A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (14 page)

Jewish chroniclers praised the courage and religious devotion of Simchah, David and other Jews. They also honored those who had taken their own lives, even though Jews are permitted to do so only in the most extreme circumstances. To many European Jews in the eleventh century and later, these were the most extreme circumstances, and they called for the most extreme measures. What was said about Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity? A Jewish chronicler wrote of these converts:

Now it is fitting to tell the praise of those forcibly converted…. They did not go to church except occasionally. Every time they went, they went out of great duress and fear. They went reluctantly. The gentiles themselves know that they had not converted wholeheartedly, but only of fear of the crusaders, and that [the converts from Judaism] did not believe in [the Christians’] deity, but rather that they clung to the fear of the Lord and held fast to the sublime God, creator of heaven and earth. In the sight of the gentiles, they observed the [Christian] Sabbath properly and observed the Torah of the Lord secretly. Anyone who speaks ill of them insults the countenance of the Divine Presence.
⁷

In time, Emicho and his army left the Rhineland and continued east on their journey to Jerusalem. However, they never reached the Holy Land. After they raided several villages in Hungary, local soldiers retaliated, killing almost everyone. Emicho managed to escape to Germany along with a few companions. A Christian chronicler said of Emicho’s fall:

So the hand of the Lord is believed to have been against the pilgrims, who had sinned by excessive impurity… and who had slaughtered the exiled Jews through greed of money, rather than for the sake of God’s justice, although the Jews were opposed to Christ. The Lord is a just judge and orders no one unwillingly, or under compulsion, to come under the yoke of the Catholic faith.
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Although other crusaders continued to attack Jews, by the fall of 1096 nearly all of the crusaders had moved on—some to Jerusalem and others back to their homes. In 1097, Henry IV returned to Germany from his lands in Italy. Almost immediately, he issued an edict allowing Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity to return to Judaism. He also ordered that all Jewish property taken in the attacks be restored to its rightful owners.

Yet only the burghers in Speyer ever paid for their crimes. Neither Henry nor any other ruler brought to justice the vast majority of the people responsible for the attacks. Christians quickly learned that despite the words of kings and other rulers, there were no consequences for killing Jews.

Pope Urban II was also silent. In fact, the only recorded statement he made about the fate of the Jews was in response to the emperor’s edict. The pope condemned Henry for allowing Jews who had been forcibly converted to return to Judaism, even though earlier in his papacy, he had written strong letters opposing forced conversions.

This new hostility toward Jews continued when the crusaders reached the Middle East. Before leaving France, Duke Godfrey of Bouillon, a leader of the first crusade, vowed to avenge the blood of Jesus by leaving “no member of the Jewish race alive.” On July 8, 1099, he and his men reached the gates of Jerusalem. To avoid a war, the city’s Muslim governor tried to make peace by offering to protect Christian pilgrims and worshippers in the city. Godfrey refused the offer and demanded unconditional surrender. After a week-long siege of the city, he and his men broke through the walls of Jerusalem and killed everyone they could find. The crusaders herded 6,000 Jews into a huge synagogue and then set fire to the building. They also murdered approximately 30,000 Muslims who had sought refuge in the al Aqsa Mosque (the second-oldest mosque; the oldest is in Medina).

Violence triggered more violence. The holy wars that began in 1096 did not end in 1096 or even in 1099 with the fall of Jerusalem to the crusaders.
These wars—collectively known as the Crusades—continued for about 200 years. Each time Muslims won back a piece of land, the church would call for a new crusade. When the Crusades finally ended, Muslims were still in control of the Middle East, including Jerusalem and its holy sites. But these wars had a powerful effect on the way Jews, Christians, and Muslims viewed themselves and others.

Jews greet Henry VII soon after his coronation in 1312. The Jews are shown wearing oddly shaped hats. From the 1200s on, the Church insisted that all Jews wear clothing or head coverings that distinguished them from Christians.

Memories of the first crusade shaped Jewish communities throughout northern Europe. There had been very few Jewish martyrs before 1096; after 1096, there would be many. In the twelfth century, memorial ceremonies were held for these martyrs each year on the anniversary of the attack on Speyer. In synagogues throughout northern Europe, their names were read aloud, and the congregation then recited a new prayer, known in Hebrew as
Av ha-Rachamin
(“the merciful Father”), in memory of “the holy communities who offered their lives for the sanctification of the divine name.” The prayer is still recited in synagogues today.

Jews were affected in other ways as well. Although the number of Jews living in northern Europe continued to grow and some Jews prospered, most were now more wary of their Christian neighbors. They had good reason to be guarded. In 1145, just 50 years after the first crusade, the call came for a second crusade. Once again, preachers sought to rouse Christians to begin the crusade by attacking Jews—the “enemy within.”

That summer, fearing more violence, the archbishops of Mainz and Cologne sent urgent letters to Bernard of Clairvaux, an important religious scholar in France who led the call for a second crusade. Bernard responded with a letter that was widely circulated in Europe:

The Jews are not to be persecuted, killed, or even put to flight…. The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered. They are dispersed all over the world so that by expiating their crime they may be everywhere the living witnesses of our redemption…. If the Jews are utterly wiped out, what will become of our hope for their promised salvation, their eventual conversion?
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Although Bernard was greatly respected, his letter had no significant impact. From the fall of 1146 through the spring of 1147, attacks on Jews in the Rhineland and northern France mounted. Unlike the attacks of 1096, these assaults were carried out not by crusader armies but by individuals or small groups of people who saw Jews as the enemy.

Bernard was outraged. He even traveled to the Rhineland to make the church’s position as clear as possible. His impassioned speeches may have prevented attacks in some places, but in others his words only inflamed the mobs’ fury. Other church leaders were not as supportive of Jews as they had once been. Peter the Venerable, the abbot of the monastery of Cluny, condemned tolerance toward Jews in a letter to the king of France. He did not favor killing Jews, but he thought it was all right to rob them.
In this way, the “ill-acquired” property of one “race of infidels” would help finance the war against the other “race of infidels”—the Muslims.

Jews were more vulnerable in the twelfth century than they had been in the eleventh century. Economic and social changes that improved life for Christians in Europe increased the vulnerability of Jews. In 1096, Jews had been mainly engaged in trade. The richest among them provided luxury goods to kings and other nobles. Christian merchants did most of their business locally and traded in products produced nearby—wool, timber, and grains. By the twelfth century, however, those local goods were finding markets in distant parts of Europe, Asia, and North Africa. As this trade grew, so did partnerships and contracts among Christian merchants.

By the end of the eleventh century, Jews were being squeezed out of international trade and into occupations forbidden to Jews, Christians, and Muslims—banking, money lending, and currency exchange. All three faiths regarded the idea of charging interest on a loan as usury, which was a sin. (Interest is the price a borrower pays for a loan. Today the word
usury
refers only to the practice of charging unfairly high interest rates for a loan.) Although some Jews tried to avoid money lending, increasingly it was the only way many could earn a living. Few other occupations were now open to them.

The process of turning Jews into money lenders was gradual; it took place more slowly in some places than in others. But nearly everywhere, it pushed Jews to the margins of society and led to the stereotype of the Jew as greedy and money-hungry. Because usury was prohibited under Jewish law, Christians also saw this new occupational shift as proof that Jews were unfaithful to the laws of the God they claimed to worship. Thus, having made it impossible for Jews to hold other jobs, many Christians now blamed Jews for charging interest on loans that many Christians were eager to secure.

As life became more precarious for Jews in Europe, Jews in many communities became the personal property of their protectors, with no rights except those they acquired by supplying nobles with money on demand. Nobles kept a tight rein on “their” Jews, whom they needed to help finance wars and build palaces, cathedrals, and roads. They expected Jews to pay special taxes or to lend them money at a very low rate of interest or with no interest at all. How could Jews survive if they did not receive a return on their investments? They could do so only by lending money to everyone else—merchants, farmers, artisans, and other borrowers—at very high interest rates. As a result, many Jews were caught in a trap from which they could not easily escape.

(1144–1300)

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Europe, many people had a sense that disaster was just a step away. Life was precarious for rich and poor alike. It was a time when most babies died before their first birthday of diseases that are easily cured today. Few of those who survived their childhood lived much beyond their 30th birthday. In times of fear and anxiety, it is all too easy to blame “them”—the people who are not like “us”—for every tragedy, every hardship, and every loss.

During these years, Jews were under attack almost everywhere in Europe, not for who they were or even for what they believed but for what others
imagined
Jews were like and what they
imagined
Jews believed. Those imaginings led to myths that had horrific consequences for Jews then and in centuries to come. One of the most dangerous involved the accusation that Jews killed Christian children as part of their Passover ritual. This myth had its beginnings in an incident that took place in the twelfth century.

On Good Friday in 1144, a forester stumbled upon the corpse of a young boy named William in a woods just outside of Norwich, England. According to a book written some years later by a monk and chronicler known as Thomas of Monmouth, “Becoming aware that [the boy] had been treated with unusual cruelty, [the forester] now began to suspect, from the manner of his treatment, that it was no Christian but in very truth a Jew who had ventured to slaughter an innocent child of this kind with such horrible barbarity.”
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William’s relatives agreed with the forester. His uncle angrily informed church authorities that “the Jews” had committed the murder because of their unrelenting hatred for Christians. He proclaimed, “I accuse the Jews, the enemies of the Christian name, as the perpetrators of this deed and the shedders of innocent blood.” As proof, he described a dream his
wife had had a few weeks earlier. In that dream, Jews attacked her in the marketplace and tore off one of her legs. The couple now interpreted the dream as a warning that she would lose a loved one because of the Jews.

Most people in Norwich in 1144 ignored these charges or attributed them to grief at the loss of a beloved child. After all, Jews had been living in the city for about 100 years without a single incident. Many in the town also realized that despite the accusation, there was no proof that a Jew was responsible for the boy’s death. William was buried, and life in Norwich continued as usual until about 1149, when Thomas of Monmouth came to live in a monastery there.

Thomas quickly became obsessed with the murder. He was convinced that William was not a victim of random violence but a martyr who had died for his faith. He wrote a book about William’s death, hoping to have the boy declared a saint. Thomas based his book on stories told by four people—two of whom he never met.

The first story was a deathbed confession by Aelward Ded, one of the richest men in Norwich. In 1149, Aelward told a priest that he had seen a Jew named Eleazar and another man walking with a horse early on the day William’s body was discovered. On the horse was a huge sack. Curious about its contents, Aelward touched it and felt a human body. When the two men realized that Aelward knew their secret, he claimed, they fled into the woods with the sack.