Crusade Chronicle

Writing in the 1140s, Solomon bar Samson utilized the Mainz Anonymous and other sources to convey the horrific events of the Crusader massacres of German Jewish communities in 1096. Solomon was more interested in some of the political circumstances surrounding the First Crusade than other Jewish writers, but he, like them, focused on Jewish martyrdom during the attacks and sought to justify and remember the Jewish dead. This excerpt tells of a mob led by Count Emicho of Leiningen and its attacks on the Jewish community of Mainz, in which, reportedly, more than a thousand Jews lost their lives. Emicho’s army was eventually stopped in Hungary. Here, Solomon connects the death of Mainz’s Jews with those of earlier Jewish martyrs. His chronicle survives in a single late medieval manuscript, not discovered until the nineteenth century.