Early Middle Ages and Crusades
Two massacres
18 et 25 mai 1096·Worms
The toll is reproduced exactly as the source states it — never rounded, never added to another. Tolls overlap from one event to the next.
the community of the town on the 18th, that sheltered in the episcopal palace on the 25th; collective suicides
The bands that followed Emicho de Flonheim, who had set out for Jerusalem, turned their fervor against the Rhenish communities. At Worms, they struck twice: first those who had remained in their homes, then, a week later, those who had taken refuge in the palace of Bishop Adalbert, who could not or would not defend them to the end.
Many preferred to take their own lives rather than accept baptism, and killed their loved ones before killing themselves. The Rhenish Hebrew chronicles — those of Salomon bar Simson and Éliézer bar Nathan — name this act *kiddouch ha-Chem*, the sanctification of the Name, and made of it a model that Ashkenazic communities transmitted for centuries.
Worms recovered: its synagogue was rebuilt, its cemetery, the oldest still standing in Europe, continued to receive its dead. But the list of its martyrs entered the *Memorbuch* that was read on days of mourning, and the Rhenish memorial was born from those weeks.
- Period :
- Early Middle Ages and Crusades
- Type :
- Massacre
- Region :
- Western Europe
- Country :
- Allemagne
Chroniques hébraïques de la Première croisade ; Memorbuch de Nuremberg ; Albert d'Aix.