The Rhineland Massacres and Religious Violence During the First Crusade

When speaking about violence, the present inevitably comes to mind—wars of extermination, colonialism, and nonstate actors seeking to harm. Yet to know where we are today, we must also ask where we have been. In this paper, I will look at how Christendom influenced European ideas of antisemitism within a crusading context and how this formation of identity both required and looked for an other to moderate exclusion between groups.

The guiding question of this paper revolves around violence within and around identity formation for groups. Within the crusading fervor whipped up at the end of the 11th century, there is already an easy witness to this kind of formation. Christendom is pushing itself towards the exclusivity of all other religions, notably the powerful transcontinental power of Islam. This front is not singular, as the Reconquista was an eternal process in this context, but lost to most in this milieu, are Jews. Yet it is preciously this group, before the crusading armies even reach the borders of the Eastern Roman Empire, that the crusaders attack first. In perhaps the first major act of anti-Jewish violence of the Middle Ages, we see in stark clarity the implicit exclusivity of crusading ideology. Not only that: we see some historians, such as Kenneth Stow, posit that the crusaders themselves knew the violence was illegitimate. The crusaders knew the violence was illegitimate, yet still did it for the purpose of legitimizing their own narratives about Christendom. This paper will look at the Jewish accounts, specifically the *Mainz Anonymous Chronicle*, to look at reactions to this violence and understand how Christian violence was formative not only for their own groups, but also for the marginalized groups experiencing that violence. Seeing the interplay between abuser and abused within the Christian and Jewish sources can lead to understanding the groups’ different constructed realities. After the Christians leave, the known illegitimate violence was covered up with platitudes about supersessionism and reactions to the story of Jews killing Jesus. But this moment was powerful for the crusading moment as it solidified what exactly the Christians were fighting for. It was not necessarily a fight against Islam but a fight rooted in being pro-Christianity to the detriment of all other faiths and ideas.

This paper will look interdisciplinarily at these texts as history and literature to strain out both the historical facts and the emotive communal understandings of these actions. It will use these methods to understand how previous conceptions of identity influenced how this violence came about and left a fractured reality in its wake. Determining the historical accuracy of the accounts is not the paper’s primary goal, but rather centering this fractured narrative which allows us to enter the perceived reality of the narrator. Through Robert Chazan’s ideas about source and timelessness, this paper will speak to how identities were formed in this specific communal traumatic act through trauma theory and ideas of how trauma can lead to fractured reality. The *Mainz Anonymous Chronicle* attempts to create narrative of time and fails, thus proving the hypothesis of trauma theory. Fractured reality makes the present and past difficult to ascertain, along with an unimaginable future.