Sanctifying the Name of God

Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade

Jeremy Cohen

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812201635
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia ebraica

How are martyrs made, and how do the memories of martyrs express, nourish, and mold the ideals of the community? Sanctifying the Name of God wrestles with these questions against the background of the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland during the outbreak of the First Crusade. Marking the first extensive wave of anti-Jewish violence in medieval Christian Europe, these "Persecutions of 1096" exerted a profound influence on the course of European Jewish history.When the crusaders demanded that Jews choose between Christianity and death, many opted for baptism. Many others, however, chose to die as Jews rather than to live as Christians, and of these, many actually inflicted death upon themselves and their loved ones. Stories of their self-sacrifice ushered the Jewish ideal of martyrdom—kiddush ha-Shem, the sanctification of God's holy name—into a new phase, conditioning the collective memory and mindset of Ashkenazic Jewry for centuries to come, during the Holocaust, and even today.The Jewish survivors of 1096 memorialized the victims as martyrs as they rebuilt their communities during the decades following the Crusade. Three twelfth-century Hebrew chronicles of the persecutions preserve their memories of martyrdom and self-sacrifice, tales fraught with symbolic meaning that constitute one of the earliest Jewish attempts at local, contemporary historiography. Reading and analyzing these stories through the prism of Jewish and Christian religious and literary traditions, Jeremy Cohen shows how these persecution chronicles reveal much more about the storytellers, the martyrologists, than about the martyrs themselves. While they extol the glorious heroism of the martyrs, they also air the doubts, guilt, and conflicts of those who, by submitting temporarily to the Christian crusaders, survived.

PART I

Problems and Solutions

Chapter 1

To Sanctify the Name of God

Unquestionably the most striking aspect of the 1096 persecutions and their Hebrew chronicles is the slaughter of Ashkenazic Jews by their own hands.

Not wishing to deny their beliefs and to give up the fear of our king …, they held out their necks to be slaughtered and offered their untainted souls to their father in heaven…. Each one in turn sacrificed and was sacrificed, until the blood of one touched the blood of another: The blood of husbands mixed with that of their wives, the blood of fathers and their children, the blood of brothers and their sisters, the blood of rabbis and their disciples, the blood of bridegrooms and their brides …, the blood of children and nursing infants and their mothers. They were killed and slaughtered for the unity of God’s glorious and awesome name.¹

The three Hebrew chronicles of the First Crusade and most subsequent Jewish memories have considered such martyrdom awe-inspiring, the ultimate expression of religious self-sacrifice, outstripping in its piety even a willingness to undergo a violent death at the hands of one’s enemy.

From the perspective of traditional Judaism, however, this phenomenon proves no less problematic than impressive. The law of the Talmud indeed considered the obligation to sanctify God’s name in martyrdom—especially to avoid engaging in idolatry, and above all in times of violent anti-Jewish persecution—a divine commandment. Nevertheless, submitting to death to avoid transgression was one thing; inflicting death, upon oneself or upon someone else, was very much another. Biblical law condemned homicide; acknowledging the Torah’s affirmation of the value of life, talmudic rabbis included suicide in this prohibition. Even if one could find precedents for justifying suicide in extenuating circumstances, how could one condone the presumption involved in slaying another person?

And yet, here were not the excessive reactions of extremists or marginal types in the Jewish community, nor can one write off this pattern of Jewish behavior, which Christian sources document as well, as a fantasy of those who remembered 1096. Self-wrought acts of kiddush ha-Shem, as Jews traditionally have referred to Jewish martyrdom, loom large in the collective memory of scrupulously observant German-Jewish communities as the dominant, most praiseworthy response to the violence. How could they idealize such patently sinful behavior? How can we best seek to understand the cultural logic and significance of Ashkenazic kiddush ha-Shem during the First Crusade?

Modern scholars have generally approached this problem with one of two strategies, which are hardly mutually exclusive. One strategy explains the behavior of the martyrs as expressing the distinguishing characteristics of early medieval German Jewry. Ashkenazic Jews attributed considerable authority to aggadah, rabbinic lore, including the tale of the suicide pact at Masada found in the tenth-century Hebrew history book Josippon, and they gave weight to such stories in defining halakhah, or legal norms, too. Ashkenazic Jews, some have claimed, had inherited rabbinic traditions of the land of Israel that cherished memories of ancient Jewish martyrdom but did not generate active involvement in messianic and political movements. Messianic expectations ran high among Jews and Christians alike late in the eleventh century, but northern European Jewry looked forward to an otherworldly redemption, outside the realm of history as we know it; an act of sanctifying God’s name might secure salvation for the martyr not in this world but in the next. (By contrast, the Marranos of Spain, runs this argument, drew inspiration from Babylonian rabbinic traditions that placed higher value on redemption in this world, such that one might endeavor to remain alive at all costs.) These Jewish communities hated the church intensely, and such hatred militated against conversion—however insincere or temporary—to Christianity. No less important, some have claimed, German Jews nurtured a collective self-image of piety. Again, Jewish traditions of the land of Israel and Italy bequeathed to them an ideal of righteousness that emphasized the exemplary morality and spirituality of their communities at large, not the grandeur of a small rabbinic elite. Early Italian-Ashkenazic tradition hallowed the memories of voluntary Jewish martyrs before the First Crusade. Ashkenazic Jews displayed remarkable self-confidence as to the validity of their local ritual customs; intuition may thus have led them to identify their own inclinations with the mandates of the law, such that they even modified the codified law, or halakhah, to reflect their local customs. While debate on this supposition ensues, many would agree that the distinctive Ashkenazic ideology of kiddush ha-Shem was firmly in place before the violence began. Our chroniclers surely wrote for specific didactic purposes, but they pursued those objectives by faithfully recording the beliefs and behavior of those who sacrificed themselves.²

An alternative, though not incompatible, strategy for making sense of self-inflicted Jewish martyrdom in 1096 focuses on the ideological climate of the First Crusade. The Crusade undertook to mobilize the forces of Christian Europe under the banner of the church, to redeem the beleaguered Byzantine Empire from Turkish attack, to liberate the Holy Land in which Jesus lived and died from the rule of the infidel—and all this to avenge the wrong that was done to Jesus, the most exemplary martyr of all. Those who attacked the Jews found their mandate within this general understanding of the Crusade. Here were the most accessible enemies of Christ, those who had forfeited their covenant with God in their overt hostility toward his son. What more noble an undertaking than to baptize or destroy them! In his renowned call to engage in holy war, Pope Urban II promised crusaders a heavenly reward. Popular opinion, in turn, assigned those who fell in battle against the infidel the most direct access to paradise; they achieved the status of martyr in a genuine act of imitatio Christi, the imitation of Christ.

Attacked on these terms, it appears, the Jews of the Rhineland tried unsuccessfully to defend themselves, to bribe the local potentates, usually the bishops, to defend them, and to secure immediate divine assistance. When all else failed, there remained only the options offered by the crusaders: Christianity or death. Within such a context, self-inflicted martyrdom perhaps offered a different, more meaningful alternative. For the Jew thereby took the initiative in his or her own hands, actively determining his or her own destiny, not permitting the enemy to seal his or her fate. Moreover, in acts of self-determined martyrdom, the Jews challenged the very hostile ideology of the Crusade that precipitated their woes: The ultimate self-sacrifice was not that of the crusaders or of Jesus before them but that of the Ashkenazic Jew.³

To understand Jewish reactions to the persecutions of 1096 we must surely acknowledge the unique Ashkenazic Jewish experience as well as the climate of the Crusade, and we have much to learn from both these interpretive strategies. Perhaps a social and religious profile that predisposed Jews to martyrdom, coupled with the external stimulus of the Crusade and its hostile ideology, contributes the only sensible explanation for the acts of suicide and homicide committed by the Jewish martyrs. Nonetheless, when they ground the martyrs’ behavior in the perspective on martyrdom that infuses the three Hebrew chronicles of 1096, I believe that both scholarly approaches stand in need of correction. As I shall explain in Chapter 3 and seek to demonstrate in Part 2 of this book, we must evaluate the written records of kiddush ha-Shem in 1096 on a qualitatively different basis. Laying the groundwork for such a reassessment of the Hebrew chronicles, this chapter offers a brief overview of Jewish and Christian traditions of martyrdom and self-sacrifice as they developed in late antiquity, were transmitted to the early Middle Ages, and resonated during the period of the Crusades.

“I Shall Be Sanctified in the Midst of the Israelite People”

The painfully rich history of martyrdom in Jewish experience, from the biblical period and into modernity, merits thorough investigation unto itself.⁴ Here we can offer only a general picture of early developments, highlighting landmarks that may inform the events of 1096 and/or the memories of these events among their survivors.

The willingness of heroic Israelites to offer their own lives and those of their loved ones out of devotion to God or for the greater good of their people appears in the earliest layers of Jewish tradition: from Abraham’s binding of Isaac to the suicide of Samson and the self-induced slaying of King Saul; and from the attempted executions of Daniel and his three friends to the self-endangering refusal of Mordecai and Esther to yield before the evil designs of Haman. Yet martyrdom and the figure of the martyr assumed especial significance in Jewish society and religion beginning with the persecution of Judaism by the Hellenistic emperor Antiochus Epiphanes in the second century B.C.E. The Second Book of the Maccabees recounts the fate of those Jews who refused to violate their ancestral laws. “For instance, two women who had had their children circumcised were brought to trial; then, with their babies hanging at their breasts, they were paraded through the city and hurled headlong from the ramparts” (6:9–10). An elderly Jew named Eleazar was “forced to open his mouth and eat pork; but preferring death with honor to life with impiety, he spat it out and voluntarily submitted to the torture” (6:18–19). Even when his captors suggested that he publicly taste of kosher meat simply to give the impression to others that he was eating pork, he refused, fearing that “many of the young might believe that at the age of ninety Eleazar had turned apostate. If I practiced deceit for the sake of a brief moment of life, I should lead them astray and stain my old age with dishonor. I might, for the present, avoid man’s punishment, but alive or dead I should never escape the hand of the Almighty” (6:24–26).

Tortured to the brink of death, Eleazar exclaimed: “To the Lord belongs all holy knowledge; he knows what terrible agony I endure in my body from this flogging, though I could have escaped death; yet he knows also that in my soul I suffer gladly, because I stand in awe of him” (6:30). More horrifically still, 2 Maccabees relates that the king brutally tortured a mother and her seven sons, killing them in succession as the others watched, once again for not eating pork. Refusing even to address the king in Greek, the brothers gave no heed to his entreaties and threats and suffered most terribly as a result. Yet

the mother was the most remarkable of all, and she deserves to be remembered with special honor. She watched her seven sons perish within the space of a single day; yet she bore it bravely, for she trusted in the Lord. She encouraged each in turn in her native language; filled with noble resolution, her woman’s thoughts fired by a manly spirit, she said to them: “You appeared in my womb, I know not how; it was not I who gave you life and breath, not I who set in order the elements of your being. The creator of the universe, who designed the beginning of mankind and devised the origin of all, will in his mercy give you back again breath and life, since now you put his laws above every thought of self.” (7:20–23)

Identifying mother and sons with the ever-victorious goodness of reason—and transforming 2 Maccabees’ tale of a single chapter into an epic of twelve chapters—the pseudepigraphic Fourth Book of the Maccabees added lavishly to this ode of praise.

O mother with the seven sons, who broke down the violence of the tyrant and thwarted his wicked devices and exhibited the nobility of faith! Nobly set like a roof upon the pillars of your children, you sustained, without yielding, the earthquake of your tortures. Be of good cheer, therefore, mother of holy soul, whose hope of endurance is secure with God. Not so majestic stands the moon in heaven as you stand, lighting the way to piety for your seven starlike sons, honored by God and firmly set with them in heaven. For your childbearing was from our father Abraham. (17:2–6)⁵

Other Judaic texts of late antiquity resound with similar themes. According to Philo the Jew of Alexandria in the first century C.E., the Jews who protested when the Roman Emperor Caligula sought to erect a statue of himself in their temple stood ready to die—and kill themselves—rather than have their shrine violated.

We gladly put our throats at your disposal. Let them slaughter, butcher, carve our flesh without a blow struck or blood drawn by us and do all the deeds that conquerors commit. But what need of an army! Our selves will conduct the sacrifices, priests of a noble order: wives will be brought to the altar by wife-slayers, brothers and sisters by fratricides, boys and girls in the innocence of their years by child-murderers…. Then, standing in the midst of our kinsfolk after bathing ourselves in their blood …, we mingle our blood with theirs by the crowning slaughter of ourselves.⁶

The first-century Jewish historian Josephus likewise left us his well-known account of the suicide pact of the Jewish zealots at Masada, urged upon them by their leader, Eleazar ben Yair, following the Romans’ destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.

Unenslaved by the foe let us die, as free men with our children and wives let us quit this life together! This our laws enjoin, this our wives and children implore of us. The need for this is of God’s sending, the reverse of this is the Romans’ desire, and their fear is lest a single one of us should die before capture.⁷

Josephus recounted yet another Jewish suicide pact at Yodfat, from which only he and one comrade escaped with their lives; yet not only did he fail to explain the justification for such suicide in Jewish law, but he reportedly sought to convince his comrades that God opposed it.⁸

The destruction of the temple, the Bar Kokhba rebellion of the 130s, and the anti-Jewish decrees of the Roman emperor Hadrian also gave rise to numerous tales of martyrdom and self-sacrifice in the Talmud and midrash. These tales relate how four hundred young Jewish captives en route to Rome threw themselves into the sea rather than submit to sexual slavery. They retell the story of the mother and her seven sons.⁹ And they recount the willingness of individual sages—Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Chaninah ben Teradyon perhaps the best known among them—to martyr themselves for God and the Torah. As the period of the Talmud drew to a close, the acclaimed story of the ten martyrs wove various traditions concerning such heroes into an ornate narrative that still fills an important place in Jewish liturgy today.¹⁰

Yet the talmudic sages’ concern for martyrdom did not rest with memories and tales of specific martyrs. As with virtually every other aspect of human experience, these rabbis strove to define the particulars of a Jew’s obligation to sacrifice his or her life under the law. Several factors bore directly on their conclusions. On the one hand, the rabbis accorded fundamental value to human life, and they had no doubt that their God con curred. In the divine commandment of Leviticus 18:5, “You shall keep my laws and my rules, by which one shall live,” the rabbinic preacher emphasized “by which one shall live, not by which one shall die,” and reasoned that “the commandments were given only to Israel for the purpose of living by them,” not for leading Jews to their deaths.¹¹ On the other hand, believing the fulfillment of divine law the purpose of human life, the rabbis demanded that the Jew submit to death sooner than violate three of the most cardinal mitzvot, or commandments, of the Torah. T...