The First Crusade sets out to “liberate” Jerusalem. But a 10,000–man German Crusader army, instead of heading southeast towards Jerusalem, marches first north into the Rhine Valley, into well–known Jewish communities such as Cologne. The Jews were to be held individually culpable for the Crucifixion of Jesus by Rome 1062 years earlier.
With the Crusaders often giving the Jewish communities a choice between conversion and death, according to the historical record many Jewish communities committed mass–suicide in horrific scenes.
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Today, many contemporary Christian books and many online encyclopedias relating events of the Middle Ages, often have a small segment included relating/asserting how the local bishop attempted to protect the Jews from the low–level Christian mobs or from the fancy Christian mob—the Crusaders.
In all these segments, the bishop is inevitably overcome by the mob or yields to the mob or is outflanked by the mob. The Catholic bishop, however, does not seem to ever actually “stand–down” the Catholic mob. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Be that as it may, where was all this hatred sown initially? It was sown in Church-related and texts—in the very cathedral of this very same bishop—whether or not during his precise tenure.
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Having provided the “kindling wood, the gasoline and the matches” for a bonfire mob scene of hatred, the Church is then postured in contemporary Catholic texts as having shown up at the conflagration in the person of the bishop, to nobly protest. In addition, many of these vignettes seem to have made an appearance in Catholic texts after the Holocaust, after which, damning the Jews and other assorted genocidal tendencies, all tended to no longer play–well in “polite society” of the West. So, best, apparently, to tamper with the texts.
The Vatican may be a little slow in contemporary times when it comes to updating various Catholic texts to neuter hatred towards the Jews as per the humanistic thrust of Nostre Aetate, but its numeraries seem to have alacrity at “updating” its texts and online references post–Holocaust, to “distance” the Vatican from the inevitable “mob,” whether Crusader Christian or Nazi.
Both the bishops and the cathedrals, in parallel to the Church itself, will have two “faces,” two diametrically different agendas and projections.
The bishops will be postured as devoted servants of Jesus, advancing humanism. But the bishops are simultaneously also the subtle “enablers” of hatred—towards the Jewish nation, the fount of Jesus, as well as towards other “politically incorrect” groups.