The beautiful one who dwells within

This excerpt is from one of several Hebrew kinot (laments) that Qalonymos composed to commemorate the 1096 massacres of Jews in the Rhineland, written between ten and twenty years after the events. It offers a poetic account of one of the most distressing stories that circulated after the First Crusade: the murder of children at the hands of their mother. Several similar accounts appear in Hebrew chronicles of the Crusades, such as Solomon bar Samson’s untitled Crusade chronicle and Ephraim of Bonn’s Book of Remembrance (Sefer zekhirah). Here Qalonymos describes a mother (“Rachel”) trying to prevent her children from being forcibly converted to Christianity. Scholars have long sought to clarify the relationship of those texts to the poem by Qalonymos. While some have argued for direct dependence, others have claimed that this poem in fact recounts entirely different events. Each stanza of this poem contains a threefold internal rhyme; the third phrase is a scriptural citation.