Crusades and Defamations

Abstract

During the Crusades, traditional Catholic hostility toward Jews became radicalized, with the Jews coming more and more to represent an alien enemy residing in the heart of Christendom.¹ A despised minority of Christendom’s “greatest sinners”, scattered and unarmed, barely protected by the era’s most powerful authorities, the Jews easily fell prey to Catholic Crusaders. The Jewish communities hardest hit by Crusader attacks—Worms, Mainz, and Cologne—were the greatest western European centers of Jewish intellectual and cultural vitality.² Some Crusaders put it bluntly, “either the Jews must convert to our belief, or they will be totally exterminated—they and their children down to the last baby at the breast.”³ But if the Crusaders had wanted simply to convert Jews, surely Jewish children would have been saved and raised as Catholics. This was seldom done.⁴ The Jews’ reputation as stubborn, stiffnecked reprobates led many Crusaders to believe that the Jews could easily ward off the oceans of baptismal water required for a real conversion. With authentic conversion a lost cause, all the Jewish enemies of Christ might as well be killed. Crusader assaults were territorially widespread,⁵ religiously motivated,⁶ savage, murderous, and characterized by communal Jewish martyrdom and an ambivalent attitude on the part of secular and religious authorities.⁷

Either the Jews must convert to our belief, or they will be totally exterminated— they and their children down to the last baby at the breast.

The Chronicler of Mainz, quoting Crusaders