ABSTRACT
It is a common notion that the outbreak of the bloody massacres of Jews in Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Trier, Cologne, and other cities in the Rhineland, but also in northern France, came as a thunderbolt out of a blue sky and that it is attributable to a sudden eruption of religious fanaticism in connection with the First Crusade. However, this is but a half-truth. Unrest had been smoldering throughout the eleventh century. In the aftermath of the rumor that spread through the Christian world, about the demolition of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem through the Fatimide Caliph Hakim (996-1021), Jews were expelled from a number of cities because they were identified with the Saracens. Sporadic popular violence against Jews is reported from some localities, especially in France, and although this violence was subdued by the territorial lords, the underlying emotions were not. When Pope Urban II issued his famous call to a Crusade to the French Knights in 1095, he unleashed these emotions and unwittingly fanned them to a consuming flame. While the Knights assiduously prepared themselves for the holy campaign, the agitation was at once taken up by popular preachers and self-appointed prophets, among whom a slight, ascetic man with a long gray beard, called Peter the Hermit, exercised a particular and irresistible fascination upon the masses of poor people. Hordes of ragged folks who gathered around him and others of his kind crossed over from France into the Rhineland and their way to the Holy Land and fell upon the unsuspecting Jewish communities along their path. While the minds were set on combating the distant enemy of the faith, it seemed utterly incongruous to spare the infidels at home who mocked Christ and stubbornly refused conversion.
