The Impact of the Crusades 117
to emphasize that Bernard was universally regarded as a holy man and that he
eschewed bribery, but that, unlike rudolph, he understood that traditional
Christian theology demanded protection for the Jews.79 No doubt he hoped that,
by praising such a prominent cleric, he might better ensure future protection for
Jewish communities.80
Ephraim portrayed Bernard as an exception to the rule, making it clear that in
general the local clergy could not be trusted to protect Jews, or at least not
without some financial incentive. Bernard himself had called on kings to apply
the precepts of ‘Quantum praedecessores’ decreeing that the debts of crusaders
should be annulled,81 yet Ephraim reported nothing about Bernard’s dislike of
Jewish money-lending and pronouncements against it—even though Bernard
had implored king Louis to take action against usury in the same pastoral letter
which decried crusader violence.82 Indeed since Ephraim said nothing of Bernard’s
dislike of Jewish usury, some historians have argued that he was deliberately ten-
dentious in his one-sided praise of Bernard.83 However, it is not certain that
Ephraim would have known the full contents of Bernard’s correspondence with
the king of France. Indeed even if he did know that Bernard had urged Louis
to cancel interest owed by crusaders, this may have seemed of little importance
beside actions to save Jewish lives. what Ephraim wanted to emphasize was that
Bernard, unlike many other clergy, was willing to protect the Jews because he
espoused correct Christian theology.
Although, as Bernard later lamented in the De Consideratione, the Second
Crusade ended in failure and resulted in the crusaders abandoning the siege of
damascus and surrendering to the Muslim leader Nur-al-din. Less than thirty
years later, gregory vIII (1187), devastated by the news of the fall of Jerusalem
to Saladin in 1187, called for yet another military venture—the Third Crusade.
According to two contemporary texts, the Continuations of the History of William
Archbishop of Tyre and the Chronica majora of Matthew paris, this crusade, organ-
ized by Archbishop Joscius of tyre, and led by philip II Augustus, richard I, and
Frederick I Barbarossa (1155–1190), was funded in England by the ‘Saladin tithe’.
Yet once again a pope’s call for crusade led indirectly to violence. Several English
chroniclers recorded it in 1189–1190—associated with richard’s preparations
for the crusade—as directed against Jewish communities in King’s Lynn, Stamford,
79 Ephraim of Bonn, Sefer Gezerot Sarfat ve-Ashkenaz ed. Habermann, p.116.
80 St Augustine, De civitate Dei 2, ed. B. dombart, A. Kalb, (Stuttgart, 1981), Bk 18, Ch. 46,
p.329. See Stow, Alienated Minority, p.18.
81 Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘Sermo mihi ad vos’ (1146), ed. in Jean Leclercq ‘L’Encyclique de Saint
Bernard en faveur de la croisade’, Revue Bénédictine 81 (1971), 295–300. See Stow, The ‘1007 Anonymous’
and Papal Sovereignty, p.4.
82 peter the venerable also made a number of negative pronouncements about Jewish usury; Stacey,
‘Crusades, Martyrdom and the Jews of Norman England 1096–1190’, p.241; Stow, Alienated
Minority, pp.113–14. For Bernard’s remarks on freeing all crusaders from exactions of usury, see his
letter in PL 182, col. 568; Sancti Bernardi... Opera, vol. 1, ed. Mabillon, col. 330. For discussion of
Bernard’s stance on usury for example in Lester Little, ‘The Jews in Christian Europe’, in Essential
Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict, ed. Cohen, p.292.
83 For example, Stow, The ‘1007 Anonymous’ and Papal Sovereignty, p.5.