§ Debates · Ch. 7 · Under the Cross
How reliable are the Hebrew chronicles of the First Crusade?
2 positions · no single answer
Position A · held by The traditional reading implicit in the chronicles
Testimony of widespread martyrdom
Many Jews killed themselves and their families to sanctify the Name rather than accept baptism.
Rests on: p. 196
Reads the same page as : the same source, different readings.
Statements tied to the debate
- Historians still argue over how reliable these chronicles and the accounts in liturgical poems are. There is no doubt that many Jews were killed and that others took their own lives and those of their families, yet how widespread this was remains uncertain. The texts praising self-sacrifice were written, sometimes decades afterward, not as objective histories: their authors may have wanted to justify acts of killing and suicide hard to square with Jewish law, or to answer the growing danger of voluntary conversion to Christianity in the twelfth century, a reading proposed by historians Jeremy Cohen and Avraham Grossman.
- The accounts in the Hebrew narratives include grim and disturbing descriptions that are, of course, impossible to verify and may be implausibly detailed given that those who lived through the events did not survive to tell them. Even so, the chronicles show a community caught between brutal violence and an equally radical ideology of religious martyrdom.
- In making sense of the martyrdom reported in the chronicles, one must remember that many Jews did not truly face a choice between baptism and death: in many cases the Crusaders and the mob meant to kill, not convert. The ideology of self-sacrifice credited to the Crusade generation is above all an expression of what took shape afterward, in reaction to the events and in the chronicles themselves. Individuals like 'Rachel' or 'Meshullam' need not have been zealots for kiddush ha-shem; desperation may be all that moved them.