A Pious Belligerence: Dialogical Warfare and the Rhetoric of Righteousness in the Crusading Near East by Uri Zvi Shachar

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Pious Belligerence: Dialogical Warfare and the Rhetoric of Righteousness in the Crusading Near East by Uri Zvi Shachar John Tolan A Pious Belligerence: Dialogical Warfare and the Rhetoric of Righteousness in the Crusading Near East. By Uri Zvi Shachar. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2021. Pp. x, 320. $65.00. ISBN: 9780812253337.) In the year 1211, according to various Hebrew sources, several hundred French-speaking Jews, mostly from France and England, landed in Acre, principal port of the kingdom of Jerusalem and de facto capital since Saladin captured the Holy City in 1187. They had come to live in the Holy Land; some of them settled in Jerusalem, although when the Ayyubid sultan al-Mu‘azzam dismantled the defensive walls of the city to prevent crusaders from taking and holding it, many of these Jews resettled in Acre. Various writers from this community of immigrants presented their aliya (return to the Holy Land) as what Uri Shachar calls a “Jewish Crusade.” The return to the Holy Land of these pious Jews would play a key role in purifying the world, and would herald the emergence of the Messiah, who (according to at least one source) would be a member of this European Jewish community in the Holy Land. The voyage itself was an act of piety and renunciation, which purified the immigrant Jews (in comparison with those who chose to remain in Europe to pursue base earthly interests). And these Jews would purify the Holy Land itself, sullied or “polluted” by the occupation of infidels, Christians, and Muslims. [End Page 186] Shachar carefully analyzes a rich and complex group of texts associated with these European Jews in the Holy Land. Some of these Jewish authors refashioned apocalyptic texts first composed five or six centuries before, complex and layered treatises that were continuously reworked by Hebrew authors who sought to inscribe their current hopes and tribulations into an apocalyptic scenario of the last days. They “stylize historical events into common apocalyptic structures” (pp. 140–1). One of the great strengths of Shachar’s work is that he does not limit himself to analyzing these Hebrew works from European Jewish immigrés, but places them in the broader political and cultural history of the thirteenth-century Near East, where conflicts between Frankish princes, Ayyubid sultans, and crusaders created a fragmented political landscape and continual military and political struggles. This forged an atmosphere propitious to apocalyptic speculation on the part of Christians and Muslims as well as Jews. In the wake of the death of Saladin in 1193, the territory he had dominated, stretching from the Jazira (in Iraq) to Egypt, was fragmented in a power struggle between the late sultan’s brother, sons, and nephews. Meanwhile, the Franks of the Levant (kings, princes, knights, and military orders) were often at odds with one another. Add to that the periodic arrival of crusaders from Europe who had their own agendas, which did not necessarily coincide with those of local Franks. This led to alliances between Muslim and Frankish principalities: as Shachar shows, numerous battles in the region over the course of the thirteenth century pitted one alliance of Muslims and Christians against another alliance of Muslims and Christians. Jacques de Vitry, bishop of Acre, arrived from Europe and was consternated at what he saw: Christians, Muslims, and Jews mixed together, speaking a Babel of languages. The eastern Christians had a confusing variety of rites, doctrines, and habits; he was at a loss to establish who was to be considered a true Christian and who a heretic. As Shachar shows, the new bishop was particularly critical of the “Poulains,” as he calls the Franks settled in the Holy Land: They had become corrupted and effeminate; they entered into alliances with infidel Muslims instead of combatting them. The new bishop pinned his hopes on forthright crusaders fresh from Europe, uncorrupted by contact with the Orient, though as he stayed on in the East after the failure of the Fifth Crusade, he tempered his criticism of the Poulains. It is impossible in a brief review to do justice to this rich study. Shachar presents subtle and nuanced analyses of historiographical and apocalyptic works...