Kalonymus of Mainz Bars the Door — and the Fathers Take Up the Knife

The three great Jewish communities along the Rhine — Speyer, Worms, and Mainz — were the crown of Ashkenaz. They had been founded back in Roman times and grown over centuries. Their kings had given them charters of protection. Rabbeinu Gershom, called the 'Light of the Exile,' had issued his famous rulings from Mainz. Rashi, still a young man in France, had studied at these yeshivot. Ashkenaz was healthy and thriving.

The November before, at a church council in the French town of Clermont, Pope Urban II preached a war. The Muslim Turks held Jerusalem. The Holy Sepulchre had to be recovered. Any man who took the cross and marched east would have his sins forgiven. Tens of thousands answered — armored knights, ordinary peasants, and, most dangerously for the Jewish communities along the road, wild bands of freebooters who reasoned that if unbelievers in the East were going to be killed, the unbelievers on their own doorstep should be killed too.

The mobs moved down the Rhine in the spring and early summer. Count Emicho of Leiningen led one of the biggest. Peter the Hermit's ragged 'People's Crusade' fed into others. At Speyer, the bishop hid most of the Jewish community in his own palace and even executed a Crusader for murdering a Jew in the street; only eleven Jews died. At Worms, some eight hundred Jews were killed — first in their homes, then in the bishop's palace where they had hidden.

The worst was at Mainz. Rabbi Kalonymus, the head of the community, had led more than a thousand Jews into the archbishop's palace under a promise of safety. The archbishop took a bribe from Emicho and opened the gates. The mob poured in. A Jewish eyewitness named Solomon bar Shimshon wrote down what happened in words unlike anything written in Jewish history before. Fathers picked up the slaughtering knife — the same kosher knife they used every week for animals — and slaughtered their own children. Mothers slaughtered their babies. They said it out loud: kiddush Hashem, sanctifying God's Name. They believed, with a clarity that will echo through every century of Ashkenaz, that dying with the Shema on their lips was better than a forced baptism that would cut their children off from the covenant. Kalonymus tried to fight and was killed. The Chronicle names the dead by household — Rachel, who killed her four children before turning the knife on herself; Meshullam, who bound his son Yitzchak on a stone in imitation of the Akedah and offered him with a blessing.

The official Crusade set out on the fifteenth of August — the ninth of Av. Reports came back all summer of more massacres at Cologne, Trier, Regensburg, Prague. Three years from now, when the Crusaders finally reach Jerusalem, they will herd the Jews of the city into the great synagogue and burn it with them inside, singing 'Christ We Adore Thee' as it burns.

The consequences run for centuries. The prayer Av ha-Rachamim, said in Ashkenazi synagogues every Shabbat, was written for the martyrs of the Rhine. Dozens of the kinot said on the ninth of Av name them and their communities out loud. A new spiritual idea — the mekaddesh ha-Shem, the one who sanctifies the Name through death — becomes central to how European Jews understand themselves. It will shape how they respond to every persecution that follows, up to and including the last one.