Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews (43 page)

Largely because of their economic function, Jews by the eleventh century usually lived near the marketplace, which was always near the church or, in bigger towns, the cathedral. In an era when Christendom began to define itself by opposition to those it excluded, to live in the shadow of the cathedral would soon enough be dangerous if you did not rejoice in what it symbolized. This would be true no matter what the bishop thought.

Cathedrals gave expression to the fact that the Christian insider had never been more consoled by feelings of belonging. And such was the tenor of the time that insider feelings could never be more intensely enjoyed than when attacking those who did not belong. As reports of the Iberian
reconquista
made their way north, a heightened xenophobia took hold, enforcing a new tolerance among Christians for each other. The princes, barons, and common people of Europe found that the urgent emotion of Latin Christianity's uniting new project against the infidel overrode the former spirit of internecine vendetta. Thus Pope Urban II's summons to war against the Saracen, when seen solely through the prism of Christendom, could be celebrated as an act of peacemaking. As such, it was related to the earlier mandating of Church-regulated tournaments as an alternative to the mayhem of battle. Because it was war undertaken in the name of Christ, an effect of this "peacemaking" was a heretofore unthinkable militarization of Christian religion. Knights formerly dubbed in the halls of castles were now dubbed at the altar. Soon enough, knights would be wearing tonsure, would be bound by the three vows, would be living as monks when not in combat. Bishops would be warriors at the heads of armies. In the Holy Land itself, one French bishop, side by side with the king, would lead an army into battle carrying what he and his followers believed to be Saint Helena's True Cross.
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But first, in this initiating Crusade of 1096, it would be the laity donning the mantle and claiming license to kill in the name of the Gospel. Armed convert makers, they would wear the "horizontal-vertical sign." Those outside the consensus, outside the cathedral, would learn to see the cross with horror. Those "taking the cross," however, and those "bearing" it were, ipso facto, marked for salvation.

25. The Incident in Trier

J
UDGING FROM THEIR
unambivalent response to Clermont, the various aristocracies—Flemings, French Normans, Normans from Sicily, Provençaux, and men of Lorraine
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—were ready to lay off each other. But in a culture and an economy defined by the martial ethos, it required a way of doing so without, in effect, laying off their retinues of knights. Each of these mounted warriors carried in his wake archers, foot soldiers, engineers who manned siege machines, servants, and the ragtag horde of deracinated peasants and their families. It was a mass of people—mounted and in armor, carrying lances; on foot, bearing clubs and knives. Almost all were crudely marked with the cross.

In the months after Urban lis autumn summons, the larger part of this force mustered in the northwest of Europe. Their route to Jerusalem took them first along the valleys of the River Maas, in present-day Netherlands, which becomes the River Meuse in France, then down the Moselle, which becomes the Mosel in Germany. This movement brought them to the great continental highways of the Rhine and the Danube. And as Nicaea stood at the forward edge of the crusaders' true field of conflict, as defined by Urban II, so our Trier stood at the edge of a first battlefield the pope had never intended, never foreseen, and never blessed.

"I have been told of the incident of Trier." This is a medieval Hebrew chronicler again, commenting on an event that the otherwise prolix Christian chroniclers of the Crusades never mention.

It came to pass on the fifteenth of the month of Nisan, on the first day of Passover, there arrived an emissary to the crusaders from France, an emissary of Jesus, named Peter. He was a priest and was called Peter the prelate. When he arrived there in Trier—he and the very many men with him—on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he brought with him a letter from France, from the Jews (indicating) that in all places 'where his foot would tread' and he would encounter Jews, they should give him provisions for the way. He would then speak well on behalf of Israel, for he was a priest and his words were heeded. When he came here, our spirit departed and our hearts were broken and trembling seized us and our holiday was transformed into mourning.
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The Jews of Trier paid Peter, as he asked, but the crusaders attacked them anyway. They broke into the Jews' "strong house" and "threw the Torah scrolls to the ground. They tore them and trampled them under foot." The Jews then "fled to the bishop," who at first offered to protect them. The bishop's palace stood on the spot where the bishop's residence stands today, abutting the cathedral in which the Seamless Robe of Jesus is kept. The palace was only several hundred yards from the narrow streets where the Jews would have been living. "The bishop sent and called to the important men of his city and his ministers. They stood before the gateway of his palace. In the gateway there was a door like the grate of a furnace. The enemy stood around the palace by the hundreds and thousands, grasping sharp swords. They stood ready to swallow them alive, body and flesh. Then the bishop's military officer and ministers entered the palace (where the Jews had taken refuge), and said to them: 'Thus said our lord the bishop: Convert or leave his palace.'"

In this drama unfolding over a considerable period of time, the bishop had done what he could. Finally his guard abandoned the palace. Crusaders forced two leaders of the Jews to bow before "an image," the cross. When instead the two Jews mocked the cross, they were killed. A Jewish girl "stretched her neck outside and said, 'Anyone who wishes to cut off my head for the fear of my Rock, let him come and do so.' The uncircumcised did not wish to touch her, because the young lady was comely and charming." Rather than convert, the girl escaped from the palace, ran to the Moselle, threw herself in, and drowned. "After these were killed," the chronicler concludes, "the enemy saw those remaining in the palace—that they were as firm in their faith as at the outset."
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The crusaders forced the baptisms of some, but Jewish resistance continued. In time, the "uncircumcised" evangelizers moved on. Even a history according to Jews would remember this particular contingent of crusaders under Peter the Prelate as benign, but only compared to what other brigades did in other cities. But as the chronicler understands, the incident in Trier was the beginning of an unprecedented turn in the story of Christians and Jews: Crusader attacks on Jews throughout the Rhineland that spring amounted to Europe's first large-scale pogroms. And Trier's knot in the narrative thickens: Constantine's fateful conformity campaign had begun here, as now did Europe's rehearsal for the extermination of Jews who would not conform.

The factors accounting for this sudden wave of anti-Jewish violence are often limited to the new forces of economics, such as the anti-Jewish bias of a nascent burgher class; to the pressures resulting from a century-long demographic explosion and related urbanization; or even to the social stresses of conformity, which made dissent of all kinds more offensive. But such factors fall short as explanations. Jews and Christians had lived more or less peacefully together for centuries. Augustine's "Do not slay them!" had been sanctioned by Pope Gregory the Great (Gregory I, 590–604) at the end of the sixth century. He had expressly forbidden any forced conversions of Jews, yet he had also sanctioned Augustine's ambivalence. The popes would forever be protectors of Jews, but they would also be steadfast denigrators of Jews. Gregory Is proclamation began with the words
Sicut Judaeis,
which thereafter named the genre of papal defenses of Jews. Its key passage read, "Just as the Jews must not to be allowed freedom in their synagogues more than is decreed by law, so neither ought what the law concedes them suffer any curtailment."
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To maintain this combination of protection and curtailment required a delicate balance, and in 1096, it was lost.

Was there something about medieval Judaism that elicited the brutal new hostility? On the contrary, Jewish life at the millennium was humane and thriving. In the Arabic world, with centers in Iberia and in Baghdad, Jewish communities had reached unprecedented levels of intellectual and religious achievement. I read this history as a Christian, but it seems fair to say that the Talmudic system had shaped a way of thinking by the very seriousness with which the commentary of rabbis was taken. That way of thinking, in turn, shaped Jewish communal life. The problems and crises of Jews were addressed and resolved through commentary and further commentary—an inbuilt commitment to text, reading, imagination, and community. All of this was organized around an admired collective whose authority was rooted in study and in the proven wisdom of its "responsa," its responses to questions. Though based on the Law of Moses, Judaism had emerged as a community ordered not by legislation or decree but by the influence of its interpreters, reflecting on a compilation of the commentary of ancestral masters. This is the culture of Talmud, a culture not of codification but of conversation, written and oral; a culture not of hierarchy but of mutuality.

The emphasis on practical application of theory prepared Jews to prosper, and, when unfettered, they did. Among Muslims, Jews occupied leading positions in science, art, commerce, and government. Yet the culture of Talmud turned out to be as transferable across the boundaries of time and place as the texts on which it was based. Rabbis could bring it with them wherever they went. Thus the vital premillennial centers of Jewish life in the Arab world spawned a religious and cultural renewal in Christian Europe, especially in settlements along the Rhine. "How wonderful is your place," the leaders of Spanish Jewry wrote to leaders of German Jewry in this era, "praiseworthy and honored, a superior assembly of scholars and teachers."
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In the Rhineland Jewish communities, the literate, scholarly class outnumbered the ignorant, the unlettered. By far the most influential center of Talmudic scholarship was Mainz. One of its leading figures in the eleventh century was Rabbi Simeon the Great, so called because of his Talmudic learning. Among Jews across Europe spread the legend that Rabbi Simeon's son was kidnapped by Christians, baptized, and raised to become a priest. Reflecting the true, if secret, genius of his lineage, he eventually became the pope. "When he finally learned of his origin," the scholar I. A. Agus recounts, "he sanctified the Name of the Lord and according to some accounts died a martyr's death."
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Despite rumblings of coming attacks against Rhineland Jews as usurers, their international connections were, in the eleventh century, highly valued as sources of exchange and trade. Prosperity, when it came to the center of Europe, underwrote an intra-Jewish cultural enrichment. An expressly Jewish practice of medical science was growing. Vernacular and Hebraic literatures were taught at Jewish schools and academies, like the one in Mainz, which ranked with the best in Europe. Because of the interchange among Jewish communities along the Iberian-central European-Persian axis, Jewish translation skills were unmatched, and eventually it would be Jewish translators who brought to Christendom the Arabic masters, and through them Aristotle. Christians, meanwhile, knew little or nothing about this Jewish high culture of the Middle Ages, both far away and near at hand—and that remains true today.

So the hated Jew of the crusader's imagination was unrelated to the actual Jews he came upon, which only emphasizes the fact that something besides the normal sway of social upheaval explains what began to happen. The source of Jewish-Christian violent conflict lay entirely on the Christian side of the hyphen—an obvious statement, but not one that can go without saying. The crusaders, suddenly obsessed with the "infidel," projected onto Jews a fantasy tied to an ancient memory that had little enough to do with the Jews of that bygone era, and nothing whatever to do with Jews as they existed in the crusaders' time. The age-old "Jewish problem," that is, was and remains a Christian problem, spawned by an ignorant Christian imagination. Its cause? The answer is so plain we can hardly see it as such, and it has been there all along. A miscarried cult of the cross is ubiquitous in this story, from Milvian Bridge to Auschwitz. The "war of the cross," which is another way of saying "crusade," is the definitive epiphany, laying bare the meaning of what went before and what came after, even to our own time.

Exactly because the cross was ubiquitous on the breasts of warriors, we take it for granted, but we should see its significance there with fresh eyes if we can. A religious misunderstanding, the one we have been tracking forward from the way that circle of grief-struck friends of Jesus were misunderstood by Christians who came after, is at the heart of Christian hatred of Jews. What the crusaders do, especially as unleashed not so much in the East—though in 1099, in the violent siege of Jerusalem, they drove all the Jews into one synagogue and burned them alive
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—but in the cities of the Rhineland in 1096, is to make the thing clear as rain, albeit a rain of blood.

To see more clearly how this new violence sprang from what might be called the sacred mistake of an overemphasis on the Passion and death of Jesus, and the inevitably related mistake of the "Jewish murder" of Jesus, let us return to the Hebrew chronicles' figure of Peter the Prelate. He is more commonly known to history as Peter the Hermit, leader of the so-called Peasants' Crusade. That is surely a misnomer, since his Crusade preaching was almost exclusively done in cities.
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He is the only preacher of the Crusade whose name we know, a figure of legend but also of history.
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"Tiny in stature," one chronicler calls him, "but great in heart and speech."
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