–Second Crusade
Caption on Mainz, Germany tombstone, Old Jewish Cemetery, Alt Israelitische Friedhof, extant today, on hillside overlooking the Rhine River, as visited and viewed by chronicler James Carroll:
“Daughter of Isaac drowned and murdered. Martyred in sanctification of the oneness of God in the year 906 (1146 CE) on the Friday, the fifth of Iyar (19 April). May she rest in Eden, the Garden.”
Note the nuance of the subtly defiant inscription in full public view:
“In sanctification of the oneness of God”—as opposed to the trinity of her killers.
***
“That the daughter of Isaac was murdered in (April) 1146 CE indicates that she was a martyred victim of the Second Crusade, which was launched by a call of Pope Eugene III in March (the month prior) of that year. That the young woman died in April, within the month, suggests with what efficiency crusader terror returned to Mainz (after the First Crusade).”
–Shlomo Eidelberg, The Jews and the Crusaders, New Jersey: KTAV Publishing House © 1996, p. 126.
***
To the Jews, the Crusader cross was a symbol of evil and death. Church theology juxtaposed Catholicism against their metaphysical anti–Christ. To the Jews, as murderous Christian activity accelerated against them in the Middle Ages, the Church had itself morphed into the metaphysical anti–Christ, disguised and dressed in holy vestments, an occupation entity holding fancy cathedrals in its evil grasp.
From the Jewish perspective, a diabolical Church preached peace and love to the world, but simultaneously fostered and incited hatred and murder to its core constituents. Ongoing for centuries.
To the terrorized and brutalized Jews of the Middle Ages, the amorphous legacy of a loving Rabbi Jesus, whoever Jesus might actually have been, had clearly been hijacked by the manipulative Church. In turn, this increasingly empowered Church had morphed as increasingly murderous and merciless against the isolated and unarmed Jews. Notwithstanding the fact that Jesus had himself preached within Judaism or perhaps, because of that. For whatever combination of tactical, psychological, political or theological–justification motives, the Church had set out to undermine and brutalize the already–scattered and isolated Jews.
Christianity would “package” the New Testament as part of a 2–part set with the Jewish Bible, adding gravitas and credibility to the New Testament. But would then simultaneously severely undermine the Jews as a whole in the very same New Testament.
Christianity via its iconic centerpiece Jesus, would co–opt “love thy neighbor” from the Hillel School of the Pharisees (normative Judaism).
While the mother of Jesus was positioned as the Virgin Mary, the balance of world Jewry, stretching forth many dozens of generations, outside his devotees, is assiduously demonized and dehumanized – as in–league with the
Devil – by the Christian “Doctors of the Church,” front and center.
The murder–drowning victim “the daughter of Isaac” was far from alone. The Rhine River alone would run red with Jewish blood intermittently over the centuries to come.
The Crusaders were a very brave lot – especially when it came to murdering defenseless Jewish children – and their parents…