Free Rashi by Elie Wiesel Page A

of the French Jewish community had forebodings. Based on what? We don’t know; all we know is they sent emissaries to their relatives and friends in Mainz and Worms advisingthem to prepare themselves for riots. Strangely incredulous, too confident, the Jews of Mainz and Worms sent the messengers away, with their messages, back to the Jews of France. Yet the French were right. When they started their crusade down the Rhine and the Danube, the Crusaders, blind with hatred, inflicted suffering and agony on the thousands upon thousands of Jews living in Cologne, Mainz, Worms, and Speyer who refused to convert to Christianity.
    In some places, the Crusaders met with Jewish resistance; in others, the majority of Jews chose martyrdom. The first martyr, a woman, refused to be baptized and chose to die voluntarily. A great many coreligionists followed her example. The story of their behavior is unbearable to read. In synagogue courtyards, men recited blessings and prayers and then stabbed their wives and children to death. “Accept baptism and you will live,” shouted the Crusaders wherever they suddenly appeared, like ghosts in a blaze of violence and horror. “We believe in God, in our one God,” replied the Jews before dying. In some chronicles it is reported that the Crusaders entertained themselves by slashing open the bellies of pregnant women, putting live cats inside, and sewing them up.
    In his masterly book on the
Akedah
, the binding of Isaac, in Jewish history, the great scholar and teacher Shalom Spiegel quotes a passage in Rabbi Eliezer bar Nathan’s book on the disasters of 1096. When the Crusaders entered Mehr, a village on the banks of the Rhine, the local lord deliveredhis Jews to them. Threatened with ugly humiliation, torture, and death, some Jews let themselves be baptized. Others were slaughtered. One man called Shmaya bribed an official who helped him escape with his wife and three sons. Then the official betrayed them. At night Shmaya slit the throats of his wife and their three children and plunged the knife into his own chest. He lost consciousness, but did not die. The next day, when the Crusaders found him lying on the ground, they said to him, “Convert to our faith and you shall live.” But he answered, “May heaven protect me from renouncing the living God!” So the villagers dug a grave. The saintly Shmaya placed his wife on one side and his three sons on the other, and lay down in the middle. And the mob began to throw earth on their bodies. He was covered with earth but was still alive. They took him out. “Confess your sins and you shall live,” they said to him. He refused. They put him back in the grave, but he was still alive. They took him back out again. “Are you ready to abandon your God?” The holy man, in his last breath, refused to exchange what was great and eternal for what was not…. He passed the test, as had Abraham the father, in bygone days! Oh, Blessed be He …
    Why did so many men and women in the Rhine provinces choose martyrdom through suicide whereas their brothers and sisters in the Sephardic countries reacted differently? Is this due to a different mentality or to a different interpretation of the Law? Gershon Cohen published a remarkableessay on the subject. But this is not the topic at hand. The Crusades are.
    When the Crusaders, led by Godfrey of Bouillon, swept into Jerusalem, they devastated the City of God and brutalized its inhabitants. Jews and Muslims combined forces and put up a courageous and relentless resistance, but they were outnumbered. The Crusaders locked up a group of Karaites in a synagogue and set it on fire. The entire group was burned alive.
    Litanies and lamentations were composed describing the barbarity of the murderous invaders and the deaths of their victims. They are still recited today, on appropriate dates.
    Did Rashi know what was happening in those distant lands? Word must have reached him. What does he say on the subject?
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