ABSTRACT
Persecution of Jews in the medieval world took many forms. One of the most threatening to the future survival of the European Jewries came with the war against Islam. The crusades brought to Jews violence of hitherto unparalleled ferocity. Holy War against one sort of unbeliever seemed reason to attack another. Why combat one set of God’s enemies overseas, the argument ran, and yet leave unscathed an even worse set of enemies at home, living among us? It was a logic which at the time challenged the orthodoxies of Church and State, and which now confronts the historian of that age with a particularly significant phenomenon in the history of medieval anti-Semitism. ‘A microcosm of medieval Jewish disasters’ (Stow 1992: 115. Cf. Liebeschütz 1959; Abulafia 1996).
