Did the Jews also fight alongside the Christians in the Crusades?

Answer 1

The Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression — an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.
Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity — and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion — has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed's death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt — once the most heavily Christian areas in the world — quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.
That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.
Pope Urban II called upon the knights of Christendom to push back the conquests of Islam at the Council of Clermont in 1095. The response was tremendous. Many thousands of warriors took the vow of the cross and prepared for war. Why did they do it? The answer to that question has been badly misunderstood. In the wake of the Enlightenment, it was usually asserted that Crusaders were merely lacklands and ne'er-do-wells who took advantage of an opportunity to rob and pillage in a faraway land. The Crusaders' expressed sentiments of piety, self-sacrifice, and love for God were obviously not to be taken seriously. They were only a front for darker designs.

The Crusaders two goals, both of which would remain central to the eastern Crusades for centuries. The first was to rescue the Christians of the East.

The Crusade was seen as an errand of mercy to right a terrible wrong. As Pope Innocent III wrote to the Knights Templar, "You carry out in deeds the words of the Gospel, 'Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his life for his friends.'"

The second goal was the liberation of Jerusalem and the other places made holy by the life of Christ. The word crusade is modern. Medieval Crusaders saw themselves as pilgrims, performing acts of righteousness on their way to the Holy Sepulcher.

The reconquest of Jerusalem, therefore, was not colonialism but an act of restoration and an open declaration of one's love of God.

It is often assumed that the central goal of the Crusades was forced conversion of the Muslim world. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the perspective of medieval Christians, Muslims were the enemies of Christ and His Church. It was the Crusaders' task to defeat and defend against them. That was all. Muslims who lived in Crusader-won territories were generally allowed to retain their property and livelihood, and always their religion. Indeed, throughout the history of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, Muslim inhabitants far outnumbered the Catholics. It was not until the 13th century that the Franciscans began conversion efforts among Muslims. But these were mostly unsuccessful and finally abandoned. In any case, such efforts were by peaceful persuasion, not the threat of violence.
The Crusades were wars, so it would be a mistake to characterize them as nothing but piety and good intentions. Like all warfare, the violence was brutal (although not as brutal as modern wars). There were mishaps, blunders, and crimes.

The purpose of the Crusades was not to kill Jews. Quite the contrary: Popes, bishops, and preachers made it clear that the Jews of Europe were to be left unmolested.

By 1098, the Crusaders had restored Nicaea and Antioch to Christian rule. In July 1099, they conquered Jerusalem and began to build a Christian state in Palestine. The joy in Europe was unbridled. It seemed that the tide of history, which had lifted the Muslims to such heights, was now turning.
But it was not. When we think about the Middle Ages, it is easy to view Europe in light of what it became rather than what it was. The colossus of the medieval world was Islam, not Christendom. The Crusades are interesting largely because they were an attempt to counter that trend. But in five centuries of crusading, it was only the First Crusade that significantly rolled back the military progress of Islam. It was downhill from there.

Crusading in the late twelfth century, therefore, became a total war effort. Every person, no matter how weak or poor, was called to help. Warriors were asked to sacrifice their wealth and, if need be, their lives for the defense of the Christian East. On the home front, all Christians were called to support the Crusades through prayer, fasting, and alms. Yet still the Muslims grew in strength. Saladin, the great unifier, had forged the Muslim Near East into a single entity, all the while preaching jihad against the Christians. In 1187 at the Battle of Hattin, his forces wiped out the combined armies of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem and captured the precious relic of the True Cross. Defenseless, the Christian cities began surrendering one by one, culminating in the surrender of Jerusalem .

The response was the Third Crusade.

By 1291, the Muslim forces had succeeded in killing or ejecting the last of the Crusaders, thus erasing the Crusader kingdom from the map. Despite numerous attempts and many more plans, Christian forces were never again able to gain a foothold in the region until the 19th century.

In 1480, Sultan Mehmed II captured Otranto as a beachhead for his invasion of Italy. Rome was evacuated. Yet the sultan died shortly thereafter, and his plan died with him. In 1529, Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege to Vienna. If not for a run of freak rainstorms that delayed his progress and forced him to leave behind much of his artillery, it is virtually certain that the Turks would have taken the city. Germany, then, would have been at their mercy.
Yet, even while these close shaves were taking place, something else was brewing in Europe — something unprecedented in human history. The Renaissance, born from a strange mixture of Roman values, medieval piety, and a unique respect for commerce and entrepreneurialism, had led to other movements like humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Age of Exploration. Even while fighting for its life, Europe was preparing to expand on a global scale. The Protestant Reformation, which rejected the papacy and the doctrine of indulgence, made Crusades unthinkable for many Europeans, thus leaving the fighting to the Catholics. In 1571, a Holy League, which was itself a Crusade, defeated the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto. Yet military victories like that remained rare. The Muslim threat was neutralized economically. As Europe grew in wealth and power, the once awesome and sophisticated Turks began to seem backward and pathetic — no longer worth a Crusade. The "Sick Man of Europe" limped along until the 20th century, when he finally expired, leaving behind the present mess of the modern Middle East.

From the safe distance of many centuries, it is easy enough to scowl in disgust at the Crusades. Religion, after all, is nothing to fight wars over. But we should be mindful that our medieval ancestors would have been equally disgusted by our infinitely more destructive wars fought in the name of political ideologies. And yet, both the medieval and the modern soldier fight ultimately for their own world and all that makes it up. Both are willing to suffer enormous sacrifice, provided that it is in the service of something they hold dear, something greater than themselves. Whether we admire the Crusaders or not, it is a fact that the world we know today would not exist without their efforts. The ancient faith of Christianity, with its respect for women and antipathy toward slavery, not only survived but flourished. Without the Crusades, it might well have followed Zoroastrianism, another of Islam's rivals, into extinction.

Source(s):

Thomas F. Madden

Answer 2

lol, not exactly. here is a more accurate depiction of the activities of jews and christians during the crusades:

"1096: The First Crusade was launched in this year. Although the prime goal of the crusades was to liberate Jerusalem from the Muslims, Jews were a second target. As the soldiers passed through Europe on the way to the Holy Land, large numbers of Jews were challenged: "Christ-killers, embrace the Cross or die!" 12,000 Jews in the Rhine Valley alone were killed in the first Crusade. This behavior continued for 8 additional crusades until the 9th in 1272.
1099: The Crusaders forced all of the Jews of Jerusalem into a central synagogue and set it on fire. Those who tried to escape were forced back into the burning building."

Answer 3

When people talk about the "Crusades", they forget that these conflicts raged all over Europe and the Middle East, where the major campaigns to regain or defend Jerusalem are considered as the "Crusades" we regularly talk about. These conflicts lasted hundreds of years too, and sometimes enemies could be friends. The crusading campaingns in Spain, which we call the Reconquista, where financed and supported by Jewish banquers an bureaucrats, while in the crusading wars in the Balkans by the Teutonic Knights, the Jews were enemies of the Christian states. The Bizantines would also ally themselves with Jewish communities, and depending of the Pope in power at the moment, Jews would be friends or enemies of Christianity.

The "First Crusade" to regain Jerusalem ended up in a bloodbath in the city where not even the few Christians the muslim allowed to live in Jerusalem survived. Now, when Saladin besieged Jerusalem almost a hundred year laters, I am certain any Jew living in the city assisted in the defense and fought alongside Christians to defend his life. Same for the Acre taken by Richard III and later lost when the Kingdom of Jerusalem was destroyed.

As always, history is not clearly defined as we like to do. We want to think that Christians in general were enemies of judaism but that would be a lie. The real tragedy was that the Christians who defended and befriended judaism were not able to gain more tolerance from the rest.

Answer 4

Answer: Jews have been expelled from England in 1290. Jews rarely fought on each aspect. They have been in general the sufferers of the Christians further really usually than from the Muslims. Jews were not "drafted" When the crusaders first received Jerusalem once more from the Muslims the very first thing they did was once as soon as lock the Jews in their synagogue and burn them alive. To practice along how you can the core East, crusaders such a lot usually massacred Jews. Some FEW examples (now not record the entire exiles, fines, taxes, confiscated estate and no longer the complete pressured conversions). 1189 Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa orders monks not to pontificate in opposition to Jews. 1189 A Jewish deputation attending coronation of Richard the Lionheart was once attacked by way of the organization. Pogroms in London followed and unfold circular England. 1190 February 6 the complete Jews of Norwich, England found in their residences have been slaughtered, besides a quantity of who found shelter inside the castle. 1190 March sixteen 500 Jews of York have been massacred after a six day siege through departing Crusaders, subsidized by way of a quantity of humans indebted to Jewish coins-creditors 1190 Saladdin takes over Jerusalem from Crusaders and lifts the ban for Jews to are living there. 1236 Crusaders assault Jewish groups of Anjou and Poitou and take a look at to baptize all of the Jews. Individuals who resisted (est. Three,000) were slaughtered. 1320 Shepherds' crusade assaults the Jews of 100 twenty localities in southwest France. 1333 confused mass conversions in Baghdad 1481 The Spanish Inquisition is instituted.

Answer 5

The first crusade was to rid the world of anyone but Christians. Before they left for the Holy Land the Germans killed as many Jews as they could find. So did most of Europe.

Answer 6

At the time of The Crusades; when Europeans were attackeing the Arabs, much as they are now, Jews were equally despised. (See Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice). It has only been in recent times, since the second world war, that the Brits and the Yanks have discovered that Jews could be tricked into all moving to Israel and causing harm to the Arabs, so they brainwashed their people into thinking that Jews had always been considered great folks.

Answer 7

Christians also killed Jews, in at least some of the Crusades.

Answer 8

No, the crusaders slaughtered Jews en mass.

Not only in Israel but also in Europe on their way to the middle east.

It is estimated that as much as one third of Jews in France and Germany were killed during the crusades.

Answer 9

I am sure some fought with the crusaders, some fought against the crusaders. Some were killed by the crusaders as infidels, and some were killed by the Muslims as infidels.But I'm sure the vast majority just tried to go along with their lives and stay out of the way of the fighting.

Answer 10

No the christians hated the jews

Answer 11

only the jews that were christians,