Sanctifying the Name of God

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. Reading and analyzing these stories through the prism of Jewish and Christian religious and literary traditions, Jeremy Cohen shows how these persecution chronicles reveal much more about the storytellers, the "martyrologists," than about the martyrs themselves.

Jeremy Cohen is Professor of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University. Among his books are The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism and Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity.