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serve apologetic, polemical, or theological goals. The patterns they project are corroborated by
external sources and by a high level of agreement among independent Jewish sources.
I am not suggesting, however, that each individual depiction be taken as a precise record of what
transpired. The stories of Meshullam ben Isaac of Worms, Rachel of Mainz, David ha-gabbai of Mainz,
Isaac ben David of Mainz, and Samuel ben Gedaliah and Yehiel ben Samuel of Cologne are brilliantly
crafted reconstructions, and the role of poetic imagination must be acknowledged. We can never know
precisely what transpired in such instances. The patterns depicted are thoroughly accurate; the
specifics cannot be fully authenticated.[48]
In this regard, we must remain cognizant of the issue of language. Our 1096 narratives are
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carefully contrived reports in a biblically grounded Hebrew of events that involved Christian and Jewish
speakers of Rhineland vernaculars. Precisely what was lost and what was added with the move from
the spoken vernacular cannot now be fully gauged. Once again, we should be leery of excessive
literalism in the reading of our Hebrew narratives. Nonetheless, the findings of this chapter suggest
that wholesale fabrication was not undertaken by the Jewish narrators, that their time-bound
commitments necessitated an account that was, in the main, "accurate." How this accuracy of
depiction came to simultaneously serve timeless purposes will be the burden of the next chapter.
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9. The Hebrew First
Crusade Narratives
The Timeless
I have argued that our Jewish authors did not fabricate patterns of Christian and Jewish behavior or
Christian and Jewish thinking in order to serve apologetic, polemical, or theological goals. That is not
to suggest that the Jewish narrators were not animated by apologetic, polemical, or theological
goals they surely were. Rather, these Jewish observers seem to have concluded that the accurate
detail necessary to achieve their time-bound objectives was not at all antithetical to their broader
purposes. Indeed, they seem to have concluded that precisely the accurate detail would serve them
well in making their more far-reaching case.
Tragedy under all circumstances necessitates some kind of consolation and explanation. Simply to
suffer pointlessly is by and large inimical to human thinking. Certainly, throughout the Jewish past
those undergoing persecution have regularly sought the solace conferred by one or another pattern of
explanation.[1] In the case of the Jews of 1096, the need to comprehend the tragedy was much
enhanced by the fact that their Christian neighbors had their own explanation for the tragedy, a ready
explanation that these Christians recurrently shared with their Jewish neighbors, and that the
explication advanced by these Christians some quite friendly in fact undercut the possibility of
remaining Jewish. Given the disheartening and destructive nature of this Christian view of the suffering
that Jews experienced in 1096, the search for comprehension took on added urgency.[2]
The end result of this search for comprehension was an innovative
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view of God, humanity, and history a sense of the divine, the human, and the interaction between
the two that differed considerably from traditional Jewish thinking, that showed remarkable affinities
to the audacious thinking within crusader ranks, and that transformed tragedy into triumph and
suffering into victory.
We shall begin by gaining a fuller sense of the challenge posed by the Christian explanation for the
catastrophe of 1096, indicating how this explanation served to constrict the range of explanatory
models that Jewish observers might invoke. We shall then examine the diverse explanatory patterns
advanced by our individual Jewish narrators. While there is much that is shared among these Jewish
observers, there are nuanced and important differences as well, differences worthy of attention.
Armed with this understanding of the answers provided by our diverse observers to the difficult
theological-polemical issues posed by the tragedy of 1096, we shall proceed to investigate the
audacious conceptions of God, humanity, and history embedded in the 1096 Hebrew narratives.
THE SPIRITUAL AND THEOLOGICAL CHALLENGE
Earliest Christianity developed within a Palestinian-Jewish matrix and thus shared the widespread
Jewish sense of a potent sin-punishment paradigm at work in history. This paradigm is central to the
Pentateuchal books, the historical narratives of the First Commonwealth, and the prophetic
admonitions and consolations. With the passage of time, as fissures developed in Israelite society, the
sense that the correct grasp of the covenant between God and Israel promises great reward while
distorted comprehension of the covenant entails dire consequences became increasingly obvious. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]