Research Proposal on "Rhineland Massacres of 1096"

Research Proposal 15 pages (4241 words) Sources: 7 Style: Chicago

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Rhineland Massacres of 1096 are, too many demonstrative (if retrospective) of early anti-Semitism. While to others they are examples of the inevitable culmination of Christian hatred toward all Infidels, spurned on by the supposed wrongs done by the Muslims, in taking up arms against Christians. The fervor of the period created a collaborative excuse to rid the "Christian" world of all who did not believe in Christ and of all who transgressed against Christians and Christian beliefs. Mixed messages of church fathers, stressing the need to refrain from random violence against the Jews, as people who would likely eventually see the light and accept Christ as the Messiah were overcome by using these same texts and traditions to support violence as a result of a general dislike for the manner in which Jewish practical business applications affected Christians.

Popular revivals, overarching attempts at reformation of Christian ideologies and institutions, public expressions of penitence, real physical and mental conflict all combined to create an undercurrent of social, cultural and political woe, which culminated in greater conflict, against all who strayed from the beloved doctrines of the Christians.

During the spring months of 1096, a number of major Jewish communities across northern Europe were threatened by violence. In most instances, the anti-Jewish hostility proved fairly weak and the forces of law and order strong. In a few cases, the anti-Jewish animus among allied burghers as well as crusaders was potent, and the forces committed to law and order proved ineffective. In such cases, the result was a stunning bloodbath, with a few of the most important Rhineland Jewish communities destroyed almost in their entirety. 47"

These early pogroms, as they were titled later, were as one can see violent in nature but for the most part demonstrative of local legal acceptance of tolerance, as in most places where violence was threatened local law enforcement was able to squelch the problem. Yet, as the history goes there were a few places, not to be belittled, where the regional forces were either sympathetic to the Christian/Crusader cause or had the unfortunate status of limited real control and the massacres and mass forced baptisms not only occurred but were witnessed upon and supported to some degree, furthering the common man's involvement in the crusader mentality and simultaneously cementing Jewish angst and cohesion.

Yet, one must also explore why the Rhineland Massacres became a regional trend, known about across Europe, as is attested to by the French Jew's warnings to their Rhineland Jewish neighbors.

"When the Jewish communities in northern France heard [of the development of crusadingardor], they were seized by consternation, fear, and trembling, and they reacted in time-honored ways. 48 They wrote letters and sent emissaries to all the Jewish communities along the Rhine River, [asking] that they fast and seek mercy for them from him who dwells on high, so that they [the Jews] might be saved from their [the crusaders'] hands. 49"

There was no significant change, in the official church stand, or for that matter the secular legal stand against the Jews, though it had never been particularly favorable. Yet, it is unrealistic to develop a line of reasoning that supports more than isolated incidence of individual church leaders espousing against Jews, by supporting a line of reasoning that the church fathers. Those like Bernard Clairvaux, the great monastic reformer, who stressed practical objection to Jewish lending practices were not altering a thousand years of church doctrine regarding tolerance toward the Jews. Secular and church leaders alike, "…regarded the Jews as deviants from the truth, but, unlike other deviants such as heretics, rather ungraciously forbade steps being taken against them."

The call, by a "secular" Christian leader (not a church father or Bishop but an emperor who viewed himself as the imperial messiah) to destroy the Jews and infidels came many years after the Rhineland Massacres.

The call to take action against the Jews was an isolated sentiment that spread through a general dislike for the way in which Jews became fundamentally successful in any given region of Europe. The reality was that certain individuals, some of high repute and others simply men of action with little power but that of persuasion swayed mob mentality actions of reformation with their immediate target being the most convenient mark, "the infidels within."

Mass calls for violence against the Jews spread, again as a response to crusade mentality, as time went by and as circumstances of fear and unrest continued through the whole of the crusader periods. In other words, when things were relatively peaceful, economic, medical and agricultural peace was present the Jews were fairly safe, but when any one or all of the above trends went bad so did the sentiment against the Jews, as the partial source of God's supposed wrath upon the Christians. One must look at the trend toward unsanctioned anti-Semitic violence, with isolated sanctioned situations, as a move toward the "culture" of the crusader mentality, individualisms and proactive application for both spiritual and physical gain and the avoidance of a potential Christian downfall.

The ideology to fight all those "others," through one's own hands that pervades the crusade periods is secondary to (though influenced by the clergy) and is in many ways indicative of the Rhineland Massacre, as well as later actions against the Jews, the more practical opportunistic sentiments of the crusader spirit. The question then becomes how and why does a fiercely independent movement, coalesce into a mass movement a mob mentality that results in massive mobs of violent marauders, striking down all who are seen as convergent to themselves. In many ways the answer to this question is demographic and like the Black Death massacres against the Jews responsive to internal interpretations, espoused not so much by the clergy but as an obvious extension of singular right to life and prosperity. If the life and prosperity of the Christian Majority was threatened the Jews were an obvious target. The anti-Semitic sentiment is used primarily as a justification, after the fact, rather than as a source of impetus for action.

This work will make a bold attempt to place the Rhineland Massacres into a context of the time. To do this one must ask the question, do the events constitute a mark of the beginning of anti-Semitic actions on the part of Christians, as a result of an official writ or line of reasoning on the part of the church, or if the situation is simply another example of Christian fervor in a time of heightened religious and social strife, that just happened to be perpetrated against the most opportune, local victim? Jewish settlement, patterns can be seen as proof that the Rhineland Massacres were evident of opportunism, as well as proof that at least a minimal increase in Jewish numbers seen in the region made them potential targets for challenged status.

In the ninth century there were only a few dozen Jewish families in Germany, probably a few hundred in the tenth. It has been estimated that there were as many as 4,000 to 5,000 Jews by the end of tenth century, and 20,000 to 25,000 on the eve of First Crusade at the end of the eleventh. Even in the largest Jewish communities, however, Jews typically comprised no more than one to three percent of the total city population. The number of Jewish communities, each rather small in size, increased dramatically during the second half of the thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth centuries, before the massacres and persecution of the Jews during the Black Death (1348 to 1350). Jews were dispersed throughout Germany in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when we find numerous small Jewish communities and traces of Jews in areas out- side larger cities and in rural areas. In the high Middle Ages Jewish settlement was particularly widespread in the Rhineland, Upper Germany, and Franconia, though much thinner in Bavaria

In other words the Jewish settlement pattern in the region at least marginally supports the idea that the Jews increased settlement may have made them a marked target for "reform" but it also proves that the Rhineland Massacres did not so mark the Jewish psyche that they simply refrained from settlement in the region. In fact the massacres may have spurned settlement, during periods when peace and tolerance were more consistently accepted as such places (and people) became meccas of spiritual history. A consummate scholar on the period and the author of several secondary works of crusade history, particularly the first crusade period remarks that it is time to reevaluate the impetus and reality that let to the Rhineland Massacres. His reasoning is indicative of modern reasoning to do so, as a response to the repetition of history that is experienced during the sanctioned Nazi revitalization of anti-Semitism to an extreme and violent degree.

Much has transpired between 1096 and 1996. From the vantage point of 1996, how does 1096 look to us? Indeed, how has it looked to… READ MORE

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