CHRISTIANS CRUSADERS IN THE NAME OF THEIR GOD, then and now
Edited by Hugh
Fogelman
Pope
Urban II, proclaimed the First Crusade on November 27th, 1095 C.E. near the
town of
"In
a sense, the year 1347 C.E. can be compared to the year 1096, for the
repercussions for the epidemic were of two kinds: the immediate effect ―
the destruction of the Jews throughout
"The
most significant force, comprising perhaps 60,000 people, of whom about 6,000
were knights, came together in June 1097 C.E. Two years later some 15,000, of
whom 1,500 were knights, took
"Pope
Urban II had no idea that he was starting a movement that would endure for
hundreds of years, involve huge numbers of people from all classes and manifest
itself in so many different theatres of war ― the Spanish Armada of 1588
was an unsuccessful crusade. It is not surprising that events that impinged so
directly on history should attract the interest of a broad public. More to the
point, their effects still influence relations between Catholic and Orthodox
Christians, and between Christians, Jews and Muslims." [Riley-Smith]
The
main enemy of the Crusaders were Muslims, but as Christians rampaged across
But
like the Crusades, it didn't matter very much what anyone said to an unruly mob
which was generally the masses, the Christian peasants who did the looting and
took the initiative for these massacres. For many of the masses it became a
rebellion against the establishment and against the Jews who they believed were
just different enough and just privileged enough, though often not, but simply
just easy ENOUGH to blame for their own suffering. Or in some cases someone
might owe money to a Jew and this was the easy way to cancel the debt by
killing the Jew.
"Thus
in
"These
massacres and lootings took place in the great majority of German cities: in
Colmar, where a `Jew Hole' (Judenloch) still
perpetrates its memory; in Worms and Oppenheim, where the Jews themselves set
fire to their district and perished into he flames;
in Frankfurt and Erfurt, where they were put to the sword; in Cologne and
Hanover, where some were massacred and the rest exiled." [Poliakov]
When
Jews were not being massacred they were trying to live, and sometimes just to
survive, and they ALWAYS made some headway (there were improvements) before
being once more reminded that they were incongruous; a nationhood of people who
lived among strangers. Sometimes they married these strangers. Sometimes they
had business relations with these strangers but all too often the fact that
they were still strangers and would never quite be the same as everyone else
became perfectly obvious by expulsions, slandering them, excluding them and
finally murdering them and 500 years after the deaths wrought by the Black
Plague they were reminded again by the Holocaust. And, during the "Final
Solution" of the "Jewish Problem", the Holocaust came closer to
eliminating the Jews than any other assault on a people in human history.
"In
the extreme form, the anti-Semitic view of history portrays the Jew as a
satanic force, as the root of virtually all evil in the world, from the
earliest time to the present day. In this view, he is engaged in an eternal and
universal conspiracy, to infiltrate, corrupt, and ultimately rule the gentile
world. For this he uses a variety of methods, all of them sinister. In medieval
times, Jews were accused of poisoning wells, spreading the plague, and
practicing ritual murder; in more modern times with inventing both capitalism
and communism, and using the one or the other or both together to dominate the
world. More recently, they have been blamed for the enslavement of black
History
should remind us that Crusades which started out against Muslims rolled over
the Jews on their way to war.
NOTES
& SOURCES:
Rosehell Saidel
Wolk, "Anti-Semitism in America: Prophecy or Paronoia?" in Lilith (1980);
Judith
Plaskow, "Blaming Jews...For the Birth of
Patriarchy", in Lilith (1980);
P.G.J.Pulzer, "The Rise of Poliical Anti-Semtism in
See
anti-Semitism in Encyclopedia Judaica;