism. In 1120 Pope Calixtus II
issued Sicut Judaieis, a constitution asserting the protected status of the
Jews based on previous papal precedents which would be the model for future
statements on behalf of the Jews by various popes (cf. Marcus, no. 30).
However, its power may have been limited by its closing lines which asserted
that it was only valid for those Jews who were not plotting against Christians.

B. The Second Crusade

According to the Hebrew chronicles, after the First Crusade the Jews enjoyed
a period of fifty years of quiet. During the Second Crusade from 1146 to
1147 some attacks took place against on the Jews. In Wuerzburg, for example,
in 1147 Crusaders and local rabble killed several Jews and leveled one of
the first ritual murder accusations against the Jews. For the most part,  by
the order of Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the leaders of the Second Crusade,
whom the Jews assert that they did not have to bribe,  Jews were protected
in castles against the provocations against them by monks such as Rudolph,
and the attempt of Peter the Venerable of Cluny to confiscate Jewish
property to finance this Crusade. Bernard, however, did lash out against the
Jews, including one of the earliest hostile references to Jewish
moneylending, which he called "judaizing" or "judaizare," but which he
compared favorably to Christian moneylending.  He also stressed the role of
the Jews in the crucifixion, the dispersion of the Jews as proof of their
punishment, and the need to protect the Jews so that they might eventually
convert (Chazan pp. 100-108 and 145-6; Marcus, no. 61).

C. The Popes, 1159-1272

During the high middle ages, life for the Jews was determined by a
constellation of factors in their major centers of residence--the Germanic
lands (which included much of Italy), France, England, and Spain--including,
the relations between the rulers of each of these areas with the popes of
Rome.  One rule of thumb and its corollary for determining the treatment of
the Jews, far from perfect generalizations, are: the closer an area was to
Rome, the less likely that its rulers would cooperate with the papal
policies about the Jews and the further from Rome, the more likely that a
ruler would cooperate with the pope.  An interesting lemma to this to this
principle, in fact perhaps proof of it, is that the Jews of Rome in specific
and Italy in general, who lived under the popes' noses, tended to fare
especially well.  In addition, the reciprocal relations between countries
often explained aspects of the fate of the Jews in each of the countries.

Pope Alexander III (1159-1181) wrote about twelve moderate letters
concerning the Jews, a view reflected in the comment by Benjamin of Tudela,
the Jewish traveler and chronicler, that this pope had a Jew administering
his household.  Some of Alexander's edicts concerning the Jews included an
extension of the earlier ban against the Jews opening their doors and
windows on Easter to include Good Friday as well and repeated the ban
against Jews having Christian slaves, reflecting the fact that, despite all
the legislation against this practice, the Jews continued to engage in it.
He forbade Christians to  serve Jews as household servants, showing the
continued social and economic relations between Jewish and Christians
despite previous legislation, and ruled that Jewish converts to Christianity
could not be deprived of their property. He also repeated the rule that
synagogues could be repaired but new ones could not be built.  Several of
these rulings went against some of the liberal provisions Henry IV granted
the Jews of Speyer in 1090, including permission for Christian domestics to
work for Jews and the authorization that  Jewish converts to Christianity
lose their property, a disincentive for conversion (Chazan 30-32, cf.
60-61). Similar favorable provisions were issued by Pope Clement III
(1187-1191), who tried to protect the Jews against forced conversions and
the exhumation of their corpses, indications of popular hostilities against
them. 

The edicts of Pope Innocent III (1198-1216) reflect a radical change in the
papal attitude towards the Jews.  As a powerful reforming and crusading pope
who wanted to make the papacy supreme in the world, he made many assertions
concerning the Jews.  Nevertheless, as was true on the part of Christian
leaders throughout the middle ages, he showed much more tolerance for the
Jews than Christian heretics, such as the Albigenses in southern France
against whom launched a crusade and to whom showed no mercy at all. In 1199
he issued a Constitutio pro judaeis, a renewal of Sicut Judaeis which
protected the Jews.  He also wrote extensively about the Jews, condemning
what he thought were their excesses against Church law and  members of the
Church, particularly crusaders, including moneylending, employment of female
Christian  servants, construction of new synagogues, appearance in public on
Good Friday, abstention from Christian meat and wine while selling their
castoff meat and wine to Christians, bribing officials, acting insolent,
fencing stolen goods, and killing Christians.  They also, he said, made
Christian wet-nurses express their milk for three days after taking the
Eucharist on Sunday so that Jewish children would not have to imbibe it
through their milk. Of particular concern was Jewish moneylending,
especially the charging of compound interest, which he called usury on
usury, and their seizure of pledges from Christians, including land and
castles, which would, contrary to conventional wisdom, show Jews as owners
of land (Chazan 32-33, 171-177).  Central to his view of the Jews  was the
concept of Jewish perpetual servitude because of their crucifixion of
Christ.  In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council met under Innocent III and made
rulings that would impact on Jewish life for many centuries: Converts to
Christianity could not revert to Judaism, even if they had been forced.
Jews and Muslims had to wear distinguishing clothing in order to prevent
accidental, casual sexual intercourse with Christians. This church policy
would set the tone, but state law would legislate practices in each country.
This was the first decree that the Jews wear a badge in Christian Europe,
and the reason for implementing it indicates that until then Jews and
Christians had regular, intimate relations.  Though as one student,
recalling previous comments about the particular odor attributed by some
anti-Jewish writers to the Jews, remarked: "If the Jews had a unique odor,
why did they need to wear a badge?"   

Innocent III also ruled, after centuries of controversy among Christians,
that through transubstantiation the wine and bread became the actual body
and blood of Christ and did not merely symbolize them.  This dogmatic
assertion would find dramatic  confirmation when, beginning in 1243 in
Belitz near Berlin,  Jews were soon  accused of ritually torturing
communion hosts and making them bleed (Chazan 33-35; Marcus, no. 27).

Innocent III also ruled against excessive moneylending, which had provoked
much hostile discussion by the Church at this time, the irony of which was
that the less Christians lent money, the more Jews would have to. Influenced
by Aristotle's view that money cannot beget money, a strain of Christian
thought tried to apply these static, romantic notions of ancient society to
the middle ages.  At the later time, however, there were peasants and rulers
who needed short term loans to maintain commerce, agriculture, and war, for
which they often turned to Jews.  Christians and Jews engaged in extensive
polemics on whether Jewish moneylending was allowed, often based on
Deuteronomy 23:20-21:  "Thou shalt not lend upon interest to thy brother
interest of money, interest of food . . . unto an alien thy mayest . . ."
The issue therefore became whether the Jew perceived the Christian as a
brother or an alien (Chazan 201-204). Christian hostility to Jewish
moneylending continued in the thought of Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) who
tried to ban all Christians from benefiting from Jewish moneylending. 

Papal views concerning the Jews at this time are reflected in a topical code
of papal pronouncements,  called De poenitentia et matrimonio, edited by
Raymond of Penaforte (1180-1275), a cleric in Spain.  In it the basic
principles were put forth that the church had no spiritual authority over
Jews, but it could exercise temporal authority over them, with the Jews
being the servants of Christians. Jews, were allowed to observe their
religion, were depicted as powerful, abusing scriptures, and hostile to
Christians by not eating their food and by appearing in public during Holy
Week.  In cases in which they had been forcibly converted the Christianity,
they could not revert to Judaism unless they had been had been absolutely
forced, meaning violently dragged off and not simply given conditional
threats or enticements. Jews could not provide medicine for Christians, bath
with them, hold public office, or inherit property from them or from pagans.
They could not construct new synagogues, but might repair old ones. Jewish
converts could not be accepted immediately and when they did convert they
were not to lose their possessions (Chazan 37-41).  The pronouncements,
therefore, show a mixture of the real authority, influence, and power that
the Jews still enjoyed in Christian Europe and the frustration of the Church
not only in getting them to convert, for which they needed to resort to
strong threats short of physical violence, but the continued good relations
between many Christians and Jews.

Similarly, in the scholastic tract of Alexander of Hales, England  (d. 1245)
he discussed the Jews, making assertions and then rejecting them, but,
nevertheless, in the course of doing so exposed the reader to views that
described the Jew as a blasphemer, identifying the Talmud as the source, who
took revenge on the Christian faith and who did injury to the sacraments. He
suggested that the Jews should be persecuted to death and not tolerated at
all, an argument that was then rejected, based on a reading of Psalms 57
(also cited by Bernard of Clairvaux during the Second Crusade), which he
interpreted as meaning a call for the dispersion of the Jews rather than
their murder.  The Jews, he asserted, are witnesses to the truth of
Christianity through the prophecies of Bible and their anticipated
recognition of Christ. Following a new turn in Christian attacks on Judaism,
which we shall see shortly, he asserted that the Talmud should be burned, an
idea that was enacted during his lifetime.  He then put forward the
proposals that Judaism was idolatrous and Christians should not permit Jews
to enforce their law, propositions he negated with the utilitarian argument
that the toleration of the Jews would make it easier to convert them.

The rulings of  Pope Gregory IX (1227-1241),  a major figure in the history
of the Church under whose authority a major collection of canon law, the
Decretals, were edited by the above mentioned Raymond of Penaforte in 1230,
constituted another  major turning point in medieval Jewish history.  He
stressed  the notion that the Jews were in perpetual servitude to the
Church.  As a consequence, Jews could not have authority over Christians,
either as office holders or as slave owners, but that Christians must
protect the Jews as well.  He therefore also used this notion as the basis
for demanding that the kings of France stop the massacre of the Jews, who
according to his figures had already lost 2,500 at the hands of the
crusaders against the Albigenses.  Beyond his moral outrage, Gregory's
argument, which went back to Gregory the Great and was the basis of medieval
church policy, was that the Jews could have recourse to the apostolic throne
because they should not be completely wiped out so that their texts could
provide proof of the truths of Christianity and in the end of days a remnant
of them would convert to Christianity (Chazan 108-112). Such a strong
approach towards protecting the Jews may also have been a response to the
rulings, which we shall see shortly, on behalf of the Jews made by the
German Emperor Frederick II also in 1236.

In 1239 during Lent, Gregory IX turned his attention to the Talmud.
Nicholas Donin, a French apostate Jew, had told him that the Talmud was the
source of Jewish hostility against Christianity and that it, not the Bible,
was the source of the continuity of the Jewish religion. After a millennium
of the Church's ignoring such aspects of Judaism,  Gregory ordered the
recently established Dominican and Franciscan orders to seize Jewish books
from both Jews as well as from Christians, using the secular authorities to
do so if necessary. These decrees, however, were implemented only in France
under the leadership of King Louis IX (1226-1270). In 1240 in Paris, after
the seizure of the Jewish books, a disputation took place between Donin and
Rabbi Yehiel of Paris, an event reported in Hebrew and Latin versions.  Some
of the issues raised in this public debate included: whether the hostile
references attributed by Donin to Jesus in rabbinic literature--that Jesus
was an illegitimate son who would  be punished in Hell by being boiled in
excrement--referred to Jesus of Nazareth or another person with the same
name; whether Jews believed that non-Jews were polluted and that they had
intercourse with animals; and whether the rabbis subverted the word of the
Bible by suspending certain holiday practices such as blowing the shofar
(ram's horn) or carrying the lulav (palm branch) when the holiday fell on
the sabbath (Chazan 221-224; Marcus, no. 29).

In 1244 Pope Innocent IV encouraged attacks on rabbinic literature which he
saw as negating the divine word of the Bible and blaspheming Christ (Chazan
231-3), but elsewhere he defended the Jews against the charge that they
ritually murdered Christian children, initiating a long tradition of papal
defense of the Jews against this charge, a  defense that was never
incorporated into canon law.  In 1247, however, he reversed his position
against the Talmud, ruling that since Judaism was allowed, and the Talmud
was essential to Judaism, so too the Talmud was allowed.  Instead of
destroying it, he called for the censorship of the anti-Christian portions
of all Hebrew books, a reversal that was not accepted by the pope's own
legate in France, Odo (d. 1273), who argued that there were too many
insulting, blasphemous, and wicked passages in the books of the Jews to
allow them to be returned to the Jews  (Chazan 224-231, 231-238).

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