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A third and last instance of appeal to God is found toward the close of the description of the
slaughter of those Jews who had shut themselves up in one of the upper chambers of the archbishop's
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palace. While that particular story is dominated by Rachel, in fact she and her children were not the
only victims of the crusaders' fury in that chamber. After
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depicting generalized killing, the author notes that the victims were then stripped naked. This evokes
once more an auctorial cry of pain and outrage, this time taken from the book of Lamentations. "See,
O Lord, and behold how abject I have become."[31] Again, the Jewish victims of 1096 are identified
with the destroyed sanctuary, with parallel shock evoked by both.
Just as the outbursts of anguish are addressed to a divine audience, so too is the general
argument of the Mainz Anonymous: the Jews of 1096 exhibited unprecedented loyalty and devotion in
their heroic behavior; God who knows all can hardly be oblivious to this loyalty; the end result must
surely be divine reversal of affairs, with the Jewish victims vindicated and the Christian oppressors
punished. This is, of course, simply another version of the timeless message addressed to the Jewish
survivors. For the latter, this thesis is presented as declarative: God must surely behave this way. For
the divine audience, it is laid down in the appropriate form of a petition. The certitude expressed to
human readers does not detract from the supplicatory nature of the petitions to God, nor do the
supplications diminish the certainty of the message to the human eyes and ears that will encounter the
narrative. Divine reward must be forthcoming, and the anguished request for such reward by no
means compromises the certainty of that assertion.
The Cologne segment and the larger Solomon bar Simson Chronicle of which it is a part both
address the double audience just noted. More specifically, they address immediate and subsequent
Jewish readers and a divine reader-auditor. Indeed, the outcry to God is, if anything, intensified in
these two compositions. We have noted earlier the fuller tendency in the Cologne unit and the
prologue and epilogue to the Solomon bar Simson Chronicle to address God repeatedly and urgently.
In particular, the closing segment of the Solomon bar Simson Chronicle, which focuses on the
destruction of the popular crusading bands that wrought such havoc among the Rhineland Jews, ends
with the citation of a series of biblical verses that urge divine vengeance upon those who had
committed such atrocities on innocent Jewish victims. Given our dating of the writing of the Cologne
segment as well as the editing of the Solomon bar Simson Chronicle to the 1140s, the petitions for
divine reward and especially for divine vengeance take on special urgency.[32]
The timeless message of these two late Jewish observers is addressed to both humanity and the
divinity, and the essentials of the message remain the same: God will surely and/or must please
reward the Jewish heroism of 1096 and avenge the Christian bestiality. Once again, there
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is an interesting interplay between the assertive declarations of divine reward and punishment
intended for Jewish eyes and the urgent requests for such reward and punishment intended for divine
eyes. While seemingly a contradictory combination, our Jewish observers clearly felt that these related
messages in fact effectively reinforced each other.[33]
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10. God, Humanity, and History
The timeless objectives of the Hebrew First Crusade narratives were shaped by both the normal
human desire to ameliorate tragedy through understanding and by Christian insistence that the
catastrophe of 1096 should serve as a particularly dramatic sign of divine rejection of the Jewish
people. A Jewish explanation that would simultaneously provide the solace of meaning and rebut the
destructive Christian contentions was essential. It was, I would argue, no accident that the format
chosen for clarifying the meaning of the events of 1096 was the narrative. As we have seen, our five
Jewish voices make their cases largely through their stories. The unprecedented (from the narrators'
perspective) Jewish behaviors of 1096 ultimately provide the solace of understanding and rebut the
damaging Christian assertions.
The Jewish narratives present a striking view of the interplay between God and humanity in
shaping the course of history. From the Bible onward, Jewish (as well as Christian) tradition had seen
history as resulting from the interaction of the divine and the human. The simplest paradigm for that
interaction, as already noted, involved human sin and resultant divine retribution. That simplistic
paradigm had to give way to considerable refinement. Indeed, Christianity, with its suffering Messiah,
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