1096 CE: JEWISH MARTYRDOM at MAINZ (GERMANY) CATHEDRAL

From Constantine’s Sword –
“The crusaders were unleashed, storming through the city, looking for “the circumcised.” Jews who had eluded crusaders, or bribed them during the early phase of the Rhineland incursion, had been succeeded, especially in Speyer and Worms, by Jews who were murdered in cold blood. By the time of Mainz, crusader ferocity was at its peak, fueled by a cross–inspired righteousness, for, as the [medieval] chronicler recounts it, they declared of their Jewish prey, ‘You are the children of those who killed our object of veneration, hanging him [Jesus] on a tree [Cross]; and he [Jesus] himself had said: There will yet come a day when my children will come and avenge my blood. We [the Crusaders] are his children and it is… therefore obligatory for us to avenge him since you [the Jews] are the ones who rebel and disbelieve him.’”

“The theology of anti–Jewish hatred could not be more clearly stated. Its meaning could not have been more firmly grasped than it was then by the Jews of Mainz. More than one thousand men, women, and children huddled in the courtyard of the archbishop’s palace. They knew very well what had happened elsewhere in the preceding weeks, how bribes and flight had failed, finally, to protect even children. In Mainz, Jews had time to reflect on what was coming, and they knew that the only possible escape was through apostasy. Some few took that way out, but to most conversion to Christianity was more unthinkable than ever.”

“There is an ancient arcaded courtyard beside the cathedral that dates to within a century of 1096, and it is certainly at or near the place where the Jews awaited the crusader. Not long ago, on balmy summer morning, I sat on a stone bench in that courtyard, with the Gothic arches of the church on one side, the pointed leaded windows of the present chapter house on another. The ornate chapter house formerly served as the archbishop’s palace, on or near the site of Ruthard’s. A large granite crucifix dominated yet another side of the yard. A stone fountain, a vestige of a well, stood in the center of a grassy rectangle, altogether the size, say, of a basketball court. A pair of relatively young trees cast a filigree of shadows towards the fountain. The trees reminded me that everything I was looking at had been reconstructed from the rubble of World War II. A scattering of rose bushes was in bloom that morning, and the red shimmered against the gray stone, a contrast that emphasized the dark weight of a multilayered past.”

“Solomon bar Simson wrote [in 1096 CE]:

The hand of the Lord rested heavily on His people, and all the Gentiles assembled against the Jews in the courtyard to exterminate them…When the people of the Sacred Covenant saw that the Heavenly decree had been issued and that the enemy had defeated them and were entering the courtyard, they all cried out together – old and young, maidens and children, menservants and maids – to their Father in Heaven…“There is no questioning the ways of the Holy One, blessed be He and blessed be His Name, Who has given us His Torah and has commanded us to allow ourselves to be killed and slain in witness to the Oneness of His Holy Name…”

“Then in a great voice they all cried out as one: “We need tarry no longer, for the enemy is already upon us. Let us hasten and offer ourselves a s sacrifice before God. Anyone possessing a knife should examine it to see that it is not defective, and let him then proceed to slaughter us in sanctification of the Unique and Eternal One, then slaying himself – either cutting his throat or thrusting the knife into his stomach.”

“In April 1942, Nazis swarmed into the Warsaw Ghetto, hauling Jews to Umschlag Platz, where the boxcars waited. The yellow building behind the high fence at 60 Sienna Street was a children’s hospital. One of its doctors was Adina Blandy Szwajger. She survived to tell what happened as the Germans began “taking the sick from the wards to the cattle trucks…I took morphine upstairs…and just as, during those two years of real work in the hospital, I had bent down over the little beds, so now I poured this last medicine down those tiny mouths…and downstairs there was screaming.”

“Or, as Solomon bar Simson wrote of those in the archbishop’s courtyard (in 1096 CE):

The women girded their loins with strength and slew their own sons and daughters, and then themselves. Many men also mustered their strength and slaughtered their wives and children and infants. The most gentle and tender of women slaughtered the child of her delight. They all arose, man and woman alike, and slew one another…Let the ears hearing this and its like be seared, for who has heard or seen the likes of it? In quire and seek: was there ever such a mass sacrificial offering since the time of Adam? Did it ever occur that there were one thousand and one hundred offerings on one single day – all of them comparable to the sacrifice of Isaac, the son of Abraham?…For since the day on which the Second Temple was destroyed, their like had not arisen, nor shall there be their like again… Happy are they and happy is their lot, for all of them are destined for eternal life in the World–to–Come – and may my place be amongst them!”