ABSTRACT
Sixty years ago, when S. D. Goitein published the Geniza letters on the crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, he contrasted the discrepancy between the existence of Hebrew reports and dirges on the 1096 persecutions in the Rhineland with the absolute lack of a Jewish literary or poetic response to the conquest of Jerusalem three years later.1 However, this discrepancy was less pronounced than Goitein assumed. The present paper will draw attention to an unpublished Hebrew dirge that alludes to the call for the crusade, the 1096 persecutions, the conquest of Jerusalem, and its subsequent Christianization. This dirge appears (as of now) only in a single source: the famous Nuremberg Mahzor, written in 1331, now in The Dr. David and Jemima Jeselsohn Collection, Zurich.2
