ABSTRACT
In the year 1009, the Fatimid caliph Abu Ali al-Mansur al-Hakim ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Demolition work started on September 28, 1009, aimed not only against the church itself but also the convent beside it, although the destruction does not appear to have been particularly thorough. This event is pertinent to the subject of this volume because of a peculiar rumor that circulated at least in the kingdom of France in the first half of the eleventh century: that this attack on the holiest point of the Christian cosmos had been instigated by the Jews. Two near-contemporary chroniclers, Rodulfus Glaber and Ademar of Chabannes, both tell the story, varying in details but both firm in placing the ultimate blame on a Jewish plot — specifically, a conspiracy by the Jews of France to convince al-Hakim that the Christians were a threat and could best be countered with an attack on the Holy Sepulcher. This story is an important, though enigmatic, piece of evidence for historians studying the rise of anti-Semitism in Western Europe in the period before the First Crusade. The tale appears as one of a number of negative statements about Jews in eleventh-century Christian sources and specifically occurs in the context of a series of violent attacks on Jews that took place in the years 1007 to 1012. But these accounts of a great Jewish plot against the heart of Christianity, the most spectacular in their claims, have been the least studied of these extant texts for what they can reveal of Jewish–Christian interactions and attitudes in a period of worsening relations.
