Review: Violence and Spirituality: The Enigma of the First Crusade Author(s): Bernard McGinn Reviewed work(s): The

First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading by Jonathan Riley-Smith European Jewry and the First Crusade by Robert Chazan Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 69, No. 3 (Jul., 1989), pp. 375-379 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1205008 Accessed: 19/06/2009 13:33
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Review Articles
Violence and Spirituality: The Enigma of the First Crusade*
Bernard McGinn
/ University Chicago of

The First Crusade, one of the most dramatic events of the Middle Ages, has not lacked for historians. The events of the Crusade of 1095-99 stimulated a spate of accounts among Latin authors and was also reported upon by Byzantine and Arabic historians, as well as by some important and innovative Jewish chronicles. All these accounts have been well known and much studied for almost a century now. But lest one think that the First Crusade is a dead subject, these two recent books demonstrate, in interesting and overlapping ways, just how important, revealing, and tragic an event it was in medieval religious history. Since the publication of Steven Runciman's three-volume History of the Crusades,l the history of the Crusading movement has tended to move away from the older story of military campaigns, political machinations, and biographies of leaders toward a broader treatment both of the phenomenon of the Crusade and of the society it produced. Joshua Prawer and an innovative group of Israeli historians have been in the forefront of study of the protocolonial society set up by the Crusaders in the East; both European and American historians have contributed much to the study of Crusader institutions, Crusading policy, and even the criticism of the Crusades in recent years. Nor have historians forgotten that, whatever else they were, the Crusades were also religious events. Perhaps the disturbing rise in religiously motivated violence and war in the Middle East during the past four decades has had something to do with this new historiography, but recent concern for the history of medieval forms of lay piety also has played a role. The study of the Crusade as a religious event was initiated by one of the classics of twentieth-century Crusade historiography, Carl Erdmann's Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens of 1935, translated into English in
*Jonathan Riley-Smith, TheFirst Crusadeand theIdea of Crusading(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), vii+227 pp., $29.95. Robert Chazan, European Jewryand theFirst Crusade (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), ix+380 pp. 1Steven Runciman, A Historyof theCrusades,3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951-54). ? 1989 The by University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-4189/89/6903-0005$0 1.00

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The Journal of Religion 1977 as The Origin of the Idea of Crusade.2 Erdmann's thesis, that of the development of the Crusade out of a combination of pilgrimage piety and the growing western Christian use of the idea of holy war, has stood up well over the years, though it has been questioned and qualified in various details. But Erdmann ended his account with Urban II's preaching of the Crusade in 1095. More recent work (e.g., A. Dupront, E. O. Blake, H. E. J. Cowdrey, J. Richard, and McGinn) has tried to direct attention to the events of the Crusade itself and the ways in which it came to be understood. Now Jonathan Riley-Smith, who has produced a number of articles on these themes since 1977, has summarized and deepened his forays into the religious aspects of the First Crusade in this book on the relation between the experience of the Crusade and the development of the fullfledged idea of Crusade. Riley-Smith's work is based upon a thorough knowledge of the sources, breaking new ground in his use of the charters of departing Crusaders as evidence for their forms of motivation. Though one can argue that, in particulars, the book fails to push its case far enough in some directions and perhaps too far in others, it represents the best general account of the religious meaning of the Crusade, and as such it is an important addition to literature on the Crusades and to the development of forms of lay piety in the Middle Ages. The central insight governing Riley-Smith's approach, as announced early in the book, is that "the concepts to which Urban gave expression ... were transformed by the dreadful experiences of the army on the march and the euphoria that followed the liberation of Jerusalem into a new association of ideas, crude and semi-popular, which found its way into the narrative accounts of the eyewitnesses" (p. 2). Expressed in summary fashion, this may seem almost a truism, but carried through in detail it shows how the Crusade was more the creation of the epic events of the march itself than of the plans of the pope-which is only to put lay piety back where it belongs. The major blocks in the new interpretive structure are easy enough to sketch. Urban's plans for the holy war to free Jerusalem, according to Riley-Smith, did not mark as notable an advance on those of earlier reform popes, as is usually suggested. The amazing response they evoked still remains a puzzle, but Riley-Smith argues effectively against the oftcited idea that landless knights and younger sons saw the Crusade as an opportunity to win fame and territory in the East. Given the expense and uncertainty of the venture, as well as the fact that many of the minority who survived returned home, the evidence for preponderently religious motivation looks very plausible. The unexpected popular reaction to
2Carl Erdmann, TheOriginof the Idea of Crusade(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).

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Urban's call for the Crusade indicates that too strong a distinction should not be drawn between the "popular Crusade" associated with Peter the Hermit and the better-organized bands of the "knightly Crusade." Hence the savage pogroms against the Rhineland Jews initiated by the former groups (the subject of Chazan's book) should be viewed as dangerous expansions of the theme of vengeance on the "enemies of God" that was implied by the whole Crusading mentality (pp. 50-57). Riley-Smith's central chapters treat of the religious dimensions brought to the fore during the actual march to Jerusalem. The pilgrimage mentality, the importance of relics (including the view of Jerusalem itself as the relic par excellence), the role of visions (especially those involving warrior saints), the growing conviction that those who died on the march could be described as martyrs, all play a part in the story. While each of these themes is well developed in individual fashion, a general coordinating principle of interpretation is lacking, one that I have argued elsewhere can be found in the Crusade considered as a ritual process. Although the dynamics of pilgrimage as a form of ritual process have been more developed by anthropologists than by medievalists, the application of this interpretive key in no way distorts the evidence present in contemporary accounts and allows the various aspects of Crusading piety to be seen as a whole. The third part of Riley-Smith's thesis concerns the creation of a more theological picture of the Crusade, especially in the subsequent accounts of Robert the Monk, Guibert of Nogent, and Baldric of Bourgueil, all of whom, during the course of the first decade of the twelfth century, interpreted the conquest of Jerusalem in the light of a providential view of history. "But apart from the mystery of the healing cross, what more marvellous deed has there been since the creation of the world than that which was done in modern times in this journey of our men toJerusalem?" as Robert put it. Here Riley-Smith highlights not only the importance of the new style of active martyrdom that gradually arose on the march and was developed by medieval historians but also a more problematic interpretation that these monastic writers viewed the Crusade as a "monastery in motion" (p. 150). The partial hints of this picture found in the three monastic historians are given more emphasis than they can really bear, especially since this theological view does not seem to have played any role in the sources closer to the events, nor, as far as I can see, in the later development of the Crusade idea. The emphasis, found in Riley-Smith's book, on the Crusade as introducing a new development in Christian understanding of martyrdom finds an intriguing parallel in Robert Chazan's European Jewry and the First Crusade, which argues that the "new-style threat [of the Crusade] serves as the backdrop for the reaffirmation of old styles of Jewish 377

The Journal of Religion resistance to persecution and for the emergence of a distinctly new style of Jewish martyrdom" (p. 220). Chazan's innovative book seeks to correct much of the traditional view of the effect of the vicious persecution of the Jews by Crusader bands in 1096 according to three general theses. Rather than seeing the Ashkenazic Jews as an isolated minority in the burgeoning society of northern Europe in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, he argues that they were very much a part of this spiritually creative era and that the remarkable ways in which they came to grips with the tragedy of the Crusade witnesses to this. Second, Chazan emphasizes the diversity of actions and reactions on the part of both Christians and Jews and the relatively limited scope of the persecutions. Many Christians, both neighbors and local authorities, came to the support of the Jews, though their assistance usually had limits in the face of the savagery of the marauding Crusader bands. TheJewish communities themselves reacted in a wide variety of ways to the attacks, from flight and conversion (usually feigned) to resistance, voluntary martyrdom, and even active martyrdom, that is, killing one's children and family so that they would not be subject to forced conversion. Chazan's third thesis is that the events of 1096 did not form a watershed in Jewish history as has often been claimed. Despite the thousands killed, Ashkenazic Jewry continued to grow and flourish in the succeeding decades and "1096 did not usher in a period of unrelenting insecurity for Jewish life" (p. 203). The basic sources Chazan uses are the three famous Hebrew chronicles which he terms "The Mainz Anonymous" (called S, or the shorter narrative), the longer narrative (or L), often ascribed to Solomon ben Simson, and a later abridgment of L. His account of the origin and interrelation of these narratives is, in general, convincing, but one can wonder if he places too much emphasis on the reliability of the speeches put into the mouths of the martyrs as evidence for their actual attitudes (pp. 115-16). The events of the Crusade were unusual and surprising both to Jews and to Christians. Since the Christian sources were only able to make theological sense of this great upheaval after the fact, perhaps the theological motivations expressed in speeches of the Hebrew sources are, more likely, later attempts to explain the tragic and unaccustomed events. Why did the Crusaders (admittedly the less-organized bands) attack the Jews? Here Chazan and Riley-Smith are at one in placing the blame on the Crusade idea itself rather than on economic tensions between Jews and Christians. In announcing the Crusade, Pope Urban unleashed energies beyond his imagining, energies that the church, at least temporarily, could not control. The notion of holy war against the Islamic enemies of the Cross contained the seeds of the theme of vengeance against all of the enemies of Christ, an idea that upset the delicate balance between tolera378

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tion and rejection that governed traditional ecclesiastical attitudes toward the Jews. The struggle of Bernard of Clairvaux at the time of the Second Crusade against the renegade monk Ralph shows how diligently the official Church worked to regain the initiative in this area. The most intriguing part of Chazan's book comes in his account of the spiritual creativity displayed by the Ashkenazic Jews during the crisis (chaps. 4-5). Abstracting from the question posed above about how far the theological symbols and explanations found in the chronicles may or may not reflect the actual intentions of the martyrs, Chazan deftly shows how the Hebrew sources introduce a new form of martyrdom into Jewish spirituality, an activist form of self-sacrifice colored by the biblical account of Abraham's binding of Isaac and leading to the notion of the martyr as sacrificial victim-"they were resuming the long-suspended Temple cult, indeed in a remarkably personal and original manner" (pp. 126-27). Theologically, this was to lead to an original form of theodicy that saw the terrible persecution not so much in terms of God's punishment for human sin (the standard Christian explanation, by the way, for the failure of the later Crusades) but, rather, in Abrahamic fashion as "a test imposed upon a uniquely worthy generation" (p. 162). Chazan goes even further in describing this new spirituality as a Jewish form of "Counter-Crusade" in which the death of the martyrs is the guarantee of ultimate victory-an intriguing concept, but one which seems to give an unduly Christian reading to what was a very distinctive, if new, development inJewish piety. The tragic events of the First Crusade, now deftly illuminated in diverse but parallel ways by Riley-Smith and Chazan, will doubtless continue to attract the attention of medievalists in the years to come. Both these accounts represent not only considerable advances on previous scholarship but also invitations to subsequent work. (A similar book on the effects of the Crusade on Muslim piety, though the evidence would have to come largely from a later period, would be most welcome.) The tragedy of the thousands ofJews slaughtered for their faith and of thousands of Crusaders (most of whom did not attack Jews) who died on their religious march toJerusalem still has the power to move us. It may even have the power to teach us something about the dangers involved in mixing, even with the best of intentions, religious motivation and armed conflict.

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