Massacres of the First Crusade in the Rhineland

The call to crusade was not aimed at the Jews. The bands that formed in its wake, outside the command of the princes, decided otherwise: before going to deliver the tomb of Christ, they held that it was necessary to settle accounts with the enemies closer to home.

The troop of Emicho de Flonheim moved up the Rhine valley in the spring. At Spire, the bishop protected the community and had the murderers executed. At Worms, at Mayence, the Jews took refuge in the episcopal palaces, which were forced. It is there that the Hebrew chronicles describe what they call *qiddoush ha-Shem*: entire families taking their own lives rather than receiving baptism, fathers killing their children before the altar. At Ratisbonne, people were forcibly baptized in the Danube; Cologne, Trèves, Metz, Neuss, Xanten, Eller, Prague witnessed similar scenes.

The emperor Henri IV, absent from Germany, authorized upon his return those who had been baptized to revert to Judaism — against the advice of the antipope Clément III. The Rhineland remained the center of study it had been, but the year 1096 entered the Ashkenazi liturgy: the lists of martyrs read at the *Av ha-raḥamim* preserve its trace.