God's War: A New History of the Crusades

to rebel against their lords, who generally appeared willing to protect local Jewish communities.³⁴ Even Bernard’s condemnation of Radulf’s anti-Semitic propaganda focused narrowly on its theologically misguided incitement to murder and its reprehensible display of ambition and arrogance.

Radulf’s demotic anti-Semitism was expressed in a simple argument. In summoning men to take the cross to fight the Muslims abroad, he drew the same parallel that had been drawn in 1096, as a Jewish eyewitness recalled: ‘Avenge the crucified one upon his enemies who stand before you; then go to war against the Muslims,’ or, as Otto of Freising put it: ‘the Jews whose homes were scattered throughout the [Rhineland] cities and towns should be slain as foes of the Christian religion’.³⁵ Such approaches were not the unique preserve of ‘barking’ demagogues (the phrase of one of Radulf’s victims, Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn). Overt anti-Semitism dominated the academy of western Christendom in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, often expressed by those unmoved by practical or communal resentment or fear. The monks, not the townspeople, of Norwich invented the Jewish blood libel of William of Norwich in 1144 to raise funds for their priory. Not all intellectuals could keep their dislike and prejudice separate from their academic detachment. Writing in 1146 or 1147 to Louis VII, Abbot Peter the Venerable of Cluny argued a point very close to Radulf’s; if it is a meritorious act to fight enemies of Christianity in distant lands why are Jews allowed to live undisturbed in the heart of Christendom? If Muslims were detestable, how much more were the Jews? In profiting from Christians, even the church, through usury, they polluted Christendom. Abbot Peter was careful to follow the theologically orthodox line that Jews should not be killed but, he insisted, they should be punished as enemies of Christ. While Christians were being taxed for the crusade, why not the Jews?³⁶ Peter’s letter mirrored the social and financial resentments, heightened by crusade preparations, on which Radulf played so effectively. Ephraim of Bonn identified the persecution of the Jews specifically with the preaching of the cross, which wrecked the normally peaceful relations between the communities of the Rhineland. Radulf, Peter the Venerable and Otto of Freising all noticed the association of Jews with other enemies of Christ. Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘a decent priest’ in Rabbi Ephraim’s grateful memory, while rejecting simple and violent analogies, lacked sympathy or more than legal tolerance, stating:

The Jews are not to be persecuted, killed or even put to flight… The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered. They are dispersed all over the world so that by expiating their crime they may be everywhere living witnesses of our redemption. Under Christian princes they endure a hard captivity… when the time is ripe all Israel shall be saved [i.e. converted]. But those who die before will remain in death. If Jews are utterly wiped out, what will become of our hope for their promised salvation, their eventual conversion?³⁷

Radulf’s robust populism represented the obverse of Bernard’s refined passion, his message a product of the mass appeal to avenge the injuries done to Christ’s heritage by the ‘enemies of the cross’ (a phrase used by Bernard and Eugenius). Although the focus of official censure, Radulf did not operate in isolation. Attacks on Jews may have begun in Mainz as early as April 1146. With the heaviest persecution in the Rhineland in the autumn of 1146, Jews in Wurzburg suffered from a possibly unrelated blood libel in February/March 1147 and a rabbi at Ramerupt in Champagne was beaten up, his house looted and the Torah scroll desecrated in the spring probably of 1147 by French crusaders perhaps on their way to join the king’s muster at Metz. Three other massacres were recorded by Ephraim of Bonn a quarter of a century later, although it is unclear whether they occurred in France or central Europe. In England, the new Jewish communities, planted since the Norman Conquest with royal approval, needed and received the king’s protection.³⁸ Bernard’s encyclical letter inter alia condemning Jewish persecution acknowledged a potentially widespread problem. Anti-Jewish motifs found extended circulation. The crusaders at Ramerupt were reported as having deliberately, almost ritualistically, inflicted five wounds on the head of Rabbi Jacob, jeering as they did so: ‘Thus we shall take vengeance on you for the crucified one and wound you the way you inflicted five wounds [i.e. the stigmata] on our god.’ A song composed in France in 1146 that closely echoed official crusade propaganda contained exactly the same image of the Jews, to whom God gave his body at the Passion and Crucifixion, wounding Him in five places.³⁹

The scale and course of the Rhineland assaults provoked by Radulf differed from the 1096 pogroms. The secular and ecclesiastical authorities provided more consistent and competent protection for the Jewish communities, encouraged, perhaps, by the proximity of King Conrad. The Jews themselves appeared cannier in their own defence. Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn was thirteen in the autumn of 1146, living in Cologne, when he, his family and neighbours with members of other local Jewish communities, took refuge in the archbishop of Cologne’s fortress of Wolkenburg.⁴⁰ The archbishop was well paid for his charity, as was his castellan. Similar precautions were followed across the Rhineland, as were Jewish payments to Christians of protection money. Radulf progressed from Strassburg to Cologne, whipping up enthusiasm for the crusade and violence against the Jews in equal measure. By the time Bernard caught up with him at Mainz in November 1146, Radulf had established himself as a local celebrity, Bernard attracting local hostility when successfully browbeating him to return to the cloister (presumably by the threat of something much worse, probably temporal punishment by the king under whose protection the Jews lay). Unlike 1096, the impetus to attack the Jews came not from the local nobility, who seemed to have provided shelter, but from crucesignati and ‘the poorer segment of the population who derive joy from things of no consequence’.⁴¹ Church, town and village authorities attempted to maintain order, at a price, and even justice: one Christian murderer of Jews near Cologne was punished by having his eyes gouged out, dying soon after. The archbishop of Mainz complained directly to Bernard of Clairvaux about Radulf, perhaps suggesting the abbot’s responsibility.⁴² But in common with 1096, economic jealousy and financial anxiety fuelled the ferocity of the attacks at a time when converting capital into cash had become a major concern for crusaders, especially as Eugenius III’s bull that excluded legitimate Jewish banking, by also prohibiting interest repayment by crucesignati, discouraged loans by bankers of any faith without lucrative material collateral.

If the violence appeared more random than in 1096 and the perpetrators less well connected, the horrors were real enough. Some reported large numbers of Jews seeking the king’s protection as far away as Nuremberg to avoid the Christian fury.⁴³ Rumours circulated of massacres of hundreds of Jews; opportunist killings of men, women and children proliferated. Rabbis, synagogues, religious ceremonies and Torah scrolls became targets. Forced baptisms led to suicides as well as murder. In late summer 1146, Simon of Trier, returning from a trip to England, was caught by a mob at Cologne; on his refusal to abjure his faith, his head was severed from his body by being squeezed in a winepress. For a fee, the civic authorities returned the body and the remains of the head for Jewish burial.⁴⁴ Others drowned rather than receive baptism in the local rivers; those who submitted returned to their faith once the Christian militants had passed. After Radulf’s removal, sporadic outbursts of violence continued until preaching ceased, when communal relations were restored. In contrast with England where the Jewish communities were of relatively recent origin and, on this occasion, peace reigned, areas with long-established Jewish communities had proved most susceptible to prejudice and persecution. The Rhineland had become a centre of Jewish settlement and business but also inter-faith dialogue and dispute. One of the most famous medieval Jewish converts to Christianity, Hermann ‘quondam Judaeus’, i.e. the former Jew, had been born c.1107 Judas Levi of Cologne, where, in 1172, he rose to be a canon in the church of Sta Maria ad Gradus. Judging from his autobiography, as with many zealous converts Hermann may not have been sympathetic to his former co-religionists and relatives in their sufferings in 1146. Yet his career demonstrated contact, communication and occasional respect, Hermann arguing that conversion of the Jews would, like his own, happen through love not force or dialectic.⁴⁵ Few, anywhere in Christendom, were listening.

One of those most affected by the Rhineland disturbances was King Conrad III. Jews and their property were royal charges and undisciplined recruitment and violence threatened his own plans for the crusade, the main purpose of Bernard’s mission to imperial lands. The formal story of Conrad’s reluctance to commit himself when he first met Bernard at Frankfurt in November 1146, his continued reluctance at the Christmas assembly at Speyer overcome by an electrifying sermon by the abbot, conceals a carefully orchestrated process begun many months earlier which culminated in Conrad taking the cross on 27 December. It is unlikely that Radulf’s tour, beginning in northern France but soon directed at the Rhineland, was accidental or, as some have suggested, determined by the need to run away from the pursuing Bernard, nor that Bernard’s own evangelism had no prospect of substantial dividends. His itinerary suggests a long-planned meeting with Conrad at Frankfurt in November, his subsequent journey south to Constance received royal encouragement and his attendance at Speyer was anticipated. If startling in its success, Bernard’s preaching tour was no surprise, hardly coming, as one local monk piously maintained, out of the blue, ‘as if from Heaven’.⁴⁶ It is barely conceivable that Conrad’s army of many tens of