The Rhineland Massacres of 1096

I. The Communities of the Rhine before the Crusade

By the last quarter of the eleventh century the Jewish communities of the Rhineland had become among the most settled and learned in Latin Christendom. Their origins lay partly in the Roman period, when Jews are recorded at Cologne in an imperial decree of 321, and partly in the commercial expansion of the Carolingian and Ottonian centuries, when families moved northward from Italy and southern France along the trade routes of the Rhône and the Rhine. The best known of these families, the Kalonymides, were remembered in later tradition as having come from Lucca to Mainz, bringing with them the learning of the Italian academies. By 1000 the towns of Mainz, Worms and Speyer, known in Hebrew by the acronym Shum from the initial letters of their names, formed a cluster of communities with recognised scholars, synagogues, cemeteries and a body of local ordinances.

The scholarly reputation of these towns rested above all on Rabbenu Gershom of Mainz, who died around 1028 and whose decrees on monogamy, divorce and the privacy of letters were accepted across northern Europe. Students came to Mainz and Worms from France, and among them was the young Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes, known as Rashi, whose commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures and the Talmud became the standard companions of Jewish study. The site's pages on Bible scholarship in Mainz and Bible scholarship in Worms describe this tradition of learning in more detail. For the present study it is sufficient to note that the communities attacked in 1096 were not marginal settlements but centres of textual scholarship whose copying of Torah scrolls, prayer books and commentaries shaped the Ashkenazi tradition for centuries.

The legal position of these communities depended on charters granted by bishops and emperors. In 1084 Bishop Rüdiger Huzmann of Speyer invited Jews to settle in his town, giving them a walled quarter, the right to trade freely, the right to judge their own disputes under their own leader, and land for a cemetery. He explained in the charter that he wished to increase the honour of the town a thousandfold by bringing Jews into it. In 1090 Emperor Henry IV confirmed and extended these privileges for the Jews of Speyer and Worms, forbidding forced baptism, protecting their property and placing them under imperial protection. These charters show that the bishops and the emperor regarded the Jews as useful and lawful residents, and they also show why the bishops were the first authorities to whom the Jews turned in the spring of 1096.

The communities were organised around the synagogue and the communal leadership, which collected taxes, arranged relations with the bishop and the town, and maintained the institutions of study. Their members were mainly merchants, moneylenders, physicians and craftsmen, and their houses lay close to the cathedral and the market. The synagogue at Worms, first built in 1034 and rebuilt in the twelfth century, and the cemetery at Worms, whose oldest stones date from the eleventh century, survive as physical reminders of the period. The Jewish population of each town numbered in the hundreds rather than the thousands, which is important for understanding the scale of the events. A loss of several hundred people could destroy most of a community.

II. The Preaching of the Crusade and the Popular Armies

On 27 November 1095 Pope Urban II addressed a council at Clermont in Auvergne and called on the knights of the West to go to the aid of the Christians of the East and to free Jerusalem. The surviving accounts of the speech, all written some years later, describe the expedition as an armed pilgrimage which would earn the remission of penance. Those who took the vow sewed a cloth cross on their garments. The appeal spread rapidly through preaching, and in the spring of 1096 several groups set out before the main princely armies, which were not to leave until August.

The most famous of the early leaders was Peter the Hermit, a preacher from the region of Amiens who gathered a large following in northern France and then moved through Lorraine and the Rhineland to Cologne, where he arrived in April 1096. His followers are often called the People's Crusade, although they included knights as well as peasants and townspeople. Other bands formed around the priest Folkmar, who led a group through Saxony and Bohemia, around the priest Gottschalk, and around Count Emicho of Flonheim, a lord from the Nahe valley whose army included knights from the Rhineland, Swabia, France and England.

Several ideas circulated among these armies which bore directly on the Jews. Some crusaders asked why they should travel a great distance to fight the enemies of Christ in the East when there were people near at hand whom they regarded as responsible for the crucifixion. The Hebrew chronicles report this argument in nearly the same words in several places, and Christian writers such as Guibert of Nogent record a similar statement made at Rouen. There were also rumours that Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine, had vowed to avenge the death of Christ on the Jews before he left, and the Hebrew sources say that the Jews of Mainz paid him money to secure his goodwill. In addition, the crusaders required money and supplies, and the Jewish communities were known to possess both.

It is important to distinguish these popular currents from the policy of the Church. The papacy had for centuries followed the principle expressed by Gregory the Great around 598, that Jews were not to be compelled to accept baptism and were to be allowed to live by their own law within the limits set by Christian rulers. Urban II made no call to attack Jews, and the bishops of the Rhineland, as will be seen, attempted to protect them. The violence of 1096 arose from the interaction of crusading enthusiasm, local resentment, the search for plunder, and the inability or unwillingness of local authorities to resist large armed bands.

III. The Events at Speyer

The first attack took place at Speyer on Saturday 3 May 1096. According to the Hebrew chronicles, crusaders and townspeople planned to seize the Jews in the synagogue during the Sabbath service. Warned of the danger, the community prayed early and left the synagogue before the attackers arrived. Eleven Jews were nevertheless caught outside and killed, and one woman took her own life rather than accept baptism.

Bishop John of Speyer acted quickly. He took the remaining Jews into his own fortified residence and into strongholds in the surrounding countryside, and he punished some of the townspeople who had taken part in the killing by having their hands cut off. The chronicler Solomon bar Samson records that the bishop was assisted by the Jews' payments, but the effect of his action was that the community of Speyer survived the spring of 1096 with relatively small losses. Its members remained under episcopal protection until the crusading bands had moved on.

The Speyer episode illustrates a pattern that recurred in the following weeks. A local authority with a fortified building and loyal armed retainers could save the Jews, provided that he was willing to use force against fellow Christians and that the attackers were not too numerous. Where either of those conditions failed, the consequences were much more severe. The difference between Speyer and the towns that followed lay less in the attitudes of the bishops than in the strength of the forces arrayed against them.

IV. The Events at Worms

At Worms the attack came in two stages. On 18 May 1096 a rumour spread that the Jews had boiled a Christian corpse and poured the water into the town wells to poison them. The rumour inflamed the townspeople, who joined with crusaders from Emicho's army in attacking the Jewish quarter. Some of the Jews had taken refuge with Bishop Adalbert, but those who had remained in their homes, trusting to the protection of Christian neighbours who had promised to look after them, were killed or forcibly baptised. Houses were plundered and Torah scrolls were torn and trampled.

The Jews who had taken refuge in the bishop's palace were attacked eight days later, on 25 May, the new moon of the month of Sivan. The bishop is reported to have proposed baptism as a means of saving their lives, and to have asked for time to consider. When the attackers broke into the palace, many of the Jews killed themselves and their families rather than submit. The Hebrew chronicles give a figure of about eight hundred dead at Worms. One of the most often cited figures in the chronicles is Simhah ha-Cohen, who is said to have accepted baptism in pretence and then stabbed the bishop's nephew before being killed.

The memorial books of Worms preserved the names of many of those who died, and the community was later re-established. The surviving synagogue and the cemetery known as the Heiliger Sand, which contains stones from the eleventh century onwards, testify to a continuity of Jewish life in the town after the catastrophe. The scholarly work associated with Worms in later generations, including the school of Eleazar of Worms in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, drew on the memory of 1096 in its devotional and penitential writing.

V. The Events at Mainz

The largest single loss occurred at Mainz, the oldest and most important community of the region. Emicho's army arrived outside the city on 25 May 1096, the same day as the second attack at Worms. The Jews had sent money to Archbishop Ruthard and to the burgrave, and they were taken into the archbishop's palace, which stood in the cathedral precinct. The Hebrew chronicles say that more than a thousand people gathered there. The archbishop promised to protect them, and his armed men stood at the gates.

On 27 May the townspeople opened the city gates to Emicho's army. The archbishop's troops did not hold the palace, and the archbishop himself withdrew, later being accused by the emperor of having profited from the property of the Jews. The attackers entered the courtyard, and the defenders, led by Kalonymus ben Meshullam, the head of the community, attempted to resist. When resistance failed, a large number of men and women killed their children and themselves in the act that the chronicles describe as the sanctification of the divine name, kiddush ha-Shem. The chronicles give the number of the dead at Mainz as about eleven hundred.

Kalonymus and a group of about fifty-three people escaped through a tunnel and reached the cathedral, and from there they were taken across the Rhine to Rüdesheim, where the archbishop had a residence. The archbishop is said to have urged them to accept baptism. According to the chronicles Kalonymus attempted to attack him, and the group was then killed by the local population. The chronicles name many of the dead and describe several acts of self-sacrifice in detail, among them that of Rachel of Mainz, who killed her four children before being killed herself.

Among the Christian sources the chronicle of Albert of Aachen, written in the early twelfth century, describes the Mainz attack and states that Emicho's men killed the Jews, women and children included, and that some Jews killed themselves. Albert regarded the subsequent destruction of Emicho's army in Hungary as a divine judgement on its conduct. His account is significant because it shows that some Christian writers condemned the attacks, even while describing the Jews in terms typical of the period.

VI. Cologne, the Moselle and the Danube

After Mainz the violence moved northward to Cologne. When the crusaders arrived at the end of May, Archbishop Hermann III dispersed the Jews among seven villages belonging to the archdiocese, among them Neuss, Wevelinghoven, Altenahr, Xanten and Moers. During June crusading bands sought them out village by village. At Xanten many killed themselves on the eve of the Sabbath; at Moers the local lord at first protected the Jews and then handed them over. The Hebrew chronicles describe the scattering and the destruction of these refugee groups as a prolonged ordeal lasting most of June 1096.

Elsewhere bands of crusaders and townspeople attacked communities at Trier, where some Jews were protected by Archbishop Egilbert in his palace and then forcibly baptised, at Metz, where twenty-two were killed, and at Regensburg, where the entire community was driven into the Danube and baptised by force. In Bohemia the followers of Folkmar attacked the Jews of Prague. Not every community was attacked, and some, such as that of Speyer, came through with limited losses, but the cumulative effect over three months was the destruction or forced conversion of several thousand people.

The bands responsible for these attacks did not reach the Holy Land. Emicho's army was refused passage through Hungary by King Coloman and was defeated at Moson in the summer of 1096. Peter the Hermit's followers crossed into Asia Minor and were destroyed by the Seljuk Turks near Nicaea in October. The princely armies that eventually captured Jerusalem in July 1099 had no part in the Rhineland attacks.

VII. The Hebrew Chronicles

The principal sources for the events are three Hebrew prose narratives. The longest is attributed to Solomon bar Samson and was written around 1140, although parts of it rest on earlier material. A second, shorter account was composed by Eliezer bar Nathan of Mainz, a leading scholar of the mid-twelfth century. The third, often called the Mainz Anonymous, is the shortest and possibly the earliest. All three survive in late manuscripts, and their relation to one another has been studied closely by Robert Chazan, Eva Haverkamp and others. Haverkamp's critical edition, published by the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in 2005, placed the study of the texts on a modern footing.

The chronicles are works of commemoration as well as narration. They are written in a Hebrew rich in scriptural quotation, and they present the victims as successors of Abraham at the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22:1-19, of Hannah and her seven sons in the Maccabean literature, and of the martyrs of the Roman persecutions. Mothers who killed their children are compared to Abraham, who was prepared to offer his son, and the deaths are described as offerings on the altar. The chronicles also contain prayers for vengeance drawn from the Psalms, among them Psalm 79:10, "Why should the nations say: Where is their God?" and its continuation, which became central to the later liturgy.

Historians have debated how far the chronicles describe what happened and how far they interpret it. Ivan Marcus and Jeremy Cohen argued that the narratives are carefully shaped literary works which reflect the concerns of the generation that wrote them, including the presence of Jews who had accepted baptism in 1096 and later returned to Judaism. Others have emphasised their value as historical records, noting that many details agree with Christian sources and with the memorial books. Both views recognise that the chronicles are the closest surviving witness to the experience of the communities.

VIII. Liturgical and Communal Memory

The events of 1096 entered the liturgy of Ashkenazi Jews in several forms. The most widely known is the prayer Av ha-Rahamim, "Father of mercy", recited on Sabbaths before the return of the Torah scroll to the ark, which asks God to remember the holy communities who gave their lives for the sanctification of his name and to avenge their blood. The prayer quotes Deuteronomy 32:43, Joel 3:21 (4:21 in the Hebrew numbering) and Psalm 79:10, and it reflects the scriptural language of the chronicles.

Poems of lament, kinot, and penitential poems, selihot, were composed in memory of the communities and incorporated into the services of the Ninth of Av and the fast days. Among the best known is the lament of Kalonymus ben Judah of Mainz, "I said, look away from me", which mourns the scholars of Speyer, Worms and Mainz. The communities also kept memorial books, the Memorbücher, in which the names of the dead were written and read aloud on certain Sabbaths. The Nuremberg Memorbuch, begun in 1296, contains lists that go back to 1096.

The memory of 1096 was renewed when later crusades were preached. During the preaching of the Second Crusade in 1146 and 1147 a Cistercian monk named Radulf urged attacks on Jews in the Rhineland, and Bernard of Clairvaux travelled to Germany to oppose him, arguing that the Jews were not to be persecuted or killed. Ephraim of Bonn, who as a boy took refuge in the castle of Wolkenburg during those events, wrote a chronicle in which he praised Bernard's intervention. The Rhineland massacres thus formed the background to later Christian discussion of the proper treatment of Jews as well as to Jewish commemoration.

IX. Scripture in the Christian Debate

The reasoning of the attackers drew on a reading of passages in the Greek Scriptures and the Hebrew Scriptures that placed responsibility for the death of Jesus on the Jewish people as a whole. The words of the crowd in Matthew 27:25, "His blood be upon us and upon our children", had been interpreted by many Latin writers as a collective and hereditary curse. Crusade preaching that described the expedition as vengeance for the injury done to Christ could readily be turned against Jews living in Christian towns.

The opposing position was rooted in a different reading. Augustine of Hippo had argued in the early fifth century, on the basis of Psalm 59:11, "Do not kill them, so that my people may not forget", that the Jews were to be preserved as witnesses to the antiquity of the Scriptures and to the truth of the prophecies. The papal letters known by the opening words Sicut Judaeis, first issued by Calixtus II around 1120, repeated that Jews were not to be baptised by force, killed, wounded or robbed, and that their cemeteries and festivals were to be respected. These letters were issued partly in response to the events of 1096.

Writers of the period also cited passages from the letters of Paul, especially Romans 11:25-29, which speaks of the hardening of Israel until the full number of the nations has come in and states that God's gifts and calling are not revoked. This passage was used to argue that the conversion of the Jews was to be expected at the end of history and was not to be forced. Bernard of Clairvaux used it in 1146 in his letters to the people of England and of eastern France.

On the question of forced baptism the chronicles and the canon law agree on the facts though not on their meaning. Many Jews who had been baptised under threat in 1096 returned to Judaism in the following year, and Emperor Henry IV, on his return from Italy in 1097, permitted them to do so, against the protests of Pope Clement III. The emperor's action reflected the principle that baptism required consent, a principle that had been stated in the canons of the Fourth Council of Toledo in 633 but which later canonists qualified by holding that baptism, once administered, could not be undone.

X. Scripture in Jewish Interpretation

For the Jewish writers who recorded the events, the central scriptural pattern was that of the binding of Isaac. In the chronicles and the poems the parents who took the lives of their children are described as offering their sons and daughters as Abraham offered Isaac, with the significant difference that in 1096 no angel intervened. The late twelfth-century poet Ephraim of Bonn developed this theme in a poem in which he suggested that Isaac had in fact been sacrificed and restored to life, a reading that connected the Genesis narrative with the experience of his own community.

A second pattern was drawn from Isaiah 43:2, "When you pass through the waters, I will be with you", and from the laments of the book of Lamentations, in which the destruction of Jerusalem is mourned in terms that could readily be applied to the destruction of a community. The chronicles also cite Psalm 44:22, "For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are counted as sheep for slaughtering", a verse which Paul also quotes in Romans 8:36 in a quite different setting. The use of the same verse by Jewish and Christian writers to describe their own sufferings illustrates how closely the two traditions shared a common scriptural vocabulary.

The halakhic questions raised by the events were discussed for generations. The law as stated in the Talmud requires a Jew to accept death rather than commit idolatry, but it does not ordinarily permit the taking of one's own life or the lives of others. The actions of the communities of 1096 were defended by later authorities, among them the Tosafists of northern France, as exceptional responses to an extreme threat. Other writers expressed reservations. The discussion shows that the events were measured against the written and oral law as well as commemorated.

XI. Historical Assessment

Modern historians agree on the broad sequence of events but differ in their interpretation of the causes. One line of interpretation, associated with older scholarship, regarded the attacks as a natural consequence of religious enthusiasm among the uneducated, and therefore as marginal to the crusade proper. More recent scholars, including Robert Chazan and Jonathan Riley-Smith, have argued that the attacks expressed ideas present in crusading thought itself, particularly the idea of vengeance for Christ and the conception of the crusade as a war against the enemies of the faith wherever they were to be found. Riley-Smith also emphasised the importance of the need for money among the crusaders.

A further body of research has examined the role of the townspeople. In several towns the attackers included local residents who were in conflict with the bishops for control of urban government, and the protection of the Jews by the bishops may have made the Jews a target in that conflict. At Worms and Mainz the townspeople opened the gates to the crusaders, and at Cologne they joined the attackers. This suggests that the massacres arose from local tensions as well as from the preaching of the crusade.

The long-term consequences for the Jews of the Rhineland are also debated. The communities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz were re-established within a generation, and the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw a flourishing of Jewish scholarship in the region, including the circle of the Pietists of Ashkenaz, the Hasidei Ashkenaz, whose leading figures included Samuel the Pious, Judah the Pious and Eleazar of Worms. Nevertheless, the legal position of the Jews changed over the following century. The Landfrieden of 1103 placed them among the groups under the special protection of the emperor, and by the thirteenth century this protection had developed into the status of servi camerae, servants of the imperial chamber, which made them dependent on the ruler's goodwill and liable to heavy taxation.

The events of 1096 are therefore often described as a turning point in the history of the Jews of northern Europe, although historians now emphasise that the communities recovered and flourished for a time. What changed most permanently was the memory of the events, which entered both the liturgy and the historical consciousness of Ashkenazi Jewry and became the first of a series of remembered persecutions that included the attacks of 1146, the massacres of the Rintfleisch and Armleder bands in 1298 and 1336–38, and the persecutions of the Black Death in 1348–50.

XII. Connections with the Rest of the Series

The Rhineland massacres stand at the beginning of the period covered by the Wars of Religion series on this site, more than a century before the Albigensian Crusade. They differ from most of the conflicts in the series in that the victims were not Christian dissenters but a religious minority with its own Scriptures, its own law and its own scholarly tradition. In that respect they belong with the site's pages on the Almohad persecution and the expulsion of 1492, which describe other episodes in which the communities that transmitted the Hebrew text of the Scriptures were placed under pressure to convert or to leave.

The Rhineland communities were also part of the history of the transmission of the Hebrew text. Their scribes copied Torah scrolls and codices according to the rules of the Masoretic tradition as received in northern Europe, and their scholars wrote commentaries that remain in use. The loss of scrolls and books in 1096, recorded with particular grief in the chronicles, was a loss to that tradition, and the recovery of the communities in the twelfth century made possible the work of the Tosafists and the Pietists that followed. The site's page on the Ashkenazi tradition provides further context on this inheritance.

For readers who wish to consult the main reference articles, the Grokipedia entries on the Rhineland massacres, Peter the Hermit and Emicho provide summaries of the events and the persons involved.

XIII. Chronology of 1096

The following summary sets the principal events in order. In November 1095 Urban II preached the crusade at Clermont. In April 1096 Peter the Hermit reached Cologne, where he remained until about 20 April, and the Jews of the Rhineland, aware of events in France, wrote to communities in the region to warn them. On 3 May the attack at Speyer took place on the Sabbath, and eleven people were killed before the bishop intervened. On 18 May the Jews of Worms who had remained in their homes were attacked, and on 25 May those sheltering in the bishop's palace were killed. On 27 May the archbishop's palace at Mainz was taken and most of the community died.

On 30 May crusaders and townspeople attacked the Jewish quarter of Cologne, from which the inhabitants had already been moved to the archbishop's villages. During June the refugee groups at Neuss, Wevelinghoven, Eller, Xanten, Moers, Dortmund and Kerpen were attacked in turn. Also in June, the Jews of Trier, Metz and Regensburg were attacked or forcibly baptised. In late June or early July Folkmar's band attacked the Jews of Prague. In the summer Emicho's army was defeated at Moson in Hungary, and in October Peter the Hermit's army was destroyed in Anatolia.

In 1097 Henry IV permitted those forcibly baptised to return to Judaism. In 1103 the imperial peace of Mainz included the Jews among those under the emperor's special protection. Around 1120 Calixtus II issued the first known letter Sicut Judaeis. Around 1140 the chronicle attributed to Solomon bar Samson took its present form, and in 1146 and 1147 the preaching of the Second Crusade led to new attacks and to the intervention of Bernard of Clairvaux.

XIV. The Documentary Record

The written evidence for the events falls into three groups. The first consists of the Hebrew chronicles already described, together with the poems and the memorial lists. The second consists of Latin chronicles, among them Albert of Aachen's Historia Ierosolimitana, the annals of Hildesheim and of Augsburg, the chronicle of Ekkehard of Aura, Bernold of Constance, Cosmas of Prague for the events in Bohemia, and the Gesta Treverorum for Trier. The third consists of documentary sources, including the charters of 1084 and 1090 and later imperial and papal documents.

The Latin sources tend to be brief, and several of them describe the attacks as the work of misguided or wicked men. Ekkehard of Aura reported that Emicho's men either destroyed the Jews or compelled them to be baptised, and he linked the failure of the popular armies to their conduct. Cosmas of Prague complained that the bishop of Prague had been unable to prevent forced baptisms. Taken together these sources confirm the main events described in the Hebrew chronicles and show that the attacks were known and discussed among Christian writers in the following decades.

The physical evidence includes the remains of the synagogues and ritual baths of Speyer and Worms, which date from the decades immediately after 1096, and the cemeteries of Worms and Mainz. The Jewish ritual bath at Speyer, built around 1110 to 1120, is among the oldest surviving in Europe, and its construction shortly after the massacres indicates the rapid recovery of the community. In 2021 the sites of Speyer, Worms and Mainz were jointly inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as the ShUM sites, in recognition of their importance in the formation of Ashkenazi Judaism.

XV. Reading the Events Today

Any reconstruction of the events of 1096 has to reckon with the nature of the evidence. The numbers of the dead given in the Hebrew chronicles are probably rounded and may include people who were baptised rather than killed, and the Latin chronicles are brief and often written at a distance. Historians therefore tend to speak of several thousand victims across the Rhineland and the neighbouring regions, while recognising that precise totals cannot be established. What can be established with confidence is the sequence of attacks, the identity of several of the leaders, the attempts of some bishops to protect the communities, and the lasting place of the events in Jewish memory.

The episode also illustrates a theme that runs through the whole Wars of Religion series, namely the gap between the formal teaching of religious authorities and the conduct of armed groups who claimed to act in the name of religion. The bishops of Speyer, Mainz and Cologne were bound by canon law and by imperial charters to protect the Jews, and the papal tradition forbade forced baptism. These norms were not enough to restrain armed bands in the spring of 1096, and the outcome in each town depended on local circumstances. The same tension between principle and practice recurs in many of the later conflicts described on this site.

XVI. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.