How are martyrs made, and how do the memories of martyrs express, nourish, and mold the ideals of the community? 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 mindset of Ashkenazic Jewry for centuries to come, during the Holocaust, and even today. The Jewish survivors of 1096 memorialized the victims as martyrs as they rebuilt their communities during the decades following the Crusade. Three twelfth-century Hebrew chronicles of the persecutions preserve their memories of martyrdom and self-sacrifice, tales fraught with symbolic meaning that constitute one of the earliest Jewish attempts at local, contemporary historiography. 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. While they extol the glorious heroism of the martyrs, they also air the doubts, guilt, and conflicts of those who, by submitting temporarily to the Christian crusaders, survived. "A major contribution to the study of medieval Jewish history." ― Robert Chazan, New York University "This is an important book, beautifully written and cogently argued. Some of Cohen's readings are daring indeed and will surely arouse dissent. Long live debate!" ― American Historical Review "The sufferings of the Rhineland Jews in 1096 were commemorated in three Hebrew narratives, which Professor Jeremy Cohen reexamines in this beautifully written book. . . . The cumulative effect of Cohen's analysis is overwhelming." ― Catholic Historical Review "The slaughter of the Jews in the Rhineland in 1096 is one of the better-known events of the First Crusade. Cohen analyzes the texts of the Jewish accounts of these massacres in light of the martyrdom tradition of Masada, well-known at that time, and the contemporary Christian cult of self-sacrifice. . . . Recommended." ― Choice "Cohen's fresh reading of the chronicles opens up a new vista to these complicated sources." ― Journal of Jewish Studies "This is a beautifully written and thought-out work that raises valuable questions and draws unprecedented attention to important features of these texts; it is sure to provoke fruitful discussion" ― Journal of Religion Jeremy Cohen is Professor of Jewish History and Director of the Goldstein-Goren Diaspora Research Center 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 . 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. I shall speak out in the grief of my spirit before my small congregation. I shall wail and lament; for the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me. Be silent, hear my words and my prayer. If only he would hear me. The crusaders massed at the gateway To blot out the name of his remnants. Small children cried out to him with one voice: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God; the Lord is one."Thus the payyetan , the Jewish liturgical poet of the Middle Ages, recalled the massacres of the spring and summer of 1096, when, during the earliest months of the First Crusade, bands of armed crusaders attacked Jewish communities in western and central Germany. The crusaders converted those Jews whom they could, while others who fell in their path they killed. Jewish settlements of the Rhine valley—in Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Cologne and its suburbs, Metz, and Trier—and others including Regensburg and Prague to the east suffered serious losses in life and property. This marked the first major outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in medieval Christian Europe. Why did the massacres occur? Some historians have argued that economically grounded jealousies soured the relations between German Jews and their neighbors; perhaps the still ongoing Investiture Conflict between the popes and the kings of Germany further aggravated existing tensions. Yet most of the evidence from both Jewish and Christian sources indicates tha