Unpublished Letter to the Editor of the New York Times Book Review by Zvi Lothane:
Eric Ormsby praises Jonathan Philips, the author of “Holy Warriors A Modern History of the Crusades,” for the “cool, almost documentary power [of] his narrative,” which inspires Ormsby to romanticize the Crusaders: “In fact, their faith was as pure as their savagery.” But were they so pure? Ormsby makes no reference to Phillips’ perfunctory descriptions of “pogroms” and massacres during the first Crusade, while Phillips studiously avoids mentioning “anti-Semitism or the role played by Church-sponsored hatred of the Jews in fueling the fervor of the Crusades. As noted by Paul Johnson in “A History of the Jews,” “the anti-Semitic ideology and folklore which helped to detonate the first crusader riots proved to be simply the plinth on which a vast superstructure of hostile rumour was built” (p. 208). Similarly, Count Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi, in his 1901 “Anti-Semitism throughout the Ages” (published in English in 1953 but cited by Sigmund Freud in his 1938 “Comment on anti-Semitism,” after he fled from Nazi Austria to London), noted the following: “with the Crusades began a time of the most terrible persecution of the Jews. Hosts of Crusaders, many of the the scum of French, English, Lothringian and Flemish countries, started, as Graetz says, their work of murdering and plundering with the Jews for want of Mohammedans. Thousands of the former were massacred” (p. 132); “when the Crusaders under Godfrey of Bouillon captured Jerusalem they indulged in terrible carnage and massacre. All the Jews were driven into the Synagogue, which was set on fire, and the victims perished in the flames” (p. 134). Such persecutions were repeated in the subsequent Crusades as well. Regretfully, Ormsby believes that the persecution of the Cathars was nothing but a “holy war” waged “against coreligionists”; thankfully Phillips makes a small concession when he describes Usama bin Laden as spouting “Judeo-Christian” hatred.
Henry (Zvi) Lothane, MD, DLFAPA
Clinical Professor Department of Psychiatry
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
1435 Lexington Avenue New York, NY 10128(212) 534 5555
Schreber@lothane.com
www.lothane.com