Crusaders & Martyrs: Murder, Suicide, Martyrdom - Jewish Persecutions During the First Crusade, 1096 (original) (raw)
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The Preaching of the First Crusade and the Persecutions of the Jews
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Although the versions of Pope Urban’s call for the First Crusade focus on the need to liberate the Holy Land from the Muslims, crusaders and locals attacked first the communities of the Franco-German (Ashkenazic) Jews. Both contemporary and modern historians have offered a variety of explanations for these uncalled-for devastating attacks. Without discounting some of these proposals, this article applies the psychological explanation of Displacement to offer an additional reason. The article suggests that the urgent call to retaliate against the Muslims immediately and the many graphic descriptions of alleged Muslim atrocities against Eastern Christians and Christian pilgrims in the propaganda of the First Crusade created mounting frustration in Europe. And since this frustration could not be expressed immediately and directly against its source, i.e., the faraway Muslims, the attackers displaced their aggression onto the nearby Jews. Moreover, Displacement also explains the many cl...
The American Historical Review, 2009
The theme of Jonathan Elukin's elegant and well-argued book is Jewish-Christian coexistence in medieval Europe-how was it possible given Christian prejudice and anti-Jewish violence? Older medieval Jewish history stressed the themes of "scholars and suffering," embodying what the late Salo Baron termed a "lachrymose" view of Jewish history. In recent years historians have stressed how medieval Europe became a "persecuting society," following the work of R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (1987), and David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence (1996). Elukin argues for a different approach to medieval Jewish experience, eschewing a "one-dimensional narrative of victimization" (p. 4) for a more nuanced inquiry that explores the social and political ties that bound Jews to medieval society. While other medieval Jewish historians such as Robert Chazan and Ivan Marcus have made some of the same points in the past, Elukin is the first to write a sustained book-length argument along these lines. The book consists of six chapters. The first three are chronological, covering late antiquity to the early Middle Ages, the Carolingians to the twelfth century, and the High Middle Ages. The final three chapters are more topical, covering social integration, violence, and expulsion and continuity. In making his argument, Elukin does not introduce any texts that were previously unknown to scholarship, but rather he discusses the usual texts cited in Jewish histories, while offering new insights concerning their context. For example, when discussing royal Jewish charters, Elukin asserts that such agreements should be understood as evidence of Jewish integration into medieval society. Since every medieval person was bound to more powerful people, the terms of these charters are indicative of a group's importance. Elukin points out that the provisions of these charters parallel those of the clergy, who were, after all, a privileged order of society (p. 63). Perhaps the most novel argument that Elukin makes in the course of his book is his interpretation of medieval violence against Jews. Elukin asserts that it is critical to understand how Jews viewed generalized violence in medieval
Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe
Religion and law in Medieval Christian and Muslim Societies, 2016
This volume contains the fruits of a conference organized at the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Vienna on 23-25 October 2013. We brought together 15 specialists on the history of medieval Judaism to discuss the legacy of Bernhard Blumenkranz. Bernhard Blumenkranz was born in Vienna in 1913 to a family of Polish Jews. 1 He went to France at about the time of the Anschluss; he was arrested and placed in the Gurs prison camp in Pyrénées Atlantique, where the Vichy government interred foreign-born Jews. He escaped from Gurs and made his way to Switzerland, where he stayed out the war in Basel and prepared a doctorate at the University of Basel on the portrayal of Jews in the works of Augustine. 2 After the war, he moved to France and wrote a thèse d'État entitled 'Juifs et chrétiens dans le monde occidental, 430-1096' (Jews and Christians in the Western World, 430-1096). Through his numerous publications and through the foundation of two important research institutions (the Mission française des archives juives in 1961, and the « Nouvelle Gallia Judaica » in 1971), he revitalized the study of Jewish history in France and in Europe. His many publications and his teaching had a profound impact on the scholarship concerning medieval Jewish history and on the history of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. Most of his rich production falls into three areas. His earliest work deals with Christian perceptions of Jews and Jewish-Christian relations in the early Middle Ages: from Augustine to the first crusade. Much of this work involved the close study of Latin texts, for some of which he produced critical editions (notably Gilbert Crispin's Disputatio judei et christiani, published in Utrecht in 1956). 3 His second major field of research, beginning in the 1960s, was the place of Jews in Medieval Christian iconography. Finally, towards the end of his career, he wrote extensively about the history of the Jews in France, from the Middle Ages to the modern era. In all of these areas, Bernhard Blumenkranz's work was fundamental in reassessing and in reinvigorating research. A generation of scholars has been profoundly influenced by his work, and much of the work in these three fields over the past fifty years has been built on the foundations that he laid. In some cases his conclusions have been called into question or nuanced: for example on the First 1 This brief biography is based on 'Blumenkranz, Bernhard' , in Dictionnaire encyclopédique du Judaïsme,