Popes and Jews, 1095-1291

98 Popes and Jews, 1095–1291

ProTecTioN froM crUSAderS

The papal promise of protection as articulated in the ‘constitutio pro iudaeis’

forbade forced conversion of Jews, yet Jewish communities often feared forced

conversion to christianity at the hands of crusaders. According to the hebrew

first crusade chronicles, which, as we saw in chapter one, recounted the mass

suicide of Jews in the rhineland in 1096 to avoid forced conversion by crusaders

on their way to the Near east, approximately 1,200 Jews are supposed to have

committed suicide by practising qiddush ha-Shem—‘sanctifying the name of

God’—namely the suicide of all members of a family with a special ceremony

performed in a specific way in the presence of the entire community.186 Jewish

chroniclers who described these events gave details of this ceremony in which chil-

dren as well as adults died. According to one account, a Jewish mother named

rachel allowed her own children to be killed with the words:

four children have i. have no mercy on them either, lest those uncircumcised ones

come and seize them alive and raise them in their ways of error.187

Later, in 1140 on the eve of the Second crusade, the chronicler Solomon bar

Simson described how at Worms ‘bridegrooms slew their betrothed, and merciful

women their only children’ in order to avoid forced conversion,188 while at Mainz

he recounted how ‘the most gentle and tender of women slaughtered the child of

her delight’ in order to prevent his conversion.189 Such descriptions reminded Jews

of the words of Jeremiah 31: 15:

Thus says the Lord: A voice is heard in ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping.

rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children,

because they are not.190

Some scholars have argued that prayers used in synagogues such as ‘they stood

their watch and slaughtered them crying’ referred to these specific acts of parents

performing qiddush ha-Shem on their children.191 others believe that the practice

of qiddush ha-Shem was not universally accepted by medieval Jews and that there

is strong evidence of debates from the first half of the twelfth century onwards as

to whether suicide was the best answer to christian attempts at forced conver-

sion.192 Some historians have seen the hebrew chronicles as not only historical

accounts but also didactic and educational texts deliberately written for the benefit

of local communities,193 while others as literary adaptations of Jewish polemic

186 Simha Goldin, ‘The Socialisation for Kiddush ha-Shem among Medieval Jews’, Journal of
Medieval History 23/2 (1997), 117–38.
187 Goldin, ‘The Socialisation for Kiddush ha-Shem among Medieval Jews’, 117–38.
188 The Jews and the Crusaders: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusaders, trans. and
ed. S. eidelberg (New Jersey, 1977; repr. 1996), p.23.
189 Peggy Mccracken, The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender and Medieval
Literature (Philadelphia, 2003), p.62.
190 Jeremiah 31: 15, Biblia sacra iuxta Vulgatam versionem, ed. Weber, Vol. 1.
191 The Jews and the Crusaders, trans. and ed. eidelberg, p.29, pp.35–7.
192 Goldin, ‘The Socialisation for Kiddush ha-Shem among Medieval Jews’, 117–38.
193 Goldin, ‘The Socialisation of Kiddush ha-Shem among Medieval Jews’, 117–38.