Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (review)

Over the winter and spring of 1095–6, Jewish communities in France, Bohemia, Bavaria, and especially the Rhineland were violently persecuted by bands of departing crusaders, whose prime aim seems to have been to force them to convert to Christianity. Faced by a merciless enemy and by neighbors who had now turned against them, many Jews killed their families and themselves to avoid the pollution of baptism. These terrible events are believed by most historians to constitute the first great persecution of the Jews in medieval western Europe, although it is possible that a precursor was a widespread pogrom in France in 1010. The sufferings of the Rhineland Jews in 1096 were commemorated in three Hebrew narratives, which Professor Jeremy Cohen re-examines in this beautifully written book. He is not concerned with issues which have exercised others, such as the date of the texts—he assumes they were all written in the first half of the twelfth century—or their relationship with each other. Concentrating particularly on the account attributed to Solomon bar Samson, his interest is in what the narratives tell him about the attitudes of their authors and of the milieu in which they were composed. He starts with the premises that martyrologies reveal much more about the martyrologists than about the martyrs themselves, that these martyrs had anyway violated the letter of Jewish law in killing their families and themselves, and that their memorialists were members of a traumatized society, consumed by guilt since many had survived precisely because they had submitted to baptism: a feature of the Rhineland communities was that they had been allowed to return to their faith by the Emperor Henry IV. In the first part of the book Professor Cohen, who envisages the narratives having a therapeutic role for the profoundly disturbed survivors and their descendants, discusses martyrdom, and particularly suicide, in the Jewish tradition, examines critically the historiography of the events, and in a brave and at times brilliant chapter explains his methodology. The second part consists of five case-studies, which are given intensive exegetical treatment in the light of Scripture and Talmudic teachings. The memories are revealed to have been complex, ambivalent, even ironical. In my opinion some of Cohen's arguments are stretched. Christian men and women of the period were also inclined to emit a stream of consciousness in their writings, with sentences flecked with biblical and liturgical imagery. It is arguable whether they were really aware of the nuances, although of course the snatches of scripture and liturgy do provide valuable evidence for their state of mind. And I am very doubtful of the application of modern psychology to people in the past. Some quite dramatic changes in responses to stress in the twentieth century should make us very wary of believing that psychological reactions are constant through the ages. Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of Cohen's analysis is overwhelming. He adds to the growing evidence for cultural cross-fertilization—the use of Christian imagery he uncovers in the narratives is amazing—and he introduces a new approach to the history of Ashkenazic Jewry. Although I am very reluctant to devalue the historical evidence contained in the Hebrew accounts, he has left me in no doubt that in future we will have to treat them much more carefully.