On 3 May 1096, the Jewish Sabbath, Count Emich's troops attacked the Jews at Speyer, near to his estates, killing a dozen of them who refused baptism, before the bishop came to their rescue. One woman committed suicide rather than submit to the Christians. The persecutors received the help of townspeople, as Bishop John punished some of them by having their hands cut off, a penalty for theft. Those Jews who had fled to the surrounding countryside or had accepted baptism returned under the bishop's protection, the apostates allowed to revert to Judaism; a new synagogue was begun. Steven Runciman rather astonishingly dismisses this episode as 'not a very impressive attack'. Perhaps the walls prescribed in 1084 proved their use. Over a fortnight later, on 18 May, Emich arrived at Worms where he managed to mobilize more effective local assistance, including peasants from the countryside as well as burghers. Given the proximity of Emich's own lands, the count was probably exploiting known local tensions. Jews found in their quarter were massacred, the Torah Scrolls desecrated; those who had fled to the protection of the bishop's palace were besieged and, on 20 May, slaughtered. Some resisted forcible conversion, one of the bishop's relatives being killed; others may have taken the rout of suicide. Hundreds died.
The desctruction of the Jews of Mainz attracted the most detailed attention, later held up to Jewish audiences as a model of fortitude under persecution and of holy martyrdom. Mainz was a major centre of Jewish learning and culture as well as business. Jewish leaders were prominent in commerce; the chief rabbi Kalonymos, on good terms with the archbishop and recognized by the emperor. On Emich's appearance before their gates, which the archbishop had ordered to be shut against him, some townspeople provoked riots. The Jewish leaders bribed the archbishop to protect them and tried to buy off Emich with a gift of seven pounds of gold, to no avail. The gate were oppened on 26 May; the killing and looting lasted two days. The archbishop reneged on his promise of protection and fled; the Jews sheltering in his palace, despite initial vigorous armed resistance, were slaughtered with the rest. The search for money and Jews throughout the city was thorough. The synagogue was destroyed in the mayhem; some Jews apostatized; others chose suicide. The story of the young mother Rachel's sacrifice of her four children, circulated for the edification of the faithful in the twelfth century, is grim. Her youngest, Aaron, terrified at seeing the deaths of his siblings, begged his mother to spare him, running away to hid under a box.
"When this pious woman had completed sacrificing her three children to their Creator, she raised her voice and called to her son: 'Aaron, Aaron, where are you? I will not spare you either, or have mercy on you.' She drew him out by his feet from under the box where he had hidden and slaughtered him before the Exalted and Lofty God."
[Further descriptions of massacre and plunder of Jewish communities along the Rhine]
Emich of Flonheim's campaign against the prosperous Jewish communities was deliberate, far from mindless vandalism. The rhetoric, not least that recorded in the harrowingly full Jewish accounts of the pogroms, was religious, but the motive may have been financial. It was not that the crusaders were in debt to the Jews, merely that many had sold or pledged their patrimonies and still faced further expense. For leaders such as Emich, cash meant power and authority. Locals, including some bishops, erstwhile protectors, exploited the crusaders' greed by extorting protection money from the helpless Jews as well as looting.
[...]
Nothing in official Christian doctrin justified slaying Jews. Pope Alexander II had explicitly prohibited it when drawing a careful distinction between them and Muslims in 1063. No justification of holy war could embrace victimization of those whom the Christians ruled anyway, hence the repeated attempts to blame the Jews of subversion and plotting the destruction of Christendom to excuse persecution. However the preaching of the cross emphasized meritorious Christian violence, the legitimacy of revenge and religious vendetta and the suffering of Christ Crucified. Christian sources record how such messages were translated into a gospel of indiscriminate religious hate. Crusaders at Rouen thought it absurd to campaign against God's enemies in the east 'when in front of our eyes are the Jews, of all races the most hostile to God'. Albert of Aachen noted that recruits to Emich's army at Mainz insisted that killing the Jews was the first act of their campaign against the 'enemies of the Christian faith'. [...] According to a disapproving German witness, Ekkehard of Aura, the persecutors were zealous Christians who 'took pains to destroy utterly the execrable Jews' either by death or forced conversion.
