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Amos Oz's Crusade
In 1971 Oz published a volume made up of two novellas one of which was entitled Crusade. The story in that piece is of a troop of men and women led by a count leaving medieval France on a journey to participate in the First Crusade. The fear and superstition of the group is palpable from the first as shown by their uneasiness in the face of a series of bad omens, a fiery chariot in the sky, an old woman speaking perfect Latin, a church that burned for three days. While there are positive feelings at the start the party soon senses that a non-Christian, a Jew, is among them. This begins a downward spiral of suspicion, fear and dread. The Jew must be found. Everyone is suspect. Eventually the band comes upon a lone Jewish peddler who in an attempt to save his life hands over his goods and money to the Crusaders. This is not really what they want, and while they apparently let him go, he is shot in the back and head with arrows from a long distance.
The mood of the little army becomes even darker when it meets a learned Jew who offers the gold his followers have amassed in return for their lives. The Jew is brutally murdered and the gold taken. Not long after the Crusaders sought to save themselves from a fierce snowstorm lasting days by seeking shelter in a ruined and absurdly designed monastery. In the end all but a few died.
The novella gives the feeling of participation in the Crusade along with the malevolent feelings that one suspects came from the persecution of the Jews. Historian Jeremy Cohen has written that he often assigns Crusade before presenting the Hebrew Chronicles as it captures and conveys much of the crusading experience no less instructively than many of the twelfth- and thirteenth- century sources. (2)
Books about Amos Oz and his Works- Ben Gurion University of the Negev
Brief Biography of Amos Oz- New York State Writers Institute-S.U.N.Y.
Speaker's Bio- B'nai B'rith International
1. Amos Oz, Unto Death, trans. Nicholas de Lange in collaboration with the author (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), 1971.
2. Jeremy Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 46. Cohen also notes "Developments in literary and cultural criticism over the last decades have helped to blur traditional boundaries between the academic disciplines of history, literature and hermeneutics [interpretation of biblical texts]. Just as the school of New Historicism has risen to prominence in literary studies, so have historians recognized the need to reappraise their primary sources using tools borrowed from the scholar of literature. Particularly in the case of tales transmitted orally before their inscription in written records folklorists have focused instructively on the historical career of the stories as such, as well as the specifics of their contents, their structures, and their symbolic codes. Here the folklorist, the literature specialist, and the cultural historian share a good deal, although it helps to keep in mind that the literary scholar seeks above all to reconstruct the history of the story rather than to document historical events external to it.... I often have my students read Israeli author Amos Oz's novella Crusade before introducing them to the texts of the Hebrew Crusade chronicles, because it offers a wonderful case in point." See also page 46.
(c) Charles Glasheen, January 2006- Permission is granted for electronic copying and distribution in print for educational or personal use. No permission is granted for commercial use.