By the time of the high Middle Ages, in the Hebrew chronicles recounting the Christians’ persecutions of the Jews, Jesus was being described as “an abhorred offshoot, a bastard, a son of a menstruating woman, a son of lechery, a trampled corpse, their [the Christians’] detestable thing, the desecrated and detestable hanged one, the son of whoredom,” and more.82 Modern Jewish historians long have been of two minds on the recounting of these invectives, some urging their suppression from the historical record so as not to encourage anti-Semitic responses, others arguing for their full discussion as examples of the understandable rage Jews felt as the victims of violent Christian persecution.83 Recently, however, it has been shown that the invectives’ principal historical value may reside in the sense they convey, not so much of rage, but of “the efforts of the Jews to keep their group together by consolidating their defenses against the forces threatening the continued existence of a corporate Jewish identity.”84 For if the Jewish resistance to Christian conversion efforts was extraordinary—and it was—the lengths to which Jews were forced to go in order to hold their communities together is a measure of the equally extraordinary pressures they were under.
As Raul Hilberg has noted, since the beginning of Christianity’s engagement with Judaism as a separate religion it has presented Jews successively with three options from which to choose: convert to Christianity, suffer expulsion, or undergo annihilation. At first, writes Hilberg, “the missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The German Nazis at last decreed: You have no right to live.”85 If anything, however, Hilberg’s historical encapsulation is too benign, for Jews were being massacred by Christians even before the dawn of the twelfth century.
The first great slaughter of Europe’s Jews by Christians began on May 3, 1096, in the town of Speyer, Germany. There, on that date, eleven Jews who refused to accept baptism and conversion to the despised faith of Christianity were murdered. The number of deaths would have been much higher, but for the intercession of the local bishop who understood the canon law’s technical restrictions against forced conversion, and who protected the remaining local Jewish population within the confines of his castle. The legalistic niceties of canon proscription were lost, then as always, on most local priests and popular preachers, however, and in a matter of days the anti-Jewish blood lust spread to the town of Worms. With the Christian authorities in Worms less willing than the bishop in Speyer had been to protect the innocent Jews from assault, Christian enthusiasts sacked the local synagogue and looted the Jews’ houses. All the town’s adult Jews who refused to convert, and who did not commit suicide in acts of defiance—approximately eight hundred in all—were stripped naked, murdered, and buried en masse. Some among the Jewish children also were murdered. The rest were carted off to be baptized and raised as Christians.86
The worst was yet to come. In Mainz, a city just to the north of Worms, the archbishop briefly defended the Jews, but soon fled for his own life as the Christian mobs attacked. According to Solomon bar Simson’s chronicle of the events that followed, the leader of the Christians in Mainz
showed no mercy to the aged, or youths, or maidens, babes or sucklings—not even the sick. And he made the people of the Lord like dust to be trodden underfoot, killing their young men by the sword and disemboweling their pregnant women. . . . The enemy came into the chambers, they smashed the doors, and found the Jews still writhing and rolling in blood; and the enemy took their money, stripped them naked, and slew those still alive. . . . They threw them, naked, through the windows onto the ground, creating mounds upon mounds, heaps upon heaps, until they appeared as a high mountain. . . . On a single day—the third of Sivan, the third day of the week—one thousand and one hundred holy souls were killed and slaughtered, babes and sucklings who had not sinned or transgressed, the souls of innocent poor people.87
And still it was not over. From Mainz the killing spread to Trier. From there it moved on to Metz, and then to Cologne, and then to Regensburg, and then to Prague. By the time the killing stopped little more than a month was gone since it had begun in the town of Speyer, and as many as eight thousand Jews lay dead.88
It was not coincidence that the massacres of May and June 1096 occurred at the same time that the First Crusade of Pope Urban II was just getting under way. For the mass murderers of the Jews in Speyer and Worms and Mainz and Metz and Cologne and Regensburg and Prague were errant bands of Christian soldiers who had wandered from the overlong trail to Jerusalem, under the leadership of such perfervid souls as Peter the Hermit and Count Emicho of Leiningen, to search out and destroy heretical victims who were closer to home than were the Saracens of the Holy Land. Those Crusaders who fulfilled the charge to march all the way to Jerusalem, however, were no less faithful to the impulse of Christian blood lust.
The very earliest Christian leaders had been of differing minds on the matter of warfare in general, having themselves suffered from military oppression under Roman rule. Thus, the influential Church father Origen was outspokenly opposed to war, while other Christians were members of Marcus Aurelius’ “thundering legion”; similarly, the New Testament contains passages that have been interpreted as supporting any number of positions on the matter, from pacifism to warlike zealotry.89 The Old Testament, however, is unremitting: “And when the Lord thy God shall deliver [thy enemies] before thee,” says Deuteronomy 7:2, 16, “though shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them. . . . Thou shalt consume all the people which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them.” And later, in Deuteronomy 20:16–17 (the passage noted earlier that was cited so gleefully by Puritan John Mason as justification for the extermination of Indians): “Of the cities . . . which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breath-eth. . . . But thou shalt utterly destroy them.” This was “war commanded by God,” writes James Turner Johnson, “a form of holy war. In such war not only was God conceived as commanding the conflict, but he was understood to be directly involved in the fighting, warring with the divinities of the enemy on the cosmic level even as the soldiers of Israel dealt with their human counterparts on the earthly level.”90
When Augustine came to pronounce on these matters he uttered some words warning of excess in the violence one was properly to bring to bear on one’s enemies, but his overall pronouncements were strongly in support of divinely inspired wrack and ruin. As Frederick H. Russell summarizes Augustine’s views:
Any violations of God’s laws, and by easy extension, any violation of Christian doctrine, could be seen as an injustice warranting unlimited violent punishment. Further, the . . . guilt of the enemy merited punishment of the enemy population without regard to the distinction between soldiers and civilians. Motivated by righteous wrath, the just warriors could kill with impunity even those who were morally innocent.91
Following Augustine, the Church enthusiastically came to accept the idea of “just war,” and from that developed the concept of “mission war” or Holy War—an idea similar in certain respects to the Islamic jihad.92 This evolution of belief took on great importance during the last years of the eleventh century, when Europe was awash in disaster—flood, pestilence, drought, and famine—and had unemployed standing armies on hand in most countries, living off the peasantry. Belief in the Second Coming’s imminence was encouraged by the turmoil in the land, and it was hardly diminished by a shower of comets—a clear sign from God—that appeared overhead in April of 1095. Before Christ could return, however, the Holy Land had to be liberated by the Christian faithful. Thus it was—or at least such was the rationale—that three years after the marauding Christian troops had laid waste the Jewish citizenry of Speyer and the other European towns and cities that lay in their path, Pope Urban’s warriors for Christ found themselves surrounding Jerusalem, t
he Holy City.
Preparatory to their assault the soldiers of the Lord underwent a sequence of penitential rituals that later became routine procedure for crusading Christian armies. In the manner of the ascetics they fasted for three days, they confessed their sins, they received communion; and then they marched barefoot around the walls of the city, chanting psalms, some of them carrying crosses and relics, in abasement before the greater glory of God.93 From within the city the commander of the Muslim garrison watched the Christians in astonishment—but with more astonishment still when they suddenly began hurling themselves against Jerusalem’s walls “like madmen, without carrying a single ladder.”94 “Regardless of age or condition,” wrote the Archbishop of Tyre regarding the Muslims and Jews whom the Christians destroyed upon entering Jerusalem,
they laid low, without distinction, every enemy encountered. Everywhere was frightful carnage, everywhere lay heaps of severed heads, so that soon it was impossible to pass or to go from one place to another except over the bodies of the slain. . . . It was impossible to look upon the vast numbers of the slain without horror; everywhere lay fragments of human bodies, and the very ground was covered with the blood of the slain. It was not alone the spectacle of headless bodies and mutilated limbs strewn in all directions that roused the horror of all who looked upon them. Still more dreadful was it to gaze upon the victors themselves, dripping with blood from head to foot, an ominous sight which brought terror to all who met them. It is reported that within the Temple enclosure alone about ten thousand infidels perished.95
Other eyewitness accounts of the sacking of the Holy City were equally gruesome. “Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city,” wrote the anonymous author of the Gesta Francorum: among other “wonderful sights” that testified to God’s divine glory, said this observer, was the fact that the conquering Christians had “to pick [their] way over the bodies of men and horses” all throughout Jerusalem, while at the Temple of Solomon “men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins.” Jews who had taken refuge in the city’s synagogue were burned alive. Thousands of Muslims were chopped to death in al-Aqsa mosque. The old and the sick were the first among the infidels to meet their proper end, their bodies slashed open in search of gold coins they might have swallowed—for the Pope had decreed that any spoils of war were possessions the Christians could keep. Finally, the few living victims of the Crusaders’ wrath were forced to drag the decomposing bodies of their countrymen beyond the gates of the city and to stack them into enormous funeral pyres to inhibit the spread of disease. But not before the bodies were mutilated: “a whole cargo of noses and thumbs sliced from the Saracens” was shipped home, writes religious historian Roland Bainton.96 Once again, Her Holy Mother the Church was triumphant, as she would be, repeatedly, for many great and grisly years to come.
But not always. Sometimes there were defeats. Never, however, were defeats unexplainable: those crusaders who were beaten had failed because they had sinned—and the sins they had committed invariably were sins of pride and especially sins of carnality. God was on the Christians’ side unless they succumbed to temptation. Example after example, the medieval chronicles claimed, showed this to be so. From the Hungarian defeat of Peter the Hermit’s disciple Gottschalk to the failures of the Christians at Antioch, “the lesson was plain,” observes one historian: “the crusaders were assured of victory in this life and salvation in the next, but only so long as they avoided carnal sins.”97
Because of this, women—including wives—constantly were driven from the Crusaders’ military encampments. And also because of this chaste ideal, the Crusaders’ non-Christian enemies were portrayed as lustful and licentious beasts: the infidel males were said to be rapists who were “addicted to lurid forms of sexual debauchery and [had] a special lust for the charms of virtuous Christian women,” while non-Christian women were viewed as defiled and wanton whores and seductresses. Sexual contact between a Christian crusader and a native woman was said to cause “an enormous stench to rise to heaven,” and the penalty for such transgressions was castration for the Crusader and facial mutilation for the woman. If they had to have contact with a tainted native female, far better that it be of the sort sardonically described by Fulcher of Chartres at the battles of Antioch where the Christians “did no other harm to the women they found in [the enemy’s] tents—save that they ran their lances through their bellies.”98
Such Christian ferocity was only to be expected, of course, since the Muslims and Jews who refused to convert to Christianity were displaying with their spiritual recalcitrance and their stubbornly non-Christian attitudes (including their offensively non-ascetic behavior regarding sex) an anti-Christian pattern of behavior. As such they were viewed as effectively at war with Christianity—that is, as engaged in a conspiracy with Antichrist to destroy everything that Christ and Christianity represented. Such infidels thus became, in the popular Christian image, “demons in human form,” as Norman Cohn has put it, to whom were “attributed every quality which belonged to the Beast from the Abyss. . . . And the Saints knew that it was their task to wipe that foul black host off the face of the earth, for only an earth which had been so purified would be fit to carry the New Jerusalem, the shining Kingdom of the Saints.”99
If not wiped from the face of the earth, such foul hosts could, as an alternative, be enslaved. Slavery, of course, was an ancient tradition in the West. While no reliable figures exist regarding the number of slaves who were held throughout all of ancient Greece, there were as many as 100,000 slaves laboring in Athens during the fourth and fifth centuries B.C., or at least three or four slaves for each free household. This is a proportion of the population much larger than that of the slave states in America on the eve of the Civil War.100 The practice continued in Rome, where slaves—who under Roman law were non-persons—were inspected and auctioned off in public marketplaces. During the late first and early second centuries A.D., between a third and nearly half the population of Italy were slaves. It has been estimated that in order to maintain the slave population at a stable level throughout the empire during this time—a level of 10,000,000 slaves in a total imperial population of about 50,000,000—more than 500,000 new slaves had to be added to the population every year.101
In the fourth century the first Christian emperor, Constantine, decreed that “anyone who picks up and nourishes at his own expense a little boy or girl cast out of the home of its father or lord with the latter’s knowledge and consent may retain the child in the position for which he intended it when he took it in—that is, as child or slave, as he prefers.” In view of the enormous numbers of children who were being abandoned by their parents in this era, Constantine’s edict assured that there would be a vast supply of young slaves for owners to hire out as prostitutes and laborers, which they commonly did.102 And when, in the eleventh century, England’s William the Conqueror commissioned the famous Domesday Book, the most extensive population survey and analysis conducted during medieval times, it was determined that approximately one out of every ten citizens of Britain was a slave whose life was totally under the control of his or her owner. “Legally no more than chattel goods,” writes David Brion Davis, “these people could apparently be killed by their owners without penalty.”103
During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries slavery began to decline in northern Europe, but it persisted in the Continent’s southern countries. The labor shortage that followed in the aftermath of the Black Death created a new boom in slavery throughout the Mediterranean world, but this time it was a boom in imported slaves, mostly Turks, Bulgarians, Armenians, Tatars, and Africans, because at the same time that the market for slaves was opening up, the Church—which always had supported the general principle of slavery—was beginning to impose more rigorous restrictions on the enslavement of persons who had been born as Christians. Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese cities thus became huge slave markets, dealing largely in chattel of infidel ancestry. As Davi
s points out, “between 1414 and 1423 no fewer than ten thousand bondsmen (mostly bondswomen) were sold in Venice alone.”104 And in Lisbon, in 1551, 10 percent of its 100,000 people were slaves, mostly Africans, Moors who had been captured in wars and raids, and a somewhat smaller percentage of Turks.105 Indeed, writes John Boswell, “actual slavery (as opposed to feudal servitude or indenturing) became more common in the later Middle Ages than it had been at any time after the fall of Rome.”106
“The Mediterranean, central to the development of human civilization and lovingly celebrated in Euro-American historiography,” observes Orlando Patterson, “from the viewpoint of human oppression has been a veritable vortex of horror for all mankind, especially for the Slavic and African peoples.” During the fifteenth century its waters were filled with sailing ships carrying legal and illegal loads of slaves from foreign lands, sometimes a few dozen in a single shipment, sometimes four hundred and more. “Cargoes of two hundred slaves at a time were not exceptional,” Charles Verlinden once noted, adding elsewhere that many of these ships were “floating tombs. . . . [where] available space was quite restricted and epidemics rampant,” and where death rates of 30 percent and more were not uncommon. But even for those foreign captives who survived the seaborne ordeal, there was little that could be looked forward to with optimism, for “in medieval Italy,” writes Davis, “slaves were tortured by magistrates and whipped without restraint by masters; in Siena a man who damaged another’s slave paid the same fine as if he had damaged a cow.”107
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