Hitler and his God

The Crusades and the Black Death

The Jews remained relatively unmolested – throughout their amazing history they were never secure – till the calling of the first crusade by Urban II in 1095. Taken by a sudden fervour, thousands of the most destitute people in Western Christendom left the little they possessed, if anything, and followed preachers like Peter the Hermit in the hope of finding lasting happiness, or a full stomach, beyond the forests which formed the horizon of their small and ignorant world. These hordes, fanatical in their ignorance and therefore dangerous, acted independently of the organized crusade of the princes and knights, and robbed and killed for their survival. It seems a rumour started circulating that duke Godfrey of Bouillon, one of the leaders of the crusade, had sworn to revenge the death of Christ in the blood of the Jews. “There was no shortage of preachers to incite at massacring the Jews without waiting for the confrontation with the Saracens.” The reasoning was simple: hadn’t the Jews killed the Son of God? Wasn’t the Antichrist to be born from them? Why march toward the Orient to kill the Saracens and leave this devil’s brood behind unharmed? The first Jews were murdered at Rouen, in the North-West of France, and the Judaic communities in that region sent warnings to their brothers in Germany, for the “crusaders” were expected to follow the Rhine upstream into central Europe. “But the communities in the Rhine Valley, well settled, prosperous and having acquired a special statute, did not heed the warning.” 548 This they would regret.

The first German victims were slaughtered in Speyer; then followed Worms, Mainz, and several villages where Jews had sought refuge. The chief instigator of the killings was a German count, Emicho von Leisingen, “a noble of low repute and a brigand” according to some, “a very noble and mighty man” say others. “The bishop of Würzburg collected butchered Jews. Fingers. Thumbs. Feet. Hands. Severed heads. He anointed these bloody pieces with oil and buried them in his garden since it is the nature of a man to perform his office. Count Emicho’s Jerusalemfarers marched along the Rhine to Cologne. Here, as elsewhere, Israelites scattered, disguised themselves. Some who were caught and refused to acknowledge ‘the light of the world’ were slain, their synagogues wrecked, burnt.” 549 And the hordes marched on, singing of Jerusalem with many a rapturous “hallelujah”, robbing and destroying, and leaving behind a trail of Jewish blood in Metz, Trier, Regensburg, Bamberg, Prague, Nitra …

Rather than letting themselves be baptized, which would have saved their lives, the German Jews first killed those who were near and dear to them, and then committed suicide. “This one killed his younger brother, that one his parents, wife and children. All accepted wholeheartedly the divine verdict [of their death]; recommending their souls to the Eternal, they cried out: “Hear, o Israel, the Eternal is our God, the Eternal is One!” Poliakov considers the slaughter by the crusaders “a capital moment” in the history of the Jews. In the course of that summer of 1096, he writes, the tradition was born of a heroical and total refusal adopted as the attitude towards a majority by a minority ready to give their lives “to sanctify the Name” – a tradition which will serve as an example to future generations. 550

Henceforth the Jews were fair game for any mob, gullible and excitable, looking for a scapegoat and for loot. “More animal-like than the animals themselves / Are all the Jews, there is no doubt. / One hates them much, and I hate them … / And God hates them / And everybody must hate them”, wrote a chronicler. The Jews were now to wear a distinctive sign – a yellow patch, the Star of David, or, as in Germany, a yellow conical hat – as prescribed by the IVth Lateran Council in 1215. “In the countries where the Christians are not distinguishable from the Jews and the Saracens by their dress, relations have taken place between Christians and Jewish or Saracen women, or vice versa. In order that such enormities may no longer be excused as having been committed by mistake, it is decided that from now onwards the Jews of both genders will distinguish themselves from the other people by their dress, as has moreover been prescribed by Moses.” 551

Poliakov tells of one of the worst pogroms in the small German town of Röttingen where the Jews, in 1298, were suddenly accused of desecrating a host. One Rindtfleisch led a mob against them and they were killed and burnt to the last person. But Rindtfleisch did not stop there, for this “butcher of the Jews”, as he became known, led his troupe of Jew-baiters from place to place, attacking and slaying the Jews wherever he found them, except when they consented to be baptized. The killer wave ran through Franconia and Bavaria, making tens of thousands of victims. “What is new in this case is that for the first time a crime allegedly committed by one or a few Jews was held to be the responsibility of all the Jews in the country … We can say in our modern language that it was (exception made for the excesses of the crusaders) the first case of ‘genocide’ of the Jews in Christian Europe.” 552

The next phase in our ever darker tale was caused by the Black Death, which ravaged Europe for three years, from 1347 till 1350, and exterminated at least a third of its population. Many historians have been of the opinion that this was one of the lowest points ever known in the continuity of history, in a century which one historian calls “the Devil’s century”. “In the cities they became ill in their thousands and nearly all died for lack of care and assistance. In the morning one found their corpses before the doorstep of the houses where they had died during the night … It came to the point that one did not care more about a person who died than one does nowadays about the lowliest animal”, wrote Giovanni Boccaccio. But questions began to be asked: why this scourge, and how had it come about? Was it sent by God or by Satan? Didn’t everybody know who were the agents of Satan on earth? The scapegoats were found – the Jews! – and they would remain cast in this role for many centuries.

At Strasbourg two thousand Jews were burnt in their own cemetery and their possessions were distributed among the citizens. Colmar followed, and Worms, Oppenheim, Frankfurt, Erfurt, Cologne, Hannover … Then the flagellants appeared upon the scene, bands of organized fanatics who went in procession from place to place and beat themselves in public with whips and spiked thongs till their flesh was torn from their bones. They invoked God’s pity for this miserable world and preached general repentance, for the end was near. And as the end meant first the coming of the Antichrist, his accomplices, the Jews, were declared outside the law and often massacred after the flagellants had performed their pious acts.

“From the second half of the fourteenth century onwards”, writes Poliakov, “the hatred against the Jews reached such an intensity that we can unreservedly fix at that time the crystallization of anti-Semitism in its classical form, which later led to the statement of Erasmus: ‘If it is the sign of a good Christian to hate the Jews, then we are all good Christians’ … Even if the Jew is no longer present in some places [the Jews were banished from Spain, France and England], the people invent him, and the less a Christian population runs into Jews in its daily life, the more it is haunted by their image, about which it is told by its literature, at whom it stares in its churches, and whom it finds caricatured in its children’s games and miracle plays … The Jews will be despised in France and England no less than in Germany and Italy. The intensity of the feelings towards them seems to depend on the substratum on which rests the national culture, and to be more accentuated in the Germanic than in the Latin countries. In this way everything leads up to Germany becoming the predominant country of anti-Semitism.” 553