The Rhineland Massacres and Religious Violence During the First Crusade

This paper will elucidate how Christendom within popular imagination, spurred on by coalescing imperial identities, created and forced violence upon minority persons, such as Jews, in the build-up to the first crusade. While we think of the crusades as acts of war within the Near East, we need to disrupt this perceived binary of Christians and Muslims. Looking at the formations of modern antisemitism is more crucial than ever. This paper will look at the Jewish sources of the Rhineland massacres to understand the reception and reaction to Christian crusading ideology outside of a pure Christian/Muslim binary and to see how Christendom interacted with new ideas of national identity to purposefully and violently create an Other. This violence will be understood through theories of narrative fracture that unveil the continued trauma, even in narrating the accounts themselves.