114 Popes and Jews, 1095–1291
possible that Jews may have appealed to Urban to take action—perhaps through
the Jewish community in rome—it was not until almost twenty years after Henry
Iv’s proclamation of protection that one of his successors, Calixtus II, would issue
‘Sicut Iudaeis’ sometime between 1119 and 1124.
tHE pApACY, twELFtH-CENtUrY
CrUSAdES, ANd JEwS
After the crusaders had taken Jerusalem and many had returned home, Urban II
commissioned the archbishop of Milan to preach the Cross in Lombardy and on
his death his successor paschal II (1099–1118) continued to encourage crusading,
with recruitment initiatives spreading to France and germany and generating new
armies. Yet although both paschal II and his successor Calixtus II authorized cru-
sades to the Near East, we have no surviving references to their preaching. Certainly
the contingents setting out on crusade were much smaller—until 1145 when
Eugenius III authorized the Second Crusade in his general letter ‘Quantum praede-
cessores’ after the fall of the northernmost crusader County of Edessa, the first to
revert to Muslim control. According to his contemporaries, Odo of deuil and
william, archbishop of tyre, this crusade was organized by Bernard of Clairvaux
(1090–1153); this time its leaders were crowned heads of Europe: Louis vII of
France and Conrad III of germany (1138–1152). Yet again there is evidence for
anti-Jewish preaching, in particular by rudolph, a dissolute monk who preached
the crusade in germany: resulting in massacres of Jews at Cologne, Speyer, Mainz, and
würzburg.64 In France too there were massacres, at Carentan, Sully, and ramerupt.
The Jewish chronicler Ephraim of Bonn, who would doubtless have heard stories
about the previous persecutions suffered by the rhineland Jewish communities at
the hands of those taking part in the First Crusade, recorded in his Sefer Zekhirah
(Book of Remembrance) that on the eve of the Second, a mob again attacked Jews on
the pretext of avenging Christ—this time in France—and that royal officials had
to be bribed to ensure protection.65 Many Jews suffered financially because, as
Ephraim explained:
High Middle Ages’, p.21; p.25; peter Schäfer, ‘Jews and Christians in the High Middle Ages: The Book
of the Pious’, in The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries). Proceedings of the
International Symposium held at Speyer, 20–25 October 2002, ed. C. Cluse, p.33; Yosef Yerushalmi,
Zakhor. Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, London, 1982), p.49; Bernhard Blumenkranz,
‘The roman Church and the Jews’, in Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict, ed.
J. Cohen (New York, London, 1991), p.214; Cohen, ‘The Hebrew Crusade Chronicles in their Christian
Cultural Context’, pp.17–34; Susan Einbinder, Beautiful Death. Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in
Medieval France (princeton, Oxford, 2002), pp.30–71. For the increased attention to militant female
piety in the Hebrew chronicles and their similarity to contemporary representations of Christian
female piety, see especially Abraham grossman, Pious and Rebellious. Jewish Women in Medieval
Europe, trans. J. Chipman (waltham, Mass., 2004), pp.198–211.
64 richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation, p.92.
65 Ephraim of Bonn, in Sefer gezerot sarfat ve-ashkenaz, ed. Habermann, p.121. For a detailed dis-
cussion of the role of popes in this complex text, see especially robert Chazan, ‘rabbi Ephraim of
Bonn’s Sefer Zechirah’, Revue des Études Juives 132 (1973), 119–26; Stow, The ‘1007 Anonymous’ and
Papal Sovereignty, pp.4–5; p.7; pp.18–19; p.21; p.48.