Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade

摘要: How are martyrs made, and how do the memories of express, nourish, mold ideals community? Sanctifying Name God wrestles with these questions against background massacres Jews in Rhineland during outbreak First Crusade. Marking first extensive wave anti-Jewish violence medieval Christian Europe, "Persecutions 1096" exerted a profound influence on course European Jewish history. When crusaders demanded that choose between Christianity death, many opted for baptism. Many others, however, chose to die as rather than live Christians, these, actually inflicted death upon themselves their loved ones. Stories self-sacrifice ushered ideal martyrdom--kiddush ha-Shem, sanctification God's holy name--into new phase, conditioning collective memory mindset Ashkenazic Jewry centuries come, Holocaust, even today. The survivors 1096 memorialized victims they rebuilt communities decades following Three twelfth-century Hebrew chronicles persecutions preserve martyrdom self-sacrifice, tales fraught symbolic meaning constitute one earliest attempts at local, contemporary historiography. Reading analyzing stories through prism religious literary traditions, Jeremy Cohen shows persecution reveal much more about storytellers, martyrologists, themselves. While extol glorious heroism martyrs, also air doubts, guilt, conflicts those who, by submitting temporarily crusaders, survived.