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Jewish history.org presents Rabbi Barel Wein, 5,000 years of Jewish history, one video clip at a time. Clip number 31: The Crusades.
At the end of the 11th century, in France and Germany and throughout Europe, there were a lot of unemployed Knights, so to speak. Not a term. Knight meant that he was a mercenary soldier. He was built to kill, and if there were no wars, if nobody hired him, then he was unemployed and he had no other skills. The romantic idea of knights built up in the Western world by King Arthur's Round Table and other such fairy tales is completely devoid of any relationship to reality. These Knights were illiterate, evil, brutal people.
The Pope, who had then temporal power as well as spiritual power, was worried by all of these people running around Europe with swords. Therefore the Church supported a crusade, which meant picking up all of these itinerant Knights, organizing them in an army, and marching them to the land of Israel, to Palestine, in order to wrest it from the hands of the Muslims and restore it to Christian sovereignty.
In 1096 the First Crusade set out, led by Godfrey of Bouillon. On the way, the Crusaders said, "Why do we have to go all the way to the Middle East to kill infidels? We've got infidels living right next to us, the Jews." Therefore, in the spring and summer of 1096, terrible pogroms occurred against the Jews who lived in France and in the German Rhineland. The cities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz were decimated, and the Crusaders hacked their way throughout Europe killing Jews, so that the Crusades became one of the major tragedies in Jewish history.
The Crusaders finally reached the land of Israel and conquered Jerusalem. There were about 300 Jews in Jerusalem. The Crusaders herded them all into the synagogue and burned the synagogue down on their heads. They also killed all the Muslims in the community. Very brutal people.
Godfrey of Bouillon died. There's a Jewish legend that he was cursed by Rashi that he would never return to Troyes, and when he did he would only come back with two horsemen. The legend is that he came back with three horsemen, and crossing the arch into the city, a rock fell on one of the horsemen and killed him. That's a great legend, but that isn't what happened. Godfrey died in the land of Israel, where he is buried.
The Crusader Kingdom lasted from 1096 to the middle of the 1200s, and it spread throughout the Middle East, Lebanon, Syria, and other places as well, but it never took root in the country, simply because the Christian masses of Europe never sought to immigrate to the land of Israel or to live there on a permanent basis.
The Crusades are a blot on the history of the Church and on the history of Christian Europe.
Thanks for watching. My name is Barel Wein. For more on Jewish history, go to jewishhistorydotorg.