Reconstructing Ashkenaz
A new book by David Malkiel, Reconstructing Ashkenaz: The Human Face of Franco-German Jewry, 1000-1250
Reconstructing Ashkenaz shows that, contrary to traditional accounts, the Jews of Western Europe in the High Middle Ages were not a society of saints and martyrs. David Malkiel offers provocative revisions of commonly held interpretations of Jewish martyrdom in the First Crusade massacres, the level of obedience to rabbinic authority, and relations with apostates and with Christians. In the process, he also reexamines and radically revises the view that Ashkenazic Jewry was more pious than its Sephardic counterpart.
January 8th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
I read his revisionist interpretation of medieval Jewish martyrdom in 1096 in his “Destruction or Conversion Intention and reaction, Crusaders and Jews, in 1096″ in Jewish History, 15: 257–280, 2001:
Abstract. The argument has long been made that Jews who took their lives during the massacres of the First Crusade in 1096 did so after choosing death over baptism. However, the texts, especially those relating to events in the Rhineland, the site of the greatest violence, do not support the argument. Both Jewish and Christian authors, if anything, suggest that an option to become baptized existed, if at all, only after the first, and deadly, assaults, whose principal driving force was mayhem. Moreover, the option of accepting baptism is principally, if not always, discussed in a personal context, of an individual or a family beseeched, most often by Christians the Jews already know, to convert. These episodes also follow, literarily, a prior massacre. Whether the texts reflect a real historical sequence of events may be impossible to say; they are extraordinarily complex and always edited, often well after the events, each with its own viewpoint that takes priority over simple chronography. Yet in no case does
baptism take priority over mayhem. The long-standing counter-thesis of “choice” must be reconsidered.