Research Description:

Glorifying the Name of God Through Death

In the spring of 1096, participants of the First Crusade traveled from Europe to Jerusalem to liberate the holy land from Muslims who were regarded as infidels. Peasants, excited about the idea of working for God, decided to purge the European land of infidels and attacked the Jewish communities. These men plundered the communities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz, in northern Europe, and the Jews of the Rhineland responded in a shocking and definitive manner: they slaughtered one another in order to sanctify the name of God – Kiddush ha-Shem. These communities were faced with the fatal question of being good Jews or converting to Christianity. The Jewish communities decided to endure the ultimate test of loyalty to their God and committed suicide and sacrificial murder. The concept of martyrdom was not new to the Jewish tradition, but the events that took place in the Rhineland during the 11th century marked a paradigm shift in the way the Jews of these communities perceived themselves and their purpose. The objective of my project is to trace the history of martyrdom in the Jewish tradition and to analyze it in the context of Jewish culture and society of the 11th and 12th centuries. Moreover, I intend to study in depth the Jewish-Christian interreligious relations and mutual perceptions of the time, which shaped the accounts of the events that occurred in the Rhineland. By doing this, I hope to combine the study of Jewish culture and society of the 11th and 12th centuries with a literary study of the crusade’s accounts in order to better understand the phenomenon of Kiddush ha-Shem and its impact and significance in the society of the time.