The memory of martyrdom

What may matter even more for the Crusade's lasting effect is how the events of 1096 were remembered by later generations. The Jewish response to the violence shaped Ashkenazi culture: liturgical poems, memorial lists of the dead and detailed chronicles expressed a martyr's ideal of self-sacrifice. The main narratives are an anonymous account traditionally (but wrongly) credited to a Solomon ben Samson and a shorter chronicle, Mainz Anonymous, which dwell on the supposedly heroic conduct of those who chose martyrdom, even suicide, rather than fall to the Crusaders or accept baptism.1

Christian observers at the time of the Crusades also noticed the acts of self-sacrifice: Albert of Aix, for one, recorded that the Jews, seeing themselves and their children attacked, fell on one another and perished at each other's hands, and that mothers cut the throats of the babies they nursed rather than see them killed by the weapons of the uncircumcised.3

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.8

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.10

However reliable the details of the Hebrew Crusade narratives may be, they fixed the image and the ideal of the martyr, kiddush ha-shem, the 'sanctification of God's Name', in the shared memory of Ashkenazi Jews.2

Ironically, the ideology of martyrdom seems to have been shaped by the values of Christian society. A crusading knight could not count on coming home alive, and his participation was a sacrifice in both material and bodily terms; the pope promised an indulgence that would cleanse sins and bring reward in the afterlife. In that climate of religious sacrifice it may not have seemed so odd that Jews took up a similar ideal, if only to show that Judaism was no less than Christendom.11

Tied to the celebration of martyrs came a stronger sense of memorializing the dead. According to historian Ivan Marcus, the Ashkenazi custom of reciting each year the list of a place's righteous dead, and later the anniversary of a parent's death, comes mainly from the Christian monastic habit of compiling necrologies. Like their Christian neighbors, Ashkenazi Jews began producing memorial books (Memorbücher) and adopted rituals like yizkor, said on Yom Kippur and on the three pilgrimage festivals, and the Kaddish as mourners' prayer.12