Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade

by Jeremy Cohen

How are martyrs made, and how do the memories of martyrs express, nourish, and mold the ideals of the community? Sanctifying the Name of God wrestles with these questions against the background of the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland during the outbreak of the First Crusade. Marking the first extensive wave of anti-Jewish violence in medieval Christian Europe, these "Persecutions of 1096" exerted a profound influence on the course of European Jewish history.

When the crusaders demanded that Jews choose between Christianity and death, many opted for baptism. Many others, however, chose to die as Jews rather than to live as Christians, and of these, many actually inflicted death upon themselves and their loved ones. Stories of their self-sacrifice ushered the Jewish ideal of martyrdom—kiddush ha-Shem, the sanctification of God's holy name—into a new phase, conditioning the collective memory and mindset of Ashkenazic Jewry for centuries to come, during the Holocaust, and even today.

The Jewish survivors of 1096 memorialized the victims as martyrs as they rebuilt their communities during the decades following the Crusade. Three twelfth-century Hebrew chronicles of the persecutions preserve their memories of martyrdom and self-sacrifice, tales fraught with symbolic meaning that constitute one of the earliest Jewish attempts at local, contemporary historiography. Reading and analyzing these stories through the prism of Jewish and Christian religious and literary traditions, Jeremy Cohen shows how these persecution chronicles reveal much more about the storytellers, the martyrologists, than about the martyrs themselves. While they extol the glorious heroism of the martyrs, they also air the doubts, guilt, and conflicts of those who, by submitting temporarily to the Christian crusaders, survived.

224 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2004

Reviews

[Mary Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cohen had a fascinating take on how historians might interact with narrative sources, particularly when they are as highly stylized as the Hebrew Chronicles from the First Crusade. Cohen essentially performs close readings on passages from the chronicles in an effort to explore feelings of ambiguity and guilt held by survivors who undertook the project of writing these chronicles as memorials. Not every reading worked, and many of the allusions he discussed felt far fetched in the extreme, but the method was solid and unique. It was one of the most enjoyable non-fiction reading experiences I have ever had.

[Maja - BibliophiliaDK ✨ · Rating 2 out of 5]

The thing that really bummed me about this book was that I didn't catch on to what the purpose of it was. There were many stories of Jewish matyrs during the First Crusade in 1096, but I never really found out exactly what Cohen wanted to accomplish with his book. And I must agree with some of Cohen's critics, it did feel like he read a lot into the different stories. More often that not it actually seemed like he was grasping at straws that only he could find.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shed some really interesting light on the martyrdom of the 1096 Crusade.