William Chester Jordan: “‘Now Avenge Us’: Jewish Martyrdom and the First Crusade”

William Chester Jordan (Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Princeton University) will present the Hilldale Lecture in the Humanities on the topic ”‘Now Avenge Us’: Jewish Martyrdom and the First Crusade” Thursday, October 3rd, at 6:00 p.m. in the Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L140. Reception prior to the Lecture in the University Club, 4:45–5:45pm. Co-Sponsored by The Medieval Studies Program, The Department of History, the Center for the Humanities, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities.

The lecture sketches out the background to the call for the First Crusade, narrates a few of the major events as context for the main story of the lecture, and then concentrates on what has been and can be learned from the Hebrew and Latin sources for the Jews’ responses. It concludes by raising the question of the appropriateness of the language of trauma to categorize the European phase of the crusade and its impact on the continent’s Jews.