1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910787520103321

Autore

Cohen Jeremy <1953->

Titolo

Sanctifying the name of God [[electronic resource] ] : Jewish martyrs and Jewish memories of the First Crusade / / Jeremy Cohen

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia, : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2004

ISBN

0-8122-0163-9

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (225 p.)

Collana

Jewish culture and contexts

Disciplina

943/.004924

Soggetti

Jews - Germany - History - 1096-1147

Jews - Persecutions - Germany

Crusades - First, 1096-1099

Germany Ethnic relations

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [165]-199) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Preface -- Abbreviations for Primary Sources -- Introduction: The Persecutions of 1096 -- PART I: Problems and Solutions -- Chapter 1 To Sanctify the Name of God -- Chapter 2 The First Crusade and Its Historians -- Chapter 3 Points of Departure -- PART II: Martyrs of 1096 -- Chapter 4 Last Supper at Xanten -- Chapter 5 Master Isaac the Parnas -- Chapter 6 Mistress Rachel of Mainz -- Chapter 7 Kalonymos in Limbo -- Chapter 8 The Rape of Sarit -- Afterword -- Notes -- Bibliography of Secondary Sources -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

How are martyrs made, and how do the memories of martyrs express, nourish, and mold the ideals of the community? Sanctifying the Name of God wrestles with these questions against the background of the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland during the outbreak of the First Crusade. Marking the first extensive wave of anti-Jewish violence in medieval Christian Europe, these "Persecutions of 1096" exerted a profound influence on the course of European Jewish history. When the crusaders demanded that Jews choose between Christianity and death, many opted for baptism. Many others, however, chose to die as Jews rather than to live as Christians, and of these, many actually inflicted death upon themselves and their loved ones. Stories of their self-sacrifice ushered the Jewish ideal of martyrdom-kiddush ha-Shem, the



sanctification of God's holy name-into a new phase, conditioning the collective memory and mindset of Ashkenazic Jewry for centuries to come, during the Holocaust, and even today. The Jewish survivors of 1096 memorialized the victims as martyrs as they rebuilt their communities during the decades following the Crusade. Three twelfth-century Hebrew chronicles of the persecutions preserve their memories of martyrdom and self-sacrifice, tales fraught with symbolic meaning that constitute one of the earliest Jewish attempts at local, contemporary historiography. Reading and analyzing these stories through the prism of Jewish and Christian religious and literary traditions, Jeremy Cohen shows how these persecution chronicles reveal much more about the storytellers, the martyrologists, than about the martyrs themselves. While they extol the glorious heroism of the martyrs, they also air the doubts, guilt, and conflicts of those who, by submitting temporarily to the Christian crusaders, survived.