The Story of the Jews

by Simon Schama

  And then there was Poulceline, whom everyone would hear about, fair Poulceline, close – very close, according to Ephraim of Bonn – to Thibaut, Count of Blois, seneschal of France, the king’s brother-in-law, none of which was any help when the Jews of Blois were being burned alive on a pyre in 1171, Poulceline included. What had she done? What had any of the beautiful names done? As usual, nothing except to be born Jews. What they were said to have done, though, was kill children, especially Christian children. No actual body was needed for the accusation to become credible. No one in Blois ever found a body, nor was any child missing, but in May a serving man happened to be watering his horse by the Loire when he saw something small and pale slip from the grasp of a Jew beside the river. What that Jew had been holding was in fact a batch of untanned hides, but when one splashed into the water, the servant reported to his master, his horse shied and refused to drink, a sure sign that something foul had been committed to the river. A skin was a skin. The incident was reported to Count Thibaut who judged it serious enough for the man to be subjected to the water ordeal to test if his word was true or false. He survived; and the thirty or so Jews of Blois were arrested and imprisoned, shackled to each other and to the floor in the usual style of the time. Poulceline alone was spared the incarceration, much to the fury of Countess Alix whose enemy she had become. But such was the power it was feared the Jewish woman might have over the count that Poulceline was prevented from speaking to him. Like so many women in the Ashkenazi world of northern Europe, Poulceline was a woman of substance, a moneylender to poor and rich, Jew and Christian alike, and as such she had been useful enough to the count to enjoy his esteem and perhaps more. Every so often she remonstrated with him over the injustices inflicted on her co-religionists. This may have made things worse, for whether it was her cash or her body or both that had recommended Poulceline to Thibaut, she had become a figure of intense unpopularity in the town. Before long she joined the rest of the Jews in prison and on 26 May died with them in the flames of the market square. Perhaps the tale of the child dumped in the Loire had been concocted just to bring Poulceline down.

  Reported in letters sent by Jews in Orleans and Loches, the judicial massacre was sufficiently horrifying to embolden a deputation by the Jews of Paris to King Louis VII. A letter reporting the royal response announced the good news that the king had ‘benevolently inclined his heart towards us’. Surprisingly, Louis warned that if Thibaut had acted unjustly he would be punished. ‘Now, you Jews of my land, you have no cause for alarm over what the persecutor has done in his domain. People levelled the same accusation at the Jews of Pontoise and Joinville and when the charges were brought before me they were found to be false . . . be assured Jews in my land, I harbour no such suspicion. Even if a body were discovered in the city or in the countryside I should say nothing to the Jews in that regard.’2

  The hand-wringing came too late. Jewish Blois had been wiped out in a single day as the result of a baseless accusation, though by some miracle (probably involving money), the books and scrolls of the community were saved. It had taken little more than a horse allegedly refusing to drink river water for an entire community to be indicted as slayers of Christian children. The popular paranoia about what Jews did to children, including their own, went back to antiquity. Josephus and Philo of Alexandria had had to take accusations of Jewish child abductions seriously enough to refute them. And John Chrysostom in Antioch repeatedly accused the Jews of diabolically inspired, bestial sacrifice of their own young. The texts were twisted to fit the paranoia. The Bible’s profound abhorrence of the pagan revivalist King Manasseh’s child sacrifices to Moloch was turned into a historical confirmation of the practice. Abraham’s willingness to make a sacrifice of his son Isaac, at the command of God, notwithstanding the last-minute restraining angel, was given a sinister gloss. And medieval Christians knew both 2 Maccabees and Josephus’ Antiquities and Histories, in which, at the height of the Seleucid campaign against Judaism, a Jewish mother embraced the ghoulish sacrifice of her seven sons rather than have them submit to pagan desecrations, especially the eating of pork. Famously the last son was offered all that Antiochus could give – fortune and status – if he would capitulate, while his mother urged him to join his brothers. When he enters heaven she tells him to seek out Abraham and inform him that while he had one altar, she could boast of seven. The story ends with the mother throwing herself from the ramparts to her own death.

  By the late twelfth century, it was supposed by those Christians who were ready to believe this kind of thing, that Jewish mothers and fathers were capable of killing their own children rather than see them brought to the light of the gospel truth. But the animus of horror was focused most intensely on murderous Jewish mothers who appeared in Christian lore as a demonic counterpart to the purity and maternal love of the Virgin. Both had made sacrifices of their sons, but while the loving parents of Christian theology, God the Father and Mary the vessel of the incarnation, had made their sacrifice as an act of compassion for the salvation of mankind, the Jewish mother, perhaps under diabolical influence, had killed her children in sin and incomprehensible butchery.

  The Jewish version of those same events – both at the time of the Maccabees and the First Crusade – was precisely the opposite. By the time that Crusaders came to inflict massacre, Jews would have had available the Hebrew version of Josephus, the Josippon, written in tenth-century Italy. In its pages, the mother of the seven sons (called Miriam bat Tanchum in the Midrash) appeared not as a heartless fanatic but as someone who had robbed tyrants of their victory; had asserted godliness over profanity. Likewise, the embrace of a distinctively Jewish martyrdom, even to the point of parents killing their children to avoid death at the hands of Gentiles, was presented as a victory over the Christian ideals of martyrdom which were everywhere in their culture at exactly this time. We shall never know whether the three Hebrew chronicles that relate the stories of those martyrdoms (often in unbearably gory detail) record what actually happened in the Rhineland in 1096, because other than allusions to some of the events that show up in Christian narratives, there are no independent sources to verify them. Equally, however, there is nothing to say that in their core or even in their details they are not true histories.3 And what is indisputable is that the self-destruction of Jewish families to escape other kinds of demise – by baptism or massacre – is the way these early Jewish histories chose to remember the place their religion had in the heart of catastrophe.

  In any event there is no question that, in 1096, seventy-five years before the incident at Blois, something unimaginably terrible did indeed happen to Jewish mothers and their children, something that shadowed Jewish memory ever after. Not long after Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in November 1095 had called for a crusade to liberate the Holy Land from the unclean custody of the Saracens, it occurred to popular preachers in France and the Rhineland, like Peter the Hermit, that this work of cleansing need not wait for Christian swords to reach Palestine. Were there not enemies of Christ dwelling in their very midst, in the cities and towns of the Rhineland – Speyer and Mainz, Worms and Cologne? When those who had taken the cross were about to spend blood and money on their holy cause, ‘why should we let them [the Jews] live and tolerate their dwelling amongst us? Let us use our swords against them first and then proceed on our way.’4 The blood of the Saviour could be avenged as a sanguinary baptism at the start of the sacred war, and the ill-gotten gains of the Jews would be put to proper use. It was so very tidy. The miserable, impenitent, bloodsucking Jews would continue to pay for their crime by subsidising the armies that would deliver Jerusalem back to Christ.

  This was ominous. The Jews of France and the Rhineland, like everywhere else in Christian Europe, had lived under St Augustine’s dispensation that they had been punished for killing the Saviour by the destruction of the Temple, their banishment from Jerusalem, and their scattering about the world. This was said to be a penance so severe that it was �
�a life worse than death’. And in such a miserable dispersion they were to be preserved as a people who, in their entirety, bore the mark of Cain, living witnesses to the contrasting triumph of Christian salvation. Hence the need, according to this view, of their preservation. Wiping them out would have the unfortunate effect of precluding the great conversion that had been set as the precondition for Christ’s Second Coming. In the late eleventh century Pope Alexander II expressly reminded the flock that killing the Jews was tantamount to a blasphemous defiance of God’s own mercy. So while they were to be reminded constantly of the deplorable nature of their life outside of Christ, and prevented from defaming or defiling the works and memory of the Saviour, it was the responsibility of the Church and of obedient, godly princes to protect the Jews, not persecute, much less harm them, so that they might eventually be brought to the light.

  Besides, they were economically useful. Since Christians were forbidden by canon law to lend money at interest, the Jews had become a major (though not exclusive) source of the hefty capital needed to maintain and enlarge the glories of Christendom. Notwithstanding the prohibitions, there were, in fact, Christian moneylenders – Cahorsins and Lombards – but their interest rates were more exorbitant than the Jews’. Moreover, the absolute dependence of the Jews on the protection of lords, kings and prelates made them conveniently available for sudden arbitrary taxes, confiscations, massive death duties, or even the outright cancellation of debts should those become too onerous. As medieval rulers became more expansively ambitious, laying down the marks of their power in abbeys, cathedrals, palaces and armies, so the need for ready cash became more urgent. However much they claimed to be oppressed and generally put upon, the Jews always seemed to have enough of the ready to pay off those importunate master masons, captains and busy household stewards.

  Hence the Jews were treated hospitably enough under the terms of a charter originally issued to them by the Frankish ruler, Louis the Pious, to encourage them to settle in his realms. They were allowed to travel freely, build synagogues, were exempt from certain taxes and tolls and granted the rights of self-government for their own communities. They were excluded from the professions (other than medicine, for Christians could no more do without Jewish doctors than Muslims) and the many occupations requiring membership of a trade guild. But this seemed good enough when life in the Latin south, the Greek east and in the decreasingly tolerant Islamic world was becoming more difficult. Communities took root. Rabbis and teachers arrived, the most prodigious being Reb Solomon ben Isaac, known as Rashi, who revolutionised Bible commentary in his academy in the town of Troyes.

  But before long it became apparent that Urban II’s crusading call unloosed passions that were out of the control of bishops and kings. The Latin chronicler Albert of Aachen wrote of those days in the early part of 1096 that ‘people burned with fire and the love of God . . . but along the way wild goings-on started and knew no limit . . . would-be Christians failed to keep their distance from deceitful men, sinners and criminals, and sinned disgracefully, speaking of a goose as though it had the spirit of God on it and they said the same of a goat. Then the spirit of cruelty came on them.’5 Peasant armies led by violently menacing preachers and hitherto obscure counts, like Emicho of Flonheim, had every interest in plundering as they moved through the countryside and the Jews were the plainest target. Why not kill them while they were at it? Whether they would get the opportunity depended crucially on how determined lay and clerical powers were to stop the unruly bands in their tracks for the sake of ‘their’ Jews. Typically, Jewish quarters and the synagogues at their centre were built close to a cathedral and the bishop’s palace, precisely with these frightening eventualities in mind. But a willingness to put themselves in the way of trouble varied from diocese to diocese. At Trier the well-intentioned Bishop Engilbert, despairing of persuading the Jews to convert and save themselves, also discovered that his own life was threatened as an odious Jew-lover and beat a swift retreat, leaving the worst to happen. In Speyer, on the other hand, Bishop John and the leader of the community, Yekutiel ben Moses, took pre-emptive action, bringing all the Jews of the city inside a heavily fortified court of the episcopal palace – and later shepherding them to an even safer stronghold outside the city.6 Those who threatened the Jews had hands chopped off, which must certainly have acted as a disincentive.

  In Worms, matters did not go so well.7 Even before Emicho’s exterminating army, complete with its sacred goose, appeared before its walls, Worms had been worked into a lather of hatred by rumours that Jews had boiled a Christian alive, buried him, given the remains a good stir and then dumped the slurry into the city wells to poison the population. Despite the sinister implications of this lunacy, not all Jews availed themselves of the opportunity to move into the bishop’s palace and it’s not hard to understand their reluctance. They believed in the reliability of their protectors and they refused to believe their neighbours would turn murderous. For all their mutual suspicions (and the choice abuse they heaped on one another’s religion) Jews and Christians who dealt with each other every day in a town like Worms did not live in a state of perpetual hatred. They walked the same streets, dressed mostly the same way (for there were not yet the obligatory outward marks of difference on their costume), could understand each other’s language, shared the same habits. Let peasants and rabble foam and rave; the townsmen and women of Worms would not behave badly. But they would be disabused of their optimism. Townsmen in some numbers, though not all, did indeed join the haters and baiters, and those Jews who had stayed put were the first to be massacred. Even those who did take the opportunity of sheltering inside the bishop’s walls became victims of a siege as burghers, artisans and peasants joined forces with Emicho’s men. The memorial book of Worms’ martyrdom claims that eight hundred perished in two major attacks in May 1096, but the eventual figure of the murdered may have been closer to a thousand – virtually the entire community.

  It was in Mainz, one of the oldest and most flourishing centres of Judaism, that the greatest horror ensued. A threatened extermination was made the more credible as the horde of Crusaders had swollen into a real army, some 12,000 strong by the time they reached the city gates. The nervous Bishop Ruthard did what he could, bringing the terrified Jews into the sanctum of the cathedral and palace compound. As elsewhere, the abandoned Jewish quarter was plundered and set alight. For two days, the armed mob was held at bay, but in the end the force of numbers told. The gates were broken through and the soldiers of Christ swarmed into the palace grounds shrieking for Jewish blood.

  There could be no question of what lay in wait for the Jews. They were to be made to disappear, either converted at sword point into Christians (although taking the cross was no guarantee of immunity from physical harm), or they were to be put to death, children included – for they could not be permitted to grow and in turn breed more generations of haters of Christ. Three Hebrew narratives – one compiled from disparate reports written close to the time, known as ‘Anonymous of Mainz’; another, the longest, the twelfth-century account of Solomon bar Samson; a third, that of Rabbi Eleazar bar Nathan – all supply the unspeakable details of what followed.8 Faced with the choice between conversion and death, many of the Jews, though emphatically not all, chose the latter. Self-killing is expressly forbidden by the Torah, but the wars of the Maccabees, the collective suicide at Masada in the first century narrated in Josephus, and what had passed into memory as the exemplary martyrdoms of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Hananiah at the time of the persecutions of Hadrian, had generated a body of rabbinic literature debating whether death, self-slaughter in particular, was preferable to forced transgression. Some of those opinions had insisted that forced transgression in private was acceptable, unless Jews were being coerced into acts of incest or murder. But if forced to commit iniquities in public, the acceptance of death was the holier option. Such deaths, moreover, were described as victories for God, indeed ordained by Him over the powers of evil and
thus an act of glorification: kiddush hashem, the Sanctification of the Name, uttered in the last extremity. The reward (just as it was promised to Crusaders) was instant admission to Paradise for the slaughtered. Closely echoing the speech made to the last defenders of Masada by their leader Eleazar bar Ya’ir, the chronicle of Solomon bar Samson relates one of the Mainz leaders saying ‘let us be strong and bear the yoke of holy religion . . . for only in this world can our enemy kill us . . . but our souls in paradise will live eternally in the great shining reflection of divine glory . . . Happy are we to do his will.’9

  The deeds seem, however, no less horrific for being acts of desperation at the last extremity, and the narratives – especially the most grimly elaborate of them, that of Solomon bar Samson – describe a terrible febrile enthusiasm in setting about the fatal work. The stately daughters of ‘Mistress Rachel’ in Mainz sharpen the knives that will cut their own throats, to make sure there were no nicks or dullness of the edge, as if preparing for the slaughter of sacrificial animals, which is exactly what they become.