God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Emich of Flonheim’s campaign against the prosperous Jewish communities was deliberate, far from mindless vandalism. The rhetoric, not least that recorded in the harrowingly full Jewish accounts of the pogroms, was religious, but the motive may have been financial. It was not that the crusaders were in debt to the Jews, merely that many had sold or pledged their patrimonies and still faced further expense. For leaders such as Emich, cash meant power and authority. Locals, including some bishops, erstwhile protectors, exploited the crusaders’ greed by extorting protection money from the helpless Jews as well as looting. The Mainz community offered Emich money to spare them and delayed their own fate by throwing coins at their ravaging persecutors. Albert of Aachen drily commented that the pilgrims had slaughtered the Jews ‘more from avarice than for the justice of God’, a sin to which he attributed their later travails in the Balkans.¹⁷ The lust for money alone cannot explain the consistent flouting of canon law and religious teaching witnessed by the repeated forcible conversions. Nothing in official Christian doctrine justified slaying Jews. Pope Alexander II had explicitly prohibited it when drawing a careful distinction between them and Muslims in 1063. No justification of holy war could embrace victimization of those whom the Christians ruled anyway, hence the repeated attempts to blame the Jews of subversion and plotting the destruction of Christendom to excuse persecution. However, the preaching of the cross emphasized meritorious Christian violence, the legitimacy of revenge and religious vendetta and the suffering of Christ Crucified. Christian sources record how such messages were translated into a gospel of indiscriminate religious hate. Crusaders at Rouen thought it absurd to campaign against God’s enemies in the east ‘when in front of our eyes are the Jews, of all races the most hostile to God’. Albert of Aachen noted that recruits to Emich’s army at Mainz insisted that killing the Jews was the first act of their campaign against the ‘enemies of the Christian faith’. The Christian love Urban may have preached to justify his Jerusalem project was reserved for Christians; the obverse of this message of charity was intolerance and violence. According to a disapproving German witness, Ekkehard of Aura, the persecutors were zealous Christians who ‘took pains to destroy utterly the execrable Jews’ either by death or forced conversion.¹⁸ Not only were Jewish communities ransacked for money and goods, their synagogues, Torah Scrolls and cemeteries were repeatedly desecrated. Jews believed the incentive for their attackers was religious. In general, Jews were enemies of the church; in particular they killed Christ. When the gates of Mainz were opened to them, Emich’s followers were reported by one Hebrew source as exulting, ‘All this the Crucified has done for us, so that we might avenge his blood on the Jews.’¹⁹ All three Hebrew chronicle sources for the pogroms agree on the persistence of the theme of vengeance for the Crucifixion. Thus the mixture of demotic religious propaganda and material greed combined to create an obscene cocktail of butchery and bigotry.

Yet the anti-Jewish persecutions reflected more than mob violence and hysteria. The chronicle attributed to Solomon bar Simson, a Mainz Jew writing c.1140, recorded that those who set out for the Holy Land ‘decorated themselves prominently with their signs, placing a profane symbol – a horizontal line over a vertical one – on the vestments of every man and woman whose heart yearned to go on the stray path to the grave of their Messiah’. The butchers of the Mainz community are described as raging ‘in the name of the crucified one’ and carrying banners of the cross.²⁰ Just as much as a shared campaign, a shared pogrom cements identity on a group. Crusaders possessed a special sense of identity; already by June 1097 one wrote of ‘the army of God’.²¹ In the early days of 1096, this uniqueness of purpose and community sought and found expression, warriors of the cross fighting for Christ. Theological niceties were irrelevant and, in any case, the clergy travelling with the crusaders may have encouraged the outrages while those in the towns affected were rarely able to sustain the orthodox line. The massacre of the Jews was just the first of many articulations of the corporate spirit of crusading. There also existed a local political dimension. Henry IV had explicitly and repeatedly forbidden the Jews to be harmed; they were under his protection. Emich’s attacks represented a challenge to Henry’s authority, an assertion of his independence, made easier by the emperor’s absence in Italy. The political dividends of the upheavel of 1096 may not have been confined to the papacy.