First Crusade Sets Out; Rhineland Jewish Communities Destroyed on the Way

The three great Jewish communities along the Rhine — Speyer, Worms, and Mainz — were the crown of Ashkenaz. Founded in Roman times and grown across the centuries, they were protected by royal charter and led by scholars whose rulings reached across Europe. Rabbeinu Gershom, called the Light of the Exile, had issued his famous decrees from Mainz. Rashi, still a young man in France, had studied at these yeshivot. Ashkenaz was healthy and thriving.

The preceding November, at a church council in the French town of Clermont, Pope Urban II had preached a war. The Muslim Turks held Jerusalem. The Holy Sepulchre had to be recovered. Any man who took the cross 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 to be killed, the unbelievers on their own doorstep should be killed first.

The mobs moved down the Rhine through the spring and early summer. Count Emicho of Leiningen led one of the largest. 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 taken shelter.

The worst was 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 language unlike anything written in Jewish history before. Fathers took up the slaughtering knife — the same kosher knife they used every week on animals — and killed their own children. Mothers killed their infants. They said it aloud: kiddush Hashem, sanctifying God's Name. They believed, with a clarity that would echo through every century of Ashkenaz, that dying with the Shema on their lips was better than a forced baptism that would sever their children 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 of more massacres arrived all summer from Cologne, Trier, Regensburg, Prague. Three years later, when the Crusaders finally reached Jerusalem, they would herd the Jews of the city into the great synagogue and burn it with them inside, chanting 'Christ We Adore Thee' as it burned.

The consequences ran 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 recited on the ninth of Av name these communities aloud. A new spiritual category — the mekaddesh ha-Shem, the one who sanctifies the Name through death — became central to the way European Jews understood themselves. It would shape their response to every persecution that followed, up to and including the last.