In the spring and early summer of 1096, as contingents assembled for the First Crusade, armed bands attacked Jewish communities along the Rhine and into the Danube valley — Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Cologne, Trier, Metz, Regensburg and Prague — demanding conversion and killing those who refused. The Hebrew chronicles composed within a generation, together with Latin annals and the German memorial books, record the killings community by community and describe many Jews killing themselves and their families rather than accept baptism. Robert Chazan's reconstruction from these sources puts the total dead in the low thousands rather than the higher figures sometimes quoted. Church and imperial authorities did not sanction the attacks — several bishops attempted to shelter Jews and Henry IV afterwards allowed forced converts to revert — but no perpetrators were punished. The events are treated in modern scholarship as a decisive turning point in the position of Jews in Latin Christendom.
Bands accompanying the People's Crusade, chiefly under Count Emicho of Flonheim, attacked the Jewish communities of the Rhineland and the Danube while local bishops and burghers variously sheltered or abandoned them
No defensible denominator exists. The only near-contemporary evidence is the Hebrew crusade chronicles and the Christian annals, which give community sizes for Mainz, Worms, Speyer and Cologne that historians read as symbolic as often as literal. Estimates of Ashkenazi Jewry in the German lands at the end of the eleventh century range from a few thousand to more than twenty thousand, and the reported death tolls (roughly 2,000 to 12,000) span nearly the same range, so no ratio can be constructed.
The range spans the estimates derived from the Hebrew chronicles and the memorial books; Robert Chazan's reconstruction sits near the lower end, at roughly three thousand. The uncertainty comes from the martyrological form of the Hebrew sources and from incomplete coverage of the smaller communities.
The killings, the plundering and burning of Jewish quarters and the destruction of synagogues and Torah scrolls are documented in the Hebrew chronicles of 1096, in Latin annals and in the German memorial books.
Germany