Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France

Introduction
THE MEDIEVAL POETRY OF JEWISH MARTYRDOM
[E]veryone wants
What he did to be remembered a long time after
The things he didn't do are forgotten.
--Natan Zach
THIS IS A BOOK about poetry and history, about what people did and how they wanted to remember doing it. It is about poems that turned to passion and polemic in the wake of violence, shaping people's responses to the incidents they described in their own time and for generations to come.
The events in question began in the spring of 1096, when Crusader armies passing through the Rhine Valley on their way to the Holy Land attacked Jewish communities that lay in their path. An outpouring of commemorative literature--prose chronicles, martyrological rosters, and verse laments--for the victims appeared soon after. This literature also preserved accounts of many Jews who, faced with the furious mobs of crusaders and local reinforcements, preferred to kill themselves and their families rather than let the Christians determine their fate. With their defiant deaths, the medieval Jewish martyr was born and, with the descriptions of their deeds, so was medieval Jewish martyrology.
By the second half of the twelfth century, the Jewish poetry of martyrdom formalized an ideal of Jewish resistance to persecution and conversionary pressures. The poems of martyrdom commemorated Jewish victims as figures of exceptional piety and courage who put virtue to the ultimate test and "sanctified the Name" in death. They also reinforced the positive values that might deter attrition, especially among the most vulnerable elements of Jewish society, while drawing ever more boldly the border between Christian and Jew. In so doing, the poems memorialized as heroes the men and women who achieved the poetic ideal while consigning to oblivion those who did not. At the same time, the poetry of martyrdom, despite its preoccupation with heroic deeds, reveals some of the daily concerns and values that characterized medieval Jewish life.
And yet, the Hebrew poetry of martyrdom from medieval northern Europe has rarely been considered a source of information about the "everyday life" of its authors or audiences. I shall explore some of the reasons for this below. As a way of beginning, however, let me emphasize that the following studies assume that Jewish martyrological poetry, like the spectrum of martyrological rituals, beliefs, and behaviors that included this poetry, is not solely concerned with the facts of martyrdom. For the Jews of northern Europe, martyrology was not merely a way of making sense of the traumatic events that struck so many Jewish individuals and communities over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Martyrological symbols and rituals, narratives and poetry, transmitted a picture of idealized Jewish living as well as a prescription for idealized Jewish death. They also reflected, in part through poems like those we shall be exploring, communal values and an ideal of social order that drew on contemporary non-Jewish models as well as particularly Jewish ones. These values and ideals were intended to be meaningful for a range of listeners, from the highly literate class of male scholars to less learned Jewish men, women, and children.
Their Christian neighbors may have viewed them as strangers, but most of these Jews were the descendents of families that had lived in northern Europe for generations; the landscape and customs of the region had had many long years to shape their mental horizons and outlooks as well as the rhythms of their daily lives.1 Three twelfth-century sources, all deriving from the school of Eleazar of Worms, trace the origins of Jewish communities in the Rhineland (known in Hebrew as the land of Ashkenaz) to a cordial invitation and charter from Charlemagne to an emigre group of Italian Jews. This claim is not taken seriously by historians, who nonetheless generally concur that the legend contains kernels of truth. The arrival in the early tenth century of members of the Qalonymos family of Italy may have been connected to the efforts of the early Carolingian rulers to encourage economic growth in the region. Small Jewish communities continued to take root along the Rhine, the Seine, and the Loire over the next century. Most were anchored in the trading activities of a few major families, the Qalonymos family prominent among them.2
Pope Urban II's call to crusade in 1095 did not include any instructions to attack Jewish communities throughout the Rhine, but in town after town, Jewish settlements were the targets of violence. Although scholars differ in their assessment of the permanent damage caused by these attacks, most agree that crusader and mob assaults on Jewish life and property changed the balance of Jewish-Christian relations.3