Pogroms of 1096 - Christian Church Response

Christian Church Response

The massacre of the Rhineland Jews by the People's Crusade, and other associated persecutions, were condemned by the leaders and officials of the Catholic Church. The bishops of Mainz, Speyer, and Worms had attempted to protect the Jews of those towns within the walls of their own palaces, but the People's Crusade broke in to slaughter them. Fifty years later when St. Bernard of Clairvaux was urging recruitment for the Second Crusade, he specifically criticized the attacks on Jews which occurred in the First Crusade. There is debate on Bernard's exact motivations, as like many he may have been disappointed that the People's Crusade devoted so much time and resources to attacking the Jews of Western Europe while contributing almost nothing to the attempt to retake the Holy Land itself, the result being that Bernard was urging the knights to maintain focus on the goal of protecting Christian interests in the Holy Land. It is equally possible that Bernard honestly held the belief that forcibly converting the Jews was immoral, or perceived that the original Rhineland massacre was really motivated by greed: both of these sentiments are echoed by bishop Albert of Aachen in the chronicle of the First Crusade which he wrote. Albert of Aachen's own view was that the People's Crusade were uncontrollable semi-Christianized country-folk (citing the "goose incident", which Hebrew chronicles corroborate), who massacred hundreds of Jewish women and children, and that the People's Crusade were themselves slaughtered by Muslim forces in Asia Minor.