The crusaders that killed Jews were the ones who ignored the fact that they were STRICTLY TOLD by the Church not to kill the Jews, but did it anyway because, hey, why not kill these non-christians close to home right? Ignoring the fact that of course the Church had said prior “leave the Jews alone, they’re a contributing group to society, k thnx, love and kisses”.
The ‘low crusaders’ caused a lot of problems for the major leaders of the crusades on the whole, being the xenophobic rabble and usually entirely the peasantry, which was the opposite of what Urban II had wanted: he had wanted Knights and nobles to get the heck out of Europe. Notably, those two groups did generally end up being at least if not supportive of the Jews, tolerant, if only because the Jews were their tenants on their land, were a huge money source, and in Outremer tended to be fairly easy to deal with.
So yes. It’s a very complex matter because (as with most of the middle ages), broad brush strokes don’t usually work as in the same context as the anti-Semitic rampages, you have groups trying to defend the Jewish population within a city.
Everytime I see either an uninformed random person talking about the crusaders being objectively evil, or some ultra-right-wing person adopting the crusaders iconography and images to perpetuate the exact attitude of Islamophobic sentiment described by @thecalmissar, I am between a deep sigh, and a drink.
Short answer is: the super Islamophobic image cultivated by the Right-wing that they attach in a Revisionist mentality to the Crusaders within a historical context, is a fiction created by that group. While the Crusaders did have some Islamophobic attitudes, it would not be in the context we recognise today, and was often downplayed between rhetoric (propaganda they put out and preached) and reality (wherein Crusader Lords and factions tried to ally with the various Saracen forces, rented property to them, etc).
The Crusaders were… varied. The bottom rung of them, the armed pilgrims and peasants were notorious for extreme fanaticism and what we would consider racism today, whereas the middling and upper classes were far more practical and friendly outside of a warring context. Like all conflicts, the Good Guys and Bad Guys are a bit more nuanced than we like to think.
Seeing that you reblogged this from wearepaladin, I’m guessing you know who we-are-knight is right? If you do, that means you’ve seen his content, which if you have seen any of his Crusader history posts, you would know that’s not true.
You’re right, they belong to the fanatical Christians who think Muslim people are heretical demons that must be purged from The Holy Land… Like???????? Crusaders weren’t any kind or flavor of Good
It’s probably reductive to reduce anti-Islamic and anti-Judaic (I’m not going to call it antisemitism in the modern sense, because that doesn’t really exist before the 1492 expulsion and subsequent limpieza de sangue laws) to a problem of the uneducated, undisciplined mob. The picture is more nuanced than that; the Rhineland pogroms were led by a count, after all, and in the Holy Land there are recorded cases of very low-level individuals freely mixing with Muslims as they went on mini-pilgrimages along the way to Jerusalem.
But if you look at the accounts by Hebrew chroniclers themselves, the Church hierarchy often did try to protect their Jewish communities from crusaders; sometimes this defense folded almost immediately upon use of force by the crusaders, but at other times crusaders actually had to launch sieges against cathedrals who refused to give up the Jews hidden inside. It seems Christian and Jewish peasants had some friendly relationships too, because there are recorded instances of Christians encouraging Jews to flee and holding onto their neighbor’s wealth until they were able to return (though the Rhineland pogroms were intensely traumatic and would be commemorated in Jewish liturgies for centuries to come, the material damage and loss of life wasn’t as bad as some accounts seem to make out, given the Jewish communities were thriving again within a few decades).
That being said, while these attacks were highly condemned by local bishops, Urban II didn’t seem to feel any need to address them; that only happened when the Holy Roman Emperor said that forced baptisms were not valid, at which point Urban II was like, “Uh, yeah, they do count.” So he didn’t seem too broken up about what had happened.
For further reading, I recommend at least these following books:
– Living Together, Living Apart: Rethinking Jewish-Christian Relations in the Middle Ages, by Jonathan M. Elukin (who challenges general conceptions of an exclusively hostile relationship between Jews and Christians) – Abraham’s Heirs: Jews and Christians in Medieval Europe, by Leonard Glick (who traces a history of anti-Judaic thought through medieval Europe) – The First Crusade: A New History, by Thomas Asbridge (who disputes a black-and-white, apocalyptic Muslim vs Christian interpretations of the First Crusade)
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