The volume under review presents scholarly editions of twenty-seven piyyutim (liturgical poems) addressing the crusader onslaught of the Jewish communities of the Rhineland in 1096 which were written in the aftermath of the massacres or at some time in the twelfth century. Twelve of the piyyutim are classified as Qinot, poems written for the liturgy of 9th of Av, the day of mourning for the destruction of the Temple. Another dozen are Selichot, liturgical compositions beseeching forgiveness of sins in preparation for redemption. Selichot are a liturgical feature of fast days and the season of the High Holy Days culminating in the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. Three of the piyyutim were composed in the format of a Zulath, that is to say a liturgical embellishment inserted after the recitation of the Shema (‘Hear o Israel’) component of the service on festivals or special Sabbaths. All of the piyyutim are translated into beautiful rhythmic German and provided with exhaustive explanatory notes. Great effort has been made to make the material accessible to non-experts in medieval Jewish religious material. The volume includes a glossary of technical terms; short introductions to each poem explain who the author was and what the interesting characteristics of the particular piyyut are and which manuscripts have been used to edit the poem. The main introduction gives a general overview of all of the material collected in the volume and covers technical issues with regard to dating and provenance of the poetry and its dissemination. Indeed this volume is a welcome companion to the first volume of the new MGH series on Hebrew sources of the German Middle Ages which contains the definitive edition of the Hebrew Chronicles of the First Crusade by Eva Haverkamp. Together the two volumes provide medieval researchers with a treasure trove of source material on the history of the Jews of late eleventh- and twelfth-century Ashkenaz. The German translations in both volumes make this invaluable material available to those who do not have Hebrew.

But whereas Eva Haverkamp's edition and book length introduction placed the Hebrew chronicles squarely within the Christian society in which they evolved, this volume seems to have eschewed that approach. The sections of the introduction exploring the motivations of the authors for composing their piyyutim and the effect of the massacres that they describe on the outlook and position of the Jews of Ashkenaz paint a picture of unremitting gloom as Jews are surrounded by Christians intent on removing them from their midst. No attempt is made to put the attacks on the Jewish communities in the Rhineland in a wider context. No mention is made that the crusaders involved were not part of the official crusading armies and that their actions contravened Christian ecclesiastical laws. The much larger Jewish communities of southern France were not attacked by the First Crusaders. The anti-Jewish persecutions of the Second Crusade are effectively put on a par with those of the First even though the violence in 1147 was much less widespread, due in part to the timely intervention of Bernard of Clairvaux.

As for the Jewish communities themselves, the impression is given of communities beleaguered by their non-Jewish surroundings. This is at odds with the wealth of new research presenting evidence for the integration of Jews into the socio-economic tapestry of the great episcopal cities along the Rhine: Speyer, Worms, Mainz and Cologne. Indeed it is the dichotomy between the cries of anguish and despair exuding from the piyyutim and the rapid recovery of the Jewries of these cities that requires explanation. That the 1096 persecutions were memorialised in Ashkenaz as a catastrophe analogous to the destruction of the Temple is not in doubt. The novelty of composing Qinot about the persecutions of 1096, instead of the destruction of the Temple, and incorporating them in the liturgy of the 9th of Av demonstrates that clearly enough. The heart-rending depictions of slaughter and self-sacrifice in the Selichot and the Zulath piyyutim do that as well. Apart from anything else, the compositions were meant to enable congregants to plead for divine intercession on the basis of the valiant heroism of the members of their congregation who were martyred for the glory of God. How the survivors viewed the many cases of self-martyrdom remains an area of speculation, as the editors indeed say in a thoughtful passage on Eliezer bar Nathan (p. 19), the author of one of the crusade chronicles and a number of piyyutim included in the volume. Whether it is right, however, to assume that far fewer Jews were forcibly converted than has been claimed by some researchers (p. 44) is another matter. It cannot be for nothing that Henry iv of Germany allowed Jews who had been baptised against their will to return to Judaism in 1097. The editors do stress that the piyyutim were composed to create solidarity among the Jewish survivors of 1096 and their descendants and to strengthen communal resistance to the lures of Christian conversion. But as so many researchers, including Ivan Marcus, Robert Chazan and Jeremy Cohen, have pointed out this did not happen in a vacuum. Allusions to the Temple allowed the Jews of Ashkenaz to imagine their own communities as a virtual re-creation of the Temple in Ashkenaz where Jews, not Christians, were serving God. This kind of internalised polemic against Christianity was augmented by the plethora of anti-Christian invectives found in the piyyutim (and the Chronicles). All of this reveals Jewish communities cognisant of their non-Jewish surroundings and actively shaping a robust Jewish identity in the face of adversity. There can be little doubt that the Jews of Ashkenaz were severely traumatised by the 1096 massacres and that the memorialisation of 1096 established martyrdom as the Ashkenazi ideal in the face of forced conversion. But that does not mean that the horrors of 1096 constituted the main factor in shaping the future presence of the Jewish communities in medieval Germany.