american-holocaust

176 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTtected the remaining local Jewish population within the confines of hiscastle. The legalistic niceties of canon proscription were lost, then as always,on most local priests and popular preachers, however, and in a matterof days the anti-Jewish blood lust spread to the town of Worms. Withthe Christian authorities in Worms less willing than the bishop in Speyerhad been to protect the innocent Jews from assault, Christian enthusiastssacked the local synagogue and looted the Jews' houses. All the town'sadult Jews who refused to convert, and who did not commit suicide inacts of defiance-approximately eight hundred in all-were stripped naked,murdered, and buried en masse. Some among the Jewish children alsowere murdered. The rest were carted off to be baptized and raised asChristians. 86The worst was yet to come. In Mainz, a city just to the north of Worms,the archbishop briefly defended the Jews, but soon fled for his own life asthe Christian mobs attacked. According to Solomon bar Simson's chronicleof the events that followed, the leader of the Christians in Mainzshowed no mercy to the aged, or youths, or maidens, babes or sucklingsnoteven the sick. And he made the people of the Lord like dust to be troddenunderfoot, killing their young men by the sword and disembowelingtheir pregnant women. . . . The enemy came into the chambers, they smashedthe doors, and found the Jews still writhing and rolling in blood; and theenemy took their money, stripped them naked, and slew those still alive.. . . They threw them, naked, through the windows onto the ground, creatingmounds upon mounds, heaps upon heaps, until they appeared as a highmountain. . . . On a single day-the third of Sivan, the third day of theweek-one thousand and one hundred holy souls were killed and slaughtered,babes and sucklings who had not sinned or transgressed, the souls ofinnocent poor people. 87And still it was not over. From Mainz the killing spread to Trier. Fromthere it moved on to Metz, and then to Cologne, and then to Regensburg,and then to Prague. By the time the killing stopped little more than amonth was gone since it had begun in the town of Speyer, and as many aseight thousand Jews lay dead. 88It was not coincidence that the massacres of May and June 1096 occurredat the same time that the First Crusade of Pope Urban II was justgetting under way. For the mass murderers of the Jews in Speyer and Wormsand Mainz and Metz and Cologne and Regensburg and Prague were errantbands of Christian soldiers who had wandered from the overlong trail toJerusalem, under the leadership of such perfervid souls as Peter the Hermitand Count Emicho of Leiningen, to search out and destroy heretical victimswho were closer to home than were the Saracens of the Holy Land.Those Crusaders who fulfilled the charge to march all the way to Jerusalem,however, were no less faithful to the impulse of Christian blood lust.