7.14. G. The Fiery Furnace in Germany
Chapter 3 A Summary of Jewish History G. The Fiery Furnace in Germany When the Jews first settled in Germany is as little known as when they first came to France or England. Their first settlement in this part of Europe was probably Worms. One Jewish legend asserts that the Jews in the Rhine countries had lived there from the time of the Judges; and another legend in proof of the antiquity of the Jewish settlements in Germany avers that they were there already in the time of Ezra, who is alleged to have sent letters to them, admonishing them to come up to Jerusalem for the great feasts, but that they replied that in Worms on the Rhine they had found a new Jerusalem, and desired to know nothing of the old. But these are only legends invented in the Middle Ages in the hope of clearing themselves from the charge of having had any share in the crucifixion of Christ, and of escaping the frightful persecution that so often threatened them, on the charge that their fathers had been the “murderers of God.” It is only in the fourth century after Christ that any evidence exists of Jews dwelling in Cologne. When Charlemagne (797) sent an embassy to Harun al Raschid, the Jew Judah Isaac accompanied as interpreter. After the embassy had perished on the journey, the reply of the Sultan, with his presents, was brought back by Isaac alone. In a solemn audience at Aix-la-Chapelle he gave them over to the Emperor. The martyrology of the Jews in Germany begins with the first Crusade. The first two hordes (for they can scarcely be called armies), led by Peter the Hermit and the monk Gotschalk, left the Jews alone; but behind these followed an immense rabble, made up of different nationalities, some two hundred thousand strong, including a host of bad women and girls, preceded by a goose and a goat. “In this vile horde no pretence was kept up of order or of decency. Sinning freely, it would seem, that grace might abound, they plundered and harried the lands through which they marched; while three thousand horsemen, headed by some counts and gentlemen, were not too dignified to act as their attendants and to share their spoil.”1 1 The Crusades, by Rev. Sir G. W. Cox, Bart., M.A, p. 39.
Words cannot describe the sufferings and agonies inflicted on the Jewish people by this lawless host as it swept across Europe. The course of blood was worst in Germany. A monk inflamed the fury of the rabble by showing them an inscription supposed to be found on the tomb of our Lord, to the effect that it was the duty of the faithful to compel the Jews first to embrace Christianity. Death or baptism! La mort ou le baptême! they cried with the sword held to the breast of their victims. As they approached Trier such terror fell on the Jews that some of them killed their own children; matrons and maidens threw themselves into the Moselle, to perish in its waters, rather than live to meet the fate preparing for them. Mothers took their infants, and, loading themselves with stones, sprang with them from the bridge to certain death. Bishop Egilbert, appealed to by the Jewish community for protection, gave them the same alternative—baptism or death. At Spires the fanatics arrived on the Sabbath Day; they caught ten Jews and dragged them to the church to force them to be baptized, but they resisted, and all fell martyrs. Bishop John received and protected the Jewish community in his palace, for which kindness he is blamed in the Chronicles of Berthold von Constance. At Worms the Bishop sheltered as many families as he was able; the rest made such defence as they could, but were overmastered and slain, women killing themselves and their children for dread of what would come upon them. Later the Bishop explained himself powerless to protect those who were yet in his palace unless they submitted to baptism. A short space was permitted them to decide. When the doors were at last forced open, a ghastly sight appeared, all the Jews lay dead in their own blood. The mob in revenge sought for any of their victims that might yet be in the city, and put them to cruel deaths. The Jewish community in Worms to this day observes a yearly fast in remembrance of the “saints”—some eight hundred—who perished in this massacre. The history of the same time in Mainz and Cologne, Mörs, and the cities of the Rhine, is a story of blood and horror which passes imagination or description. The despair which seized the Jews was such that in Cologne Samuel ben Jechiel, an aged Jew, took his young son, and after pronouncing a blessing over him, gave him his death blow, the boy acquiescing with his dying breath with an “Amen” to the deed. The old man then handed the knife to another Jew to be slain himself, the bystanders repeating aloud the Jewish confession of faith: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one God,” as was their custom in all times of massacre. After so doing they also perished, throwing themselves into the river. In another place the Jews chose five of their number to kill all the rest, and lastly themselves; the last man ended his life by precipitating himself from a high tower. What must not have been the terrors which faced the unhappy people throughout an entire continent at the hands of the Christians of their day, when they took such means to escape their fury!
Similar scenes were enacted in the second crusade, just fifty years later (1146). Pope Eugenius III. issued a Bull proclaiming that all who joined in the Holy War would be released from the interest which they owed to the Jews; while Peter, the Venerable Abbot of Clugny, exerted his influence to inflame Louis VII. of France, and other noble crusaders, against them. But “the appetite for blood among the hordes of the second crusade was whetted by the wolfish howlings of the monk Rudolph”1 who travelled about everywhere preaching with tears in his eyes that all Jews should be slain as “murderers of our dear Lord.” the worst fate again befell the Jews in Germany. “Even the partial protection which the citizens of the Rhineland had afforded the persecuted people in the First Crusade was now withdrawn, and the undisciplined mob gave the reins to the gratification of its religious zeal and of its lust.”2 It was then that Bernard of Clairvaux lifted up his voice on behalf of the Jews in his two famous epistles, one addressed to the Archbishop of Mayence and the other to the clergy and people of France and Bavaria. “The Jews,” he says in the first, “ought not to be persecuted; they ought not to be slain; they ought not to be driven into banishment. consult Holy Scripture. . . . These men are living monuments to remind us of the passion of Christ. For this cause they are dispersed in all countries, that while they suffer the just punishment of their heinous sins, they may be witnesses of our redemption . . . yet in the eveningtide of the world they will be converted, and He will remember them.”3 It was then also that the German Emperor took them under his protection; “but this favour was to cost the recipients dearly. Henceforth the German Jews were regarded as the Emperor’s protégés, which gradually came to mean the Emperor’s serfs. All they possessed, including their families and their own persons, were the Emperor’s chattels, to be bought, sold, or pledged by him at pleasure. They were designated ‘chamber-servants’ (Servi Camerœ, or Kammerknechte); servitude, however, that had the advantage of making it the Emperor’s interest to safeguard them against oppression, and to suffer no one to fleece them but himself.” But even the power of the Emperor could not always shield them. Thus, to single out only a few out of numberless Jewish tragedies; in 1298 some hundred Jewish communities in Germany and Austria were destroyed by an infuriated Christian rabble, under the leadership of a fanatical noble named Rindfleisch, on the pretext that the Jews had stolen and desecrated the Host. “It had actually been seen that as they were pounding the wafer in a mortar, blood spurted up from it”! Once again we read of many Jewish mothers throwing their children into the flames and then destroying themselves rather than fall into the hands of the demon-possessed mobs.
1 The Crusades, by Rev. Sir G. W. Cox, Bart., M.A., p. 88.
2 Abbot, Israel in Europe.
3 The letters are given in full in Israel and the Gentiles, by Da Costa. In 1336-39, in the reign of the Emperor Louis of Bavaria, a similar scourge fell upon the Jews. A horde of peasants calling themselves “Jew-slayers,” under the leadership of two nobles, swept though Alsace and Rhinelands, plundering and murdering; one of the leaders (Armleder) declaring that he was commissioned by God to avenge “Christ’s blood and wounds” on the Jewish people. But the sufferings of the Jews in Germany, “a chapter ages long,” culminated at the time of the Black Death, 1348-50. “This scourge, which carried off a quarter of the population of Europe, afflicted the Jews but lightly on account of their isolation and their simple and wholesome way of life. This comparative exemption from the pest was enough to make them suspected. ‘The Jews poison the wells and the springs,’ it was said. The Rabbis of Toledo were believed to have formed a plot to destroy all Christendom. The composition of the poison, the colour of the packages in which it was transported, the emissaries who conveyed them, were all declared to have been discovered. Confirmations of these reports, extracted by torture from certain poor creatures, were forthcoming, and the people flew upon the Jews until entire communities were destroyed.
“The ‘Flagellants,’ fanatical sectaries, half naked and scourging themselves, swarmed through Germany preaching extermination to all unbelievers. Basle expelled its Jews, Freiburg burned them, Spires drowned them. The entire community at Strasbourg—two thousand souls—was dragged upon an immense scaffold, which was set on fire. At Worms, Frankfort, and Mainz, the Israelites anticipated their fate, setting their homes on fire and throwing themselves into the flames.”1 1 Hosmer, The Jews.