The Story of the Jews

by Simon Schama

  None of this happens impassively in the Hebrew chronicles, nor with the demented unswerving resolution that characterises the mother of the seven dead sons in 2 Maccabees. ‘The courageous women’ hurl rocks and stones at the besiegers who throw them back, cutting and bruising their faces and bodies. Mistress Rachel, who seems to act like a soul possessed, all maternal feelings suspended, becomes once more a distraught mother when a companion hands her a sharpened knife. At which point the chronicler says ‘when she saw the knife she let out a great and bitter cry, smiting her face and crying “Where is your loving kindness O Lord?”’10 In one version Rachel is so given over to horror-stricken grief that the companion has to kill the girls. The mother then hardens herself, and kills Isaac, the younger of her two sons. At which point something remarkable happens in the story, and in startling contrast to Christian martyrological literature in which the blessed accept their fate with the same kind of holy resignation as Christ’s sacrifice. In one of the most unbearable scenes of all, the older of the two sons, Aaron, cries out in terror, ‘Mother, mother, do not butcher me,’ and hides under a chest. But the mother’s fanatical purpose will not be deflected, as she tells him while tugging him out from his hiding place by one leg. After completing his death, Rachel seats herself, stretching out the long sleeves of her gown to form a basin that fills with the blood of her children. When the Crusaders burst in and find her they demand to see what ‘treasures’ she has hidden under her sleeves. She shows them and they kill her. The last scene of the calamity unfolds when her husband arrives, witnesses the horror, and falls on his own sword, eviscerating himself (as the narratives insist on telling us), then dying while sitting in the road with his entrails falling out of his body.

  Whether the unspeakably gruesome details of these stories are true or not (and there is no prima facie reason to disbelieve them), the striking character of the Jewish martyrologies is the credible narration of actual human terror, resistance, revulsion and even tormented indecision at the heart of so many of them. It is what gives this terrible chapter of the Jewish story the stamp of truth – whether the truth of the mind or that of the actual body. The case of Isaac bar David, the parnas – or synagogue warden – of Mainz, unforgettably dramatises tragic indecision. The Crusaders have already murdered his wife Skolaster (fine name for a Jewish girl), the daughter of Rabbi Samuel the Great, and to save his children and his mother who lies in bed bleeding from her wounds, he decides to convert. Three days later, bitterly repenting his decision, he takes his daughters to the synagogue of which he was custodian, slaughters them in front of the Ark, and sprinkles its columns with their blood. Then he returns to his house and, against his mother’s wishes, burns it down with her inside. Finally he goes back to the synagogue, sets light to it at each corner and, with the crusading mob asking him to exit in time to be saved, goes ‘repeatedly from one corner to another his hands spread forth to the sky to his heavenly father and praying in the fire out loud in a pleasant voice’ as he perishes in the flames. Solomon bar Samson, the narrator, does not rejoice at this victory over conversion. Instead he interrupts the narrative to declare: ‘For these things do I weep. My eyes flow with tears.’

  The same merciless exposure of mixed feelings, agonies of doubt and terror, recur in the story of beautiful Sarit, the intended bride of Abraham, son of Judah the Levite. The Cologne Jews had been moved to nearby villages, but not far enough off to escape the killing bands. Through a window the prospective bride looked on in horror at the killings, wanting desperately to escape. But she was seen by her father-in-law, who dragged her into the room. In a macabre parody of wedding rites, Judah (rather than the still living bridegroom) kisses Sarit on the mouth and proclaims: ‘Behold, all of you . . . this is the huppah [wedding canopy] of my daughter. They all cried, sobbing, wailing, mourning and moaning.’11 Sarit is then thrown on the bosom of Abraham, at which point her father-in-law cuts her in two ‘through the middle’, as the chronicle euphemistically has it, bottom to top, and then slaughters his own son to complete the blood wedding.

  We will never know how many other Jews, most of them doubtless devout, who could not stomach the ‘Sanctification of the Name’ either for themselves or those they loved, especially their children, accepted conversion instead. Some did so only after they were tortured and beaten within an inch of their death; others reverted, as soon as they could, sometimes even before the Crusaders had departed, and paid the price. Most remarkably, the German emperor Henry IV issued an edict one year later, in 1097, allowing forcibly converted Jews to return to their faith. This was dramatically at odds with a strict Church prohibition on permitting baptised converts to revert, but then Henry IV (himself famously in conflict with Pope Gregory VII) had been outraged by reports of the massacres and promised severe punishment for the perpetrators.

  The enormity of what had been inflicted on the Jews in the spring of 1096 sobered some of the courts of Christian Europe. Henry IV’s son and successor, Henry V, maintained his father’s watchful benevolence and even eased some of the restraints on Jews as an encouragement to resettle in towns stained by mass murder. In France, as we have seen, Louis VII appears to have been a caustic critic of the more paranoid strains of Judeophobia. The result was that Jews did indeed return to Worms and Cologne and Rouen, resumed their old lives of trade and prayer, Torah and Talmud study and charity. For some time now historians of medieval Jewish life (even those specialising in the tragic narratives of the Crusades) have been at pains to insist on the uniqueness and exceptionalism of the horrors of 1096.12 In fact the Crusaders marched through much of Europe leaving Jews unscathed; successive Crusades did not trigger massacres on the scale of that first annihilation. Even when the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099 and burned down their synagogue, it is not entirely clear whether Jews were burned inside it at the same time. Many were ransomed, many more taken captive, so they at least survived. Life for the Jews was not all convulsion and expulsion.

  Up to a point. The usual scholarly pendulum may have overswung. For every sobered-up Christian ruler there were successors who reverted to paranoid type. The response of Louis VII’s son, Philip Augustus, to news that a Christian had been executed for murdering a Jew in the town of Bray (or possibly Brie), and that unseemly celebrations had taken place connecting the guilty man with Haman, the villain of the Purim story, was to order the killing of the entire community. So a chronic sense of insecurity on the part of Jews in the Ashkenazi world was not a figment of their imagination, not least because it was impossible to know how resolute both Church and state would be in containing the worst impulses of the Judeophobic mobs. Even when churchmen like Bernard of Clairvaux or Peter the Venerable, the abbot of Cluny, went out of their way to forbid and deplore violent assaults on the Jews, they made sure at the same time to refer to them as the most despicable of all races. And for their part, even though they knew that not every day would be a day of murder, what had happened in 1096, and what every so often, as at Bray, continued to happen in this time of Christian excitement, entered the historical self-consciousness of Jews, and would not easily depart. New prayers and liturgical poems enshrined the memory of the martyrs, most famously Av Harachamim, Father of Mercies, still sung on the high holy days. The memorbuchen, the memorial books, coloured future expectations with tragic memory. The nightmare vision of Jews killing each other in frantic desperation to avoid, as they thought, a worse fate at the hands of their persecutors, would not go away with the calendar round of festivals, a marketplace haggle, or the rejoicings of circumcisions and weddings. Henceforth those who could, built their houses and their synagogues in stone. That said everything.

  As the historian Salo Baron insisted, Jewish history is certainly not all ‘lachrymose’. Yet it is the glaring, relentless evidence, not emotional predisposition or tragic overdeterminism (oh those sighing and sobbing Jews), which tells us that it has not all been honey cakes and wine, either. Terrible things continued to happen to medieval Jews because high scep
ticism and low paranoia did not exist in separate cultural realms; and as in the case of the vengeful king of France, highness did not preclude vindictive paranoia. In other cases, at other times, there was simply nothing princes or prelates could do about vulgar hatred other than to stand back a little until it was spent. Richard the Lionheart, the Crusader king of England, is known to have been angry at what befell the Jews of his kingdom, both on the day of his coronation on 3 September 1189 and in the months that followed. But what happened happened all the same.

  Indeed it happened for the worst of reasons. The historian William of Newburgh describes a throng of well-intentioned Jews, leaders of their respective communities in provincial towns like York as well as London, coming to the capital to offer their congratulations, and gifts to match, to the new king. The Jews had been brought to England from Normandy by William the Conqueror with a mind to their usual cash-and-carry services, and they were closely tied to the fortunes of the Norman–Angevin monarchy. Other than Hebrew, their language was Judeo-French, and their raison d’être was to supply revenue and funds for soldiers, horses, churches and palaces.

  None of this cut much ice on Richard’s coronation, a day which William points out with tight-lipped glee was known on the old calendar as ‘Evil’ or ‘Egyptian’, and so it turned out for the Jews whose timing was poor and eagerness to please, excessive. Though a royal proclamation had been published expressly forbidding them from Westminster Abbey while a Crusader king was being crowned, according to William they thronged to the gates of the palace where the subsequent banquet was under way, the king in his ‘glorious diadem’. Beefily indignant at the presumption of the Jews, the officious gatekeeper pushed back hard as gatekeepers will. The usual collapsing domino effect ensued amid the enormous crowd, which when combined with the roaring of the gatekeeper, triggered violent attacks on the Jews. A fistfight turned into a headlong brutal onslaught; sticks, stones and broken bones. At least thirty of the Jews died in the violence, some trampled underfoot, others beaten to a pulp. One who barely survived was Benedict, living in York but the agent of the greatest moneylender in England, Aaron of Lincoln, the creditor of some of the ringleaders of the riot. With him was the community leader of the York Jews, Josce. Both were badly roughed up, but Josce managed to escape while Benedict was dragged in his bloody state to a nearby church and forcibly baptised. Later, on the road, trying to get back home to York, he died from his many wounds.

  ‘In the meantime,’ William cheerily notes, ‘an agreeable rumour that the king had ordered all Jews to be exterminated pervaded the whole of London with incredible celerity.’ Another monk-historian, Richard of Devizes, was likewise gratified that ‘on the same coronation day at about the hour at which the Son was sacrificed to the Father, they began in the city of London to sacrifice the Jews to their father, the Devil’.13 London and Westminster were packed with people. In no time at all an armed mob gathered ‘eager for plunder and for the blood of a people hateful to all men by the judgement of God’. After the morning’s violence, the surviving Jews had fled back to their houses, prudently stone-built, and had locked themselves in. Unable to break them down, the crowd set the roofs on fire and then either killed those exiting in terror on the spot or let them burn to death inside. ‘The horrible conflagration,’ writes William, ‘destructive to the besieged Jews afforded light to the Christians who were raging in their nocturnal work.’ Much of the rest of the city burned with them, but the extent of plunder taken from the Jews allowed their killers to be ‘satisfied with the slaughter they had committed’. The smoky havoc finally reached the sensitive nostrils of the king amid his banqueting nobles. One of them, the justiciar Ranulph de Glainville, a man ‘both prudent and powerful’, was sent, belatedly, to restrain the mob. In turn he and his men were faced with threats, alarming enough for them to abandon the attempt, Richard of Devizes says, smirking in his Latin prose that it took the destroyers of the Jews so long to finish their work ‘that the holocaust [the burnt offering] was barely completed the second day’.14

  The disaster of coronation day, however, was just a prelude to a cascade of misery and massacre. Just before Richard embarked for Normandy where he would meet with the king of France to seal the pact for their Crusade, a portent appeared in the sky in the form of a milky apparition in the likeness of the ‘banner of the Lord’ with the image of Christ crucified. The usual crusading madness then took no time at all to catch fire, as in the Rhineland with the Jews its immediate victims. The pretexts varied; the result was always the same. In Lynn (now King’s Lynn) in Norfolk, a Jewish convert was rumoured to have been pursued by angry co-religionists into a church, which was enough for killing to start. The familiarity the local population had with a well-liked Jewish doctor who treated Jews and Gentiles equally did not stop him from being among the fatalities. At Stamford during the annual fair where crosses were being taken by those who would join the holy war, a youth who had deposited money with a Jew was murdered by robbers but rapidly turned in the fevered minds of the locals into the Jew’s victim. There were more terrifying assaults on Jews in Dunstable, Colchester, Thetford and even the village of Ospringe in Kent.15

  The most infamous horror unfolded in York on 17 March 1190 (Shabbat Hagadol, the Sabbath before Passover) when, unsatisfied with the death of their bête noire Benedict, a mob broke into the house of his widow, killed her and her children and helped themselves to whatever lay to hand. Frightened, a number of Jews led by Josce, the survivor of the coronation riot, got permission from the warden of the castle to seek its safety. Having granted it, he changed his mind on returning to the castle and finding it impossible to get through the furiously besieging crowd, urged on by a white-coated Premonstratensian friar. The Jews, the warden complained, had taken over the castle. Instead of pacifying the violence he thus stoked it further. Those Jews who remained outside the keep were given the usual choice of conversion or death, many accepting the cross to save their lives. Among those trapped in the tower was a famous biblical and Talmud scholar, Yom Tov of Joigny, who had composed an elegy for the massacred Jews of Blois nearly twenty years earlier. For Yom Tov, only one possibility remained: to follow what had been done a century before in Mainz and Worms, and he made a speech to the terrified Jews, once more echoing Josephus’ version of Eleazar bar Ya’ir’s suicide appeal at Masada. ‘Thou should not ask,’ William of Newburgh has Josce saying as he endorsed Yom Tov’s grim message, ‘God who dost this, for he has commanded us to lay down our lives.’ Another self-butchery followed, Yom Tov killing his own family, bidding the men do the same, before doing away with himself, as fires burned around them.

  As in the Rhineland towns, not all wished to share this apocalyptic fate. The following morning, the survivors stood on the battlements, lamenting the dead and expressing their wish to be ‘united with the body of Christ’. The principal debtor and crowd organiser, Richard Malebisse, encouraged them to come down and exit as true Christians. As soon as they emerged, they were killed on the spot. A last burning then took place, not of people but of debts. On the floor of York Minster, the entirety of those debts, inscribed on wood and paper, were ceremoniously incinerated, completing the destruction. When the king caught up with the news, he is said to have become angry, in particular at the offence given to his royal dignity by the tumult, furious enough to order the Bishop of Ely to march on York with an armed force to apprehend and punish the malefactors. The leaders of the havoc, Malebisse included, had already taken flight to Scotland and, needless to say, no one else in York professed to know who had been responsible for the crime, leaving the king’s indignation to be satisfied by the levying of hefty fines.

  York was the most dramatic tragedy in the cycle of English Jew-killings, but the murder of fifty-seven Jews on Palm Sunday in the Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds was even more ominous for it was the result of an old obsession that would have a long run in Christian England: the conviction that Jews were in the habit of abducting Christian boys around the ti
me of Easter and Passover, and subjecting them to the torture of a mock crucifixion – a devilish parody of the Passion.16 In 1144, the body of a twelve-year-old apprentice skinner (hides and skins play a recurring part in these fantasies), one William, had been found in the woods of Mousehold Heath outside Norwich. The Jews who had only come to the town a few years before were immediately suspected of the crime. One convert, Theobald, swore that William had been lured to his doom by a Jew and that his murder had been planned by a secret conclave of Jews from all over the country who would meet to enact the mock crucifixion with the unfortunate lad on the second day of Passover. An immense hue and cry broke out; the boy’s body was brought to Norwich Cathedral for solemn burial close to the high altar. Although the sheriff was appalled at the superstition, brought the Jews within the security of his castle, and resisted any attempts to bring them to trial, the tomb continued to be a site of veneration from which miracles were said to abound.17

  It is possible to see where the fantasy that Passover solemnities were a form of anti-Passion, a repetitition of the crucifixion, came from. Christians, especially those unfamiliar with the Jewish religious calendar, as was the case in relatively recently settled England, had got the wrong festival, confusing Passover with the preceding Purim. Purim, commemorating the narrow escape that the Jews of Persia had had (courtesy of Queen Esther’s favour with King Ahasuerus/ Artaxerxes), did in fact often involve a mock hanging of an effigy-villain, Haman, who plotted Jewish extermination, and a carnival play of triumph and rejoicing. It is also the case that as crusading fervour gripped northern Europe, the anti-Christian rhetoric of Jews became much more vitriolic and unguarded. Any malicious convert wanting to persuade his new fellow Christians that his old people were up to no good, would have had no trouble at all in citing some of the more ferocious of these insults and curses. Christians also became convinced around this time that the Jews would stop at nothing to prevent one of their number from converting, or from attempting to re-Judaise them. In Lynn, it had been the rumoured Jewish pursuit of a new convert into the church that triggered the massacre there in 1190. And knowledge of what the Jews had done to their own children in 1096 in the Rhineland became perverted into an allied fantasy that Jewish fathers would feed their own sons into the oven if they suspected that they had taken Communion with Christian friends.18 William of Malmesbury included the tale in his mid-twelfth-century collection of stories of intercession by the Virgin. Failing to stop her husband from baking her son, one desperate mother appeals to Christians who rush to the scene only to discover a miracle: the boy stays cool in the oven, thanks to the intercession of Mary who, in another account, is said to have made the heat like a ‘dewy breeze’.19 In many versions of the tale – which had wide currency in France, Spain and Germany as well as England – the boy amid the flames is visited by a vision of the Virgin and Child, the epitome of Christian family love, the opposite of demonic, infanticidal Jewish cruelty. In the stained-glass window in Lincoln Cathedral the Virgin bends tenderly over the Boy in the Oven. As Miri Rubin points out, ovens, whether filled with buns or not, are the place where children are ‘cooked up’ and can be the abode of nurture or, as in this case, places of monstrous ordeal. Both Jews and Gentiles would of course have been aware of the miraculous deliverance of Meshach, Shadrach and Abed-nego in the fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar related in the Book of Daniel. Once again, the Judeophobic version takes a biblical story in which Jews have been the sacred heroes and transforms them instead into quasi-pagan killers of true believers. In this case, the monstrous figure of the immolating Jewish father yields, via the Madonna-Mother, to the benevolence of the child’s true Father – God Himself.