The Crusades saw an outbreak of anti-Jewish pogroms in western Europe with mobs massacring Jews as a prelude to fighting Muslims in the Middle East. In the mind of Christian zealots, Jewish communities were viewed as an enemy within. This was used to justify the most horrific acts.
The First Crusade unleashes bigotry
Jewish communities on the Rhine and Danube were targeted by Crusaders during the First Crusade, resulting in the Rhineland massacres. In 1095, Pope Urban had called for a crusade during a sermon at Clermont in France. His blood curdling speech electrified Christian Europe, sending thousands to fight in the Middle East against the Muslim caliphate. But it also unleashed something else.
The following year saw the so-called Rhineland Massacres – the mass murder of Jews in the German cities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz. Anti-semitism wasn’t new but it became more vehement. The papal rhetoric about fighting non-believers was directed at Muslims in the east. But fanatical thugs decided it applied equally to ‘non-believers’ closer to home: the Jews. After all – the murderous logic went – had they not killed Christ? The killers were not professional crusaders but a rabble, drunk on bigotry – and anything they could lay their hands on.
The Second Crusade (1147) saw Jews in France suffer particularly severe persecution. With the first setbacks in the Middle East, Christian supporters of the crusade were keen to take their anger out on somebody. They characterised the Jews as traitors in their midst, working for the enemy Saracens. The Second Crusade is considered a turning point in the relationship between Jews and Christians, marking a period of increased resentment and discrimination that would continue for centuries.
Pope Gregory IX – protection and persecution
In the 1230s, the Crusades of the Barons saw thousands of Jews killed in France. The pope who called this crusade, Gregory IX, was the architect of the new papal inquisition, regularising the prosecution of heresy. Vatican apologists like to characterise this as a benevolent act that replaced random lynchings of heretics with formal court proceedings. They also claim that Gregory had a benign disposition towards Jews, forbidding violence towards them.
But the picture is a little more murky than that. Gregory combined a degree of protection towards the Jews with a great deal of persecution. He ordered the seizure and burning of Jewish texts deemed to be objectionable. In 1239, influenced by Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity, Gregory ordered the seizure and examination of all Jewish books, including the Talmud, by the archbishops of France, England, Spain, and Portugal.
This action reversed the previous Christian position that the Jews were witnesses to Christian truth. Now, they were to be increasingly classified as heretics. Their law was to be regarded as something entirely alien to Catholic teaching. In his 1234 Decretals, Gregory invested the doctrine of perpetua servitus iudaeorum (perpetual servitude of the Jews) with the force of canonical law, establishing a second-class status for Jews that lasted until well into the 19th century. He also cancelled the debts of crusaders who agreed to fight the Cathar heretics in southern France.
The Shepherds’ Crusades of 1251 and 1320
Two often overlooked episodes during this period were the so-called Shepherds’ Crusades – or Pastoureaux in French. These events recalled the popular uprising that kicked off the First Crusade. The 1251 Sheperds’ Crusade involved peasants and labourers who sincerely wanted to rescue King Louis IX from his faltering crusade in the Holy Land. As criminal elements jumped on board, it simply turned into a pillaging of churches and towns in northern France, suppressed by the authorities.
In 1320, a similar movement exploded to the surface in Normandy after a teenage shepherd claimed to have been visited by the Holy Spirit. This time, the furious mass wanted to help the Christians fighting in the Iberian Peninsula against the Muslim rulers in the south. Again, this rapidly evolved into an attack on the property of the rich. But it also directed its fire against the Jews. Those who refused baptism were killed without mercy. The French king held this movement in contempt, hunted down its leaders, and executed them.
Evidence of anti-Jewish pogroms in England
A grim reminder of the pogroms that accompanied the crusades in the 12th and 13th centuries in Europe has been the gruesome discovery in England of seventeen skeletons in a medieval well. The skeletons, jumbled together, were subjected to DNA testing and according to a BBC report – at least five were members of the same family.
One of the medical team had experience of autopsies in the Balkans in recent years where ethnic cleansing was all too common. It was noted that the bodies in this well showed no signs of disease and the adults had sustained impact injuries after being thrown in. The children’s skeletons did not have fractures suggesting they had landed on top of the adults. It’s a terrible thought that they more than likely were sealed up and left to die of hunger. The date of this massacre is believed to have been the early 1200s – under Richard the Lionheart or King John.
DISCOVER: How was medieval Easter celebrated?
The myth of Blood Libel used against the Jews
That well was discovered in the English town of Norwich, which was witness to one of the worst examples in the Middle Ages of so-called ‘blood libel’. This was an absurd rumour that Jewish people used the blood of sacrificed Christian children in their ritual food – especially at the Passover.
In 1144, the Jewish community in Norwich was accused of the murder of a boy called William whose body had been found in Thorpe Wood and subjected – allegedly – to a mock crucifixion. It’s not hard to imagine in any period of history how emotive this would have been. But now imagine the reaction among a Christian medieval audience during the crusades. This was incendiary stuff.
They were said to have got hold of William in the run up to Easter “and tortured him with all the tortures wherewith our Lord was tortured, and on Long Friday hanged him on a rood in hatred of our Lord”. In other words, the Jews of Norwich had repeated the sin of their ancestors. Last time it was Christ, murdered at the Jewish passover. And now, it was an innocent child. Whoever was behind this dark propaganda knew exactly which buttons to push. The mob was enraged.
Norwich was the first recorded blood libel against the Jews and sparked a gruesome trend during the Crusades. It was soon followed by similar blood libel cases in Gloucester (1168), Blois, France (1171), Zaragoza, Castile (1182), Bristol, England (1183), Fulda (1235), Lincoln, England (1255), and Munich (1286).
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