The pogrom of the first Crusade is the first of the great Christian pogroms in the West. There had been before 1095 numbers of persecutions of Jews by Christians but none of them of that violence which reached genocidal proportions, as we have seen under Pharaoh and under Vespasian. In addition Trajan and Hadrian also brought the nation to the verge of annihilation. This, to repeat, is the criterion of pogrom—that its violence, by accident or design, should move towards the point of total extermination of its victims, and that those victims should be regarded as vermin by animals whose faculty of reasoning is temporarily suspended.
In this sense the two thousand, five hundred Jews that Titus threw to the lions at Philippi are not victims of a pogrom. That was the play and amusement of civilised savages. True pogrom is vengeance and sadism based on the lunatic logic of a phantom world.
The systematic degradation of the Western Jew from Constantine onwards is again not regarded here as pogrom. It is simply inhumanity seeking with cold and sane logic to deprive a stateless person of civic rights and grudgingly to give him a place in the sun as long as he stays in his ghetto.
Within these limits, degraded Jews lived for some centuries after the collapse of Rome in a state of non-enmity with their Gentile neighbours. They had been dispersed after Vespasian sold their country and many of them had moved along the great trade routes of the West and eked out a living in centres of commerce along the Rhine and in Bohemia, in Flanders and in France.
They became, however, the victims of a terrible state of unrest which erupted among the Gentiles at the time of the first Crusade. To understand this group mental illness of which pogrom was the symptom a small digression is necessary to discuss the concept of group mental illness.
Mentally sick individuals sometimes deviate—in degrees that are proportional to the severity of their malady—from standards of thought and of behaviour accepted as normal by the society to which they belong.
Societies are not immune from group mental illness. At its extreme, group mental illness has been described among primitive communities so closely adapted to their environment that a serious, sudden change therein has far-reaching consequences upon their social structure. Dr. Margaret Mead has described the effect of such sudden changes on some South Sea Island tribes. A river changed its course; there was an epidemic or a famine and the tribe lost its will to live and drifted into extinction.
To a lesser degree societies and minorities in the Western world have suffered from collective neuroses at different troubled times in their history. There is, of course, no true identity between such a collective mental illness and a personal one. There are only similarities. For a time a group appears to have crossed the frontier of reason into a phantom world. In that world it has for a time laid aside its normal standards of thought and of behaviour until at last it has drifted back mentally into the real world.
The problem of medieval Europe was that it always laboured under deep stress. It was totally and unconditionally at the mercy of its environment. Generally speaking we have no experience of this, since technology enables us to manipulate our world to serve us. For medieval men there was neither explanation nor remedy for many of the things that happened to them. If plague broke out there was no defence; when lightning struck there were no conductors; if fire broke out there were no brigades. Diabetes and appendicitis were fatal diseases among many others, which to us are mild afflictions. We cannot imagine the bereavements which resulted from fantastically high infant and mortality rates. Life expectancy for such men stood at a median figure of forty years of age. In the absence of applied science there were no methods of predicting what would happen, no methods of prevention and when the dire event occurred there was no defence at all. The mental patterns of the medieval world under stress have no counterpart in our experience.
There were stresses of other sorts too—corruption which prevailed at times in Church and in State, famines and misfortunes, wars and plagues—all of which imposed their burden on a simple, illiterate people until at times they were tried beyond endurance.
At such times—group anger at a petty tyrant, group fear of a plague—Christendom would begin to smoulder and a blaze would burst out in some particularly sorely tried minority.
Professor Cohn writes of this early period of the First Crusade with great intuition in his Pursuit of the Millennium.
Towards the dawn of the eleventh century, he argues, there was great discontent among the poor in Europe. There had been a minor movement from the land to the towns, and there the poor were dissatisfied. At the same time they were tried by a series of droughts, famine and plagues which begot unrest, insecurity, poverty and misery.
When Pope Urban announced the Crusade at Clermont-Ferrand in 1095, it was with the hope of uniting a divided France against the Moslem enemy which was threatening Christendom and besieging Byzantium. As it happened, the announcement of the Crusade coincided with the longing of the poor to be free from their poverty. A generation before—or a generation after—nothing much would have happened. Instead there was a great stirring among the people of Europe—something of mythical significance had been placed before them in the hour of their need.
All over Europe people began to coalesce into mobs and then into armies at the sermons of the travelling preachers. Men left their wives, their children, their homes fired by a great exaltation and an obscure conviction that a page of history was about to turn.
As they marched, the bands of the Peoples’ Armies began to dream grandiose dreams. In the dream the purpose of the Crusade was changed. It was to Jerusalem and not to Byzantium that the Peoples’ Crusade would go. They and not the knights were the children of God. They would storm the walls of Jerusalem and not their feudal leaders.
When the city fell and the Moslems were slain a new age and a new era would begin. It would be the Millennium when God would wipe away the tears from the eyes of the poor. There would be no feudal bondage, but all would be equal. There would be no sickness and no pain, for it would be the age of the saints in which the poor were at last at home with Christ.
For a time they were in a phantom world. As the armies streamed across the plains of France they actually saw the shining towers of the New Jerusalem upon the skyline. They swept onwards in a mood of dangerous exaltation. God had chosen them to be His instruments of vengeance towards the heathen. If any were to resist baptism they should be beheaded.
Under the whip-lash of misfortune these men had coalesced into groups. They were in search of Shangri-la, for the New Jerusalem, for the phantom opposite of the real misfortune their environment had visited upon them. Excitement ran between them like a virus in an epidemic. This was the time of the poor—the hour of the oppressed; blessed and sanctified by the Cross of Christ they would plant in place of the green banner of the Prophet. For them it was the beggar’s opera, the time for building castles in Israel. And so in their world there was neither faith nor reason, only the fringes of both. Away from the stabilising influence of their homes, having torn up their shallow roots from the barren towns, they sought for satisfaction in phantoms, an easy prey for the lunatic fringe of visionaries and paranoiacs whom they invested with the stature of their preachers and their prophets.
Across the centuries these phantom voices come down to us. Why, they murmur, should we go to the Holy Land when those who do not believe are among us? Professor Cohn quotes from the Chanson de Roland:
“The King’s Bishops bless the water and the heathen are brought to the baptistry. If anyone resists the King has him hanged, burned or beheaded. . . .” It is the authentic voice of the First Crusade—the phantom world of frenzy in which, for the minority who crossed its frontiers, pogrom became a sign of grace.
The victims of this the first of the great Christian pogroms were organised in Europe as follows. There were some in Hungary, in Bohemia and in parts of France and the Netherlands. The wealthiest and most numerous of them lived in the Rhineland and in the expanding cities on the Moselle and on the Rhine.
In these cities they were money-lenders and usurers. Traditionally we think of avarice as their national vice (every nation has one), and there is no doubt that one of their weaknesses is a great love of material things. In this case, however, they were forced by a number of circumstances to engage in commerce and usury, and to become conscript bankers at the whim of their feudal lord.
They were not allowed in many countries to own property and, as such, they were outcasts from, and outsiders to, the feudal system. This meant that they were excluded from the professional guilds and tended to become pedlars and money-lenders. At that time there was a conviction that the levying of interest upon loaned capital was sinful. It was not sinful to borrow; it was to lend, and hence, to salve the Christian conscience, the Jew was impressed—albeit willingly—into the role of money-lender, as he was deprived of the cultivation of the soil and forbidden the professions by the guilds. He was also forbidden to carry arms, so that he could be neither lord nor villein, and was loosely regarded as the property of the Emperor or the King, to whose underlings he paid protection money for the privilege of living in the town ghetto. His tenure was as insecure as the small trader’s in the Chicago gangster era of the 1920s. He was a ready source of income—to be milked dry by the local baron, by the King, by the State, with a flourish of the medieval equivalent of the tommy-gun if he failed to pay for protection.
While greed led the Jew into his phantom world (with which we are not concerned), avarice led the Gentile of the Middle Ages into a phantom world where he robbed Jews devoutly on the basis of a superstitious kind of faith that belongs neither to right reason nor to true religion. The sight of wealthy Jews to the discontented poor was a great provocation, no doubt. When the first wave of exaltation travelled among them it was towards the wealthy Jews of the Rhineland that they turned with animal envy.
For the Jews of the Rhineland twelve o’clock came on a May morning on the narrow streets of Speyer in the year of Our Lord 1096. There the first Jews were killed—until the community bought protection from the bishop. A little later at Worms more were killed. They sought protection in the Bishop’s House, but it was besieged and they slew each other or were slain, eight hundred of them. At Cologne they threw themselves in the river and were fished out again and literally hewn into pieces. At Mainz, at Trier and at Cologne the pattern was repeated. In a couple of months the Peoples’ Armies had executed about six thousand Jews.
In the cities on the Maine and on the Danube the pogrom also raged. Their one hope was to accept baptism. The remnants of the ghetto at Treves accepted instructions from the bishop and were saved. The appalling thing is that the avengers of the death of Our Lord believed the phantom dogma that God grants the gift of faith when a sword point leans on the throat of a Jew. They believed that Jewish babies were guilty of the death of Christ—as if any baby born now in England could be held guilty of the regicide of King Charles.1 They believed that if you killed a Jew you slew one of the army of Antichrist, and that this was a token of your own salvation.
These things were symptoms of a division between the Christian majority and the Jewish minority which was to grow sharper as the Middle Ages advanced. This pogrom really means that for the first time the acuteness of division between Jew and Gentile inscribed itself on the growing consciousness of medieval Europe.
In an age in which the hinges of culture were One Lord, one faith, one baptism the Jew was seen for the first time as a cancer in Christian social anatomy.
There were no myths until as from this time of the Jew as the ritual murderer of the Host, of the Jew as needing Christian blood for the Pasch, of the Jew as the murderer of Christian boys. This pogrom marks the beginning of them, as it does of the myth of the Wandering Jew and of the Juif Abominable whose image was imprinted by this, the first of the pogroms.
Sartre writes (Portrait of the Anti-Semite, Secker & Warburg): “From the primitive aspect, the Jew is thus a murderer or the son of a murderer (which, in the eyes of a collectivity which conceives responsibility in a pre-logical form, amounts strictly to the same thing) and as such, he is taboo.”↩︎