Sanctifying the Name of God
Subtitle: Jewish Martyrs And Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (Jewish Culture and Contexts)
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: February 15, 2006
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 208
ISBN-13: 9780812219562
Subjects: Asian / Middle Eastern history: c 500 to c 1500; Jewish studies; Religion; Religion - Judaism; ASIA; Judaism - History; Medieval; Judaism
First sentence: Unquestionably the most striking aspect of the 1096 persecutions and their Hebrew chronicles is the slaughter of Ashkenazic Jews by their own hands.
Description: "How are martyrs made, and how do the memories of martyrs express, nourish, and mold the ideals of the community? Sanctifying the Name of God wrestles with these questions against the background of the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland during the outbreak of the First Crusade. Marking the first extensive wave of anti-Jewish violence in medieval Christian Europe, these "Persecutions of 1096" exerted a profound influence on the course of European Jewish history. When the crusaders demanded that Jews choose between Christianity and death, many opted for baptism. Many others, however, chose to die as Jews rather than to live as Christians, and of these, many actually inflicted death upon themselves and their loved ones. Stories of their self-sacrifice ushered the Jewish ideal of martyrdom - kiddush ha-Shem, the sanctification of God's holy name - into a new phase, conditioning the collective memory and mind-set of Ashkenazic Jewry for centuries to come, during the Holocaust, and even today."--Jacket.