Chapter 3, Early “Solutions”: Expulsion, forced conversion, death

Background: Centuries of persecution have sensitized Diaspora Jewry to the potential for danger in times of social stress. The 1929 Great Depression ignited embers of resentment that would feed the crematoria of Auschwitz. And the 2009 Great Recession returned Western antisemitism to levels reportedly not seen since the Holocaust. In the Middle Ages the Black Plague intensified in a people already highly superstitious paranoia regarding the hand of Satan in their misfortunes. And “the Jews,” were believed his instrument of their misfortune. 

Christians imagined Satan a living presence in the world. He was lurking in shadows, hiding behind trees in wait. The John gospel described “the Jews” as Satan’s children, antichrists and agents of his malevolence. In times of poor weather, poor harvest it was “the Jews.” When plague arrived in Europe, “the Jews” were responsible for its spread. If a child went missing he was kidnapped by, “the Jews.”

Anti-Jewish Persecution divides roughly into two periods. Before the year 1000 physical violence was mostly random, individual-on-individual assault and murder. The pre-millennium was characterized by torah burnings, Church-ordered “Jew clothing” and badges, ghettoes. In general the sought after “solution” to the Jewish Problem involved fulfilling scripture by conversion, not murder. But following the disappointment of Jesus failing expectations of the Second Coming at the year 1000, anti-Jewish persecution became increasingly organized, focused and intense. Massacres grew more common and entire Jewish communities were destroyed by fire and sword. 

The first recorded massacre targeted the Jewish community of Orlean in 1009 followed within three years by massacres of Jews in Rouen and Limoges. Rome’s Jews were massacred in 1012 and, as if things could not worsened for Rome’s Jews, the remnant were burned alive in 1021. By 1063 massacres spread to Spain and, in 1065, Lorraine’s Jewish community was massacred. 

Between the Orlean massacre of 1009 and the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of 1935 Irving Borowski, in his Forward to Father Edward Flannery’s 1965 book, The Anguish of the Jews writes that, 

According to other historians Borowski’s estimate is conservative, the number of Jews murdered between those dates (and this before the Holocaust); one study suggests that, had Jews not confronted persecution over the past two-thousand years the number living today would have been at least that of the population of the British Isles! 

Beginning in the eleventh century Europe entered a period of radical social, economic and political change. Kingdoms emerged and the population multiplied. Cities, once located only along the Mediterranean coast, now appeared inland, connected by river and road. 

Usury, forbidden to Christians by the Church, was necessary to finance the expansion. Forbidden to own or even work the land; shut out from most trades and crafts, those Jews capable became, by default, Europe’s bankers while most continued to live in poverty, surfs to the land owners. It also fell on Jews, already identified with “money,” to collect taxes and rent for their masters, a position that made Jews a lightning rod for resentment otherwise inspired by the landowners. 

While the niche of “usury” provided some Jews a livelihood, serving as “money lender” to the wealthy was not without danger. Borrowing by the Church and aristocracy meant that these institutions also accumulated debt. And the fastest way to erase debt, it turned our, was to just be rid of the Jews. The year 1100 began a five-hundred year-long period of expulsions that not only erased debt, but provided the ruler with the accumulated wealth of the community unable to carry or forced to leave all property behind. 

And when the need for capital to fund wars development or war arose again the Jews would be welcomed back and the cycle would repeat. In general, Jewish communities expelled from southern Europe would resettle in North Africa, while Poland was the destination from Central Europe (Grosser, Paul E. & Halperin, Edwin G., The Causes and Effects of Anti-Semitism, 1978, p.103)

Until now the discussion has focused on the “local” level, Jews as chattel of their feudal lords, at mercy of their equally enslaved and bitter Christian neighbors. But the Church still faced the Jewish Problem, of Judaism and Jews surviving in the “messianic” age. According Church policy based on Augustine’s formulation “the Jews” were to be preserved as “witness” to Christian “truth,” to be “encouraged” to convert and enjoy the benefits of Christianity. But with few exceptions most Jews chose not to “volunteer,” resisted “forced” conversion even in the face of persecution. How “encourage” Jews to convert?

“The Dark Ages added three new techniques to anti-Semitic practices. One that had a great historical impact is the designation of those who refused to submit to forced baptism as enemies of the state and therefore liable for the death penalty. The second, while having less of an historical effect seems more horrible in its immediate impact, was the forcible taking of Jewish children and raising them in Christian homes or monasteries. The third was the establishment of local annual public insults of the Jewish population usually during the Easter season.” (Grosser and Halperin, p.96)

As it turned out “forced baptism,” regardless the degree of sincerity on the part of the convert, provided poor security. And for good reason: such conversions are unreliable, are therefore suspect. Converts, and even their children and grandchildren, came under suspicion by the Inquisition. Converts and their progeny generations-removed were tortured until confessing insincerity and rewarded for their “confession” by being burned at the stake. 

The High Middle Ages was a period in which church influence within Europe expanded north and later pushed back against the Islamic expansion in the south. It was also a time that advanced new approaches to solving Christianity’s Jewish Problem.

Over a period of two centuries, from 1096 to 1270, there ten crusades were launched, two of which were “children’s crusades.” As the crusaders set off on their quest their first victims were Jewish communities on the road to the “Holy Land.” 

In 1095 Pope Urban II proposed the Crusade to liberated Holy Land. The second part of his speech is less familiar, but has a strangely modern sound to it reminiscent of Hitler’s reason for launching WWII, Germany’s need for ,lebensräume: 

And so, in the year 1096, the first of the ten crusades set off to liberate the Holy Land. Whatever the true motivation, the impact of the crusades on Europe’s Jewish communities was devastating.

During the first Crusade alone tens of thousands of Jews met their deaths by sword, fire and drowning. “In Regensburg Jews were thrown into the Danube,” described as a “baptism” to save their souls before dying. 

On May 25, 1096, some 800 Jews were murdered in Worms, Germany while many others chose suicide rather than subject their families to torture, rape and murder at the hands of the crusaders. In Mainz, Cologne, Prague and many other cities, thousands were killed and their possessions plundered. Thus began the long period of persecution, expulsion and murder which only began to ease, if temporarily, with the gradual secularization of Europe beginning in the 17th century.

The sack of Jerusalem, in 1099 was led by Godfrey of Bouillon at the head of one of the pope’s armies. On departing for the Holy Land he had sworn, 

On arriving in Palestine in 1099 his troops breached the walls of Jerusalem, captured the city and,

Several descriptions of crusader atrocities have survived the most famous known as The Mainz Anonymous: 

In the year 1211 a group of 300 Jews fled to Eretz Israel from England and France. Eight years later they too were murdered at the hands of the Fifth Crusade.

The Crusades marked a shift in anti-Jewish persecution. For centuries previously anti-Judaism had been encouraged by the elites. With the eleventh century “the atrocities committed against the Jews sprang from the people,” (Antisemitism, Causes and Effects, p.120). And it was the people, peasants neighboring Jewish communities who, out of religion-based intolerance, fear and superstition turned on the Jews during the years of the Black Plague.

The Black Death arrived in Europe from the Orient by way of 14th Century traders. By the time it ran its course fully one-third of Europe’s population was dead. Although the plague did not distinguish Jew from Christian, suspicion fell on the Jews spreading the plague by poisoning Christian wells (Grosser and Halpern, p.127):

In Strasbourg, a city not yet touched by the plague, 900 Jews were gathered together and burned alive. 

Five hundred years later that myth would inspire The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. 

Blood libels represent one of the more grotesque popular myths invented by Medieval Christians. According to this myth pre-pubescent youths were kidnapped from their homes, tied up or nailed to a cross by way of mocking the Christian Eucharist. They were then supposedly stabbed in imitation of the wounds scripture describes as suffered by Jesus on the cross. As the boy was dying his blood was supposedly collected as an ingredient in the baking of Passover matzo. 

Simon of Trent, supposedly murdered in this fashion in 1475, was canonized by Pope Sixtus V in 1588 giving rise to a cult that continues to survive even today. Although officially disbanded in 1965 by Pope Paul VI, but the cult apparently continues and may be accessed on Catholic organization internet sites.

As with the myth of rabbis plotting mayhem for Christians survives into the present in the Protocols, so does the Blood Libel survive. The most celebrated modern blood libel involved Menahem Beilis, a Russian Jew arrested on July 21, 1911 for the murder and mutilation of a Ukrainian youth. Acquitted after two years in jail, the peasant making the charge eventually admitted that his accusations were based on tutoring by the police.

And one year after the liberation of Auschwitz, of the more than 24,000 Jewish residents of pre-war Kielce, Poland, 200 survivors returning to their homes faced a pogrom inspired by… a blood libel. Thirty-five were murdered along with two Jews who just happened to be passing through the city by train.