what were the crusades we have to understand the idea of the crusade which is of course
in today's parlance we use the word crusade like some kind of grand venture to improve something
like you can have a crusade for the environment or you can have a crusade for i don't know
literacy or something like that the term of course comes from the word cross it's related to
the word crooks and uh because the the crusaders themselves uh were traveling under the sign of the
cross on their way to jerusalem uh the are the history is basically like this in the year 1095
israel was under the control of the muslims and there was a significant conflict between
the muslim empire and the byzantine empire on in constantinople and the uh the byzantine empire of
course was christian and the although there was a significant split between the western christians
who became roman catholics and the byzantine christians the leader of the byzantine christians
in constantinople now called istanbul reached out to the pope in rome shown here urban ii
and said can you help us out we are finding that we cannot make our way to the holy sites
in jerusalem on our pilgrimages and so urban ii when he was in france he called together a council
and in 1095 he proclaimed a grand europe-wide crusade a gathering of military forces to march
all the way to jerusalem and to take it from the infidel the non-believer meaning the muslim in
this case uh it was a an audacious goal uh we're talking about highly fractionated communities
uh christians who are already arguing with each other there was a grand ecumenical motive behind
it because here were the orthodox christians calling out to the catholic christians they
were going to cooperate in this grand vest you know um adventure there are also lots of economic
and political advantages to doing this they actually had at the time a glut of young knights
at a particular rung in the feudal ladder that needed to have some kind of activity to occupy
them i'm not kidding you there's a lot of this going on but at any rate the the enterprise caught
fire people loved the idea and sure enough they organized themselves all across europe and they
made their way in a series of crusades there was not just one finally down to jerusalem where they
attacked it and conquered it in 1099 establishing for a very brief period of time and uh with some
interruptions a crusader presence in israel as you can see from this map here um they uh not all
of the crusades succeeded and in fact much of the first crusade which is especially important for us
was actually uh brought to its knees not by muslim defenders but by christians who refused to allow
the crusaders to pass through their territory uh and quite frequently along the way the crusaders
traveled past uh jewish settlements so you can see all of the uh stars of david here represent
larger jewish communities and the green path in particular is important to us at the top right
there you see that it goes through north eastern northwestern europe which is where much of the
story we're going to describe here today happened so that's the idea of the crusades they finally
get moving in 10 early 1096 and by 1099 they they conquer and take over jerusalem now uh what
this means for the jews is that there were a huge number of massacres particularly in the rhineland
and scholars of the crusades often overlook this because they tend to think of the crusaders in
terms of the um the high-level well-outfitted professional soldiers from the soldiering class
who undertook this massive journey richard the lionheart type people but in reality there were
several stages or waves of crusaders that had different levels of uh social attachment
to that class um and um in fact in quite in when you get to the the lowest level of crusaders
you had basically uh hoodlums and nerdwells and just uh decided to uh join on to this cause
um some of them were you know kind of stoked by the uh rhetoric of people like peter
the hermit shown here uh who was uh you know directing people that goose a given goose or in
one case a donkey was actually you know infused with the holy spirit and peter the hermit went
around sort of like stoking people's excitements and energy saying we have to follow the crusaders
all the way to jerusalem meaning you've got like real official soldiers who have
armor and they have a horse and they have a squire and then you have just people who are
like yeah count me in i'm there and they have no provisions and they have no money and and how are
they going to cross europe without actually um having any of these things to their name
uh here's another image of peter the hermit on the left who was kind of directing the crusaders to
their uh goal in jerusalem that's depicted on the right this is from a 13th century uh piece
of art another image of peter the hermit you know directing the crusaders as they they head off but
in reality peter the hermit was not directing the crusaders he was typically following behind them
but inspiring the masses to engage in various activities now in terms of the jews many of these
sort of lower level crusaders followers of peter the herm and others they said wait a second why
are we schlepping all the way to jerusalem to defeat the non-believer meaning the muslims
we have non-believers living right here in the rhineland valley
why do we have to go all the way over there when we can attack the jews and we can fulfill
the sort of religious mandate of the crusades by attacking our local infidels three communities in
particular were devastated amongst about a dozen spire worms and mines known as the community shum
quite often you'll have little tri towns three towns that have uh close associations and they're
geographically proximate and they tend to have an acronym like shumdas these particular towns
were the epicenter of these massacres by these sort of ragtag bands associated with the crusades
why this becomes so important in jewish history is largely because of the nature of the jewish
response i mean we're not talking about you know devastation on the scale of the 19th certainly not
the 20th century we're speaking about somewhere in the neighborhood of five to 8 000 people killed
which is a terrible tragedy no question but it's a relatively small number when you think about
you know 50 000 in the 17th century and 6 million just in the middle of the 20th century
but they nevertheless had a very powerful impact on the fairly young community of ashkenaz
that we'll discuss in a moment and in the next lecture hopefully we'll have time so
the crusades let's go through them a little bit more detail and these by the way the the
peak season was right around this time of year uh the worst attacks were days before
and after the holiday of shavuot in 1096. there are actually a lot of very powerful
pieces of the liturgy that specifically remember that and are associated with the uh
tisha b'av the national day of mourning as well so the crusaders again not the official soldier
crusaders but the uh these ragtag vans were in the neighborhood of cologne in april of 20 1096
and the jews of that community were quite afraid that there would be violence so they attempted to
respond to in advance by being proactive and providing contributions in the case of peter
the hermit who was there at the time they offered to provision his followers meaning
the jewish community of cologne said oh look at all you hungry tired crusaders let us take care
of catering you while you make your way down to jerusalem and peter the hermits accepted on their
behalf another one of the more official crusaders jeffrey de bruyne uh he accepted a contribution
of 500 gold pieces to uh maintain his troops as well so contributions quote unquote is a kind of a
bribe to hopefully avert disaster it was actually temporarily successful also because the um the uh
the jewish community of kulun also appealed to the emperor who clearly gave instructions to
local officials that there was to be no violence directed against the jews in that time as we shall
see the uh the emperor who was positively disposed towards the jewish community was not able to
control the violence gives you a sense of the the nature of medieval society as a whole so that's
what happened essentially in cohen but neighboring jewish communities were worried because these
crusaders are are making their way along to their communities and they're worried about the little
you know isolated acts of violence that they associate with this mob in the next town in spire
the jews were much more worried because by the time the crusaders got there they were more and by
the way let me reiterate that official historians of the crusades tend not to regard the the follows
the the also crusaded mobs as crusaders themselves and indeed they're quite distinct this is like mob
violence that's following the uh you know the the larger zeitgeist and the larger movement
in society at the time but in spire the jews attempted to barricade themselves in the synagogue
hoping that they could you know just simply ride out the violence the the mob actually went
into spire they and they uh they found 11 jews who were not able to make it to the synagogue
and they were killed uh and it was at this point that we have something that is especially unique
about the crusades that has i think profound impact for the rest of ashkenazic history
the crusaders even this mob had kind of like a filmy covering of religious justification for
their behavior saying that the jews were liable to be attacked because they were fundamentally
unbelievers if however they were to convert and accept baptism that would make them believers
and then they would be would save themselves and so uh the crusaders frequently offered the
jews the choice of baptism or death we talked a little bit about the uh the difficulty in
christian theology especially medieval catholic theology about forced baptism uh in general the
church frowned on forced baptism because after all it's it's supposed to be something that is
done with you know intent and if you're fearful for your life it's hard to say that you have uh
correct intent but once baptism was performed the church was also loafed to declare it null and void
we also spoke a few weeks ago about the horrible ed gardo murtara case where even as late as 1858
you still have this kind of terrible situation at any rate in spire you have the first example
and by the way we have a number of uh very solid first-hand accounts that survived the crusades
there there's a about half a dozen significant uh narratives from both the jewish and the non-jewish
perspective on how these events unfolded so we actually have a lot of uh of good material to base
this history on i refer you to the works of robert chasen who's written extensively on the crusades
it was inspired the the first uh known case of a woman given the choice of baptist baptism or death
decided to choose death martyrdom or as it's called in hebrew kidus hashem the sanctification
of the name and this is a phenomenon that would be associated indelibly with the crusades
and in much larger numbers when they got to varms which is again one of those tri-towns the jews
sought refuge with the bishop and this is something we see over and over again in the
crusades the church was not the enemy at all here the church was in fact against the violence and
although they definitely approved of the larger goal of the crusades attacking the local jews
was not something that the church officially sanctioned at all it was more of a a mass
movement that came from uh strange characters like peter the great peter the hermit so the the jews
sought refuge in the bishops uh compound and in fact the uh the crusaders broke into the bishop's
palace themselves and massacred the jews in his home uh quite a large number about 800 jews
died this way and worms had a terrible terrible situation where the jews over and over again uh
many of them we do have numbers of jews who chose baptism we'll return to them in a second
but you have this terrible awful incidence of jews you know trapped in a room and fearful of having
the synagogue set a light and dying in the flames or or fearful of having them break in and and uh
the jews not being able to withstand the temptation and deciding to convert
on pain of death where many of these jewish families and communities simply decided to
kill each other in acts of mass suicide very powerful poignant descriptions of
mothers killing their own children and fathers killing their daughters-in-law
and just horrible horrible things to read that literally formed part of the liturgy for jews
for centuries afterwards in memory of this event which was called incidentally
the the decree of 1096. in minds the bishop attempted to help but he did not have the
wherewithal to to do so and you had an incredible number there of massacres perhaps the most
powerful examples of massacres and suicides were in mines the the rough estimate of the number of
deaths is about 5 000 and when you include the the surrounding communities it might go
up a little bit more uh another one of these figures who was kind of like peter the hermit
is count amiko he eventually moved on it was his troops who were later destroyed by the hungarians
and one last detail that's quite significant after this horrible summer of 1096 the emperor
actually officially allowed any baptized jews to simply ignore their forced baptism and return to
the jewish community there was a papal conflict at this time and the so-called anti-pope clement iii
was very upset with the emperor but at this point the church did not have the authority to challenge
him especially not a uh disputed pope and so therefore the the jews were allowed to return
to their faith by secular law also interesting to note is that the the jewish community had to deal
with this question of are these baptized jews allowed to come back to judaism and others of
course uh answered in the affirmative that they were welcomed back but it was a subject of debate
and there's just a new monograph that came out recently i believe by uh professor connor fogel
i'm looking forward to reading that and knowing a little bit more about the story but at any
rate was like this massive wave of violence that swept over the rhineland in association with the
uh crusades and it had a a very distinct impact on the jews before we spend a little more time
looking at the impact on ashkenaz let's just follow the crusaders down to jerusalem where
they finally put siege to the holy city in the summer in june of 1099.
the jewish community actually defended jerusalem side by side with the dominant muslim population
but after a brutal siege the walls were breached and the jews in jerusalem were massacred
many were actually sold into slavery and only redeemed when they the slave ships
dropped them off at italy and the jewish community there was able to
take them out of slavery an absolutely horrific massacre now obviously there's huge geopolitical
implications to the crusades because this was a major point in the
cleaving of europe between the christian north and the muslim south the separation
politically and culturally and intellectually of christians and muslims continues right up until
the present day in fact one of the uh i'm told one of the slang derogatory terms for americans
in iraq is uh crusader that you know the the muslims definitely have the crusades
is a very important part of their historical memory and it's not a complementary one to the
west