Boiling Bloods: On the Use of a Motif in Hebrew Liturgical Poetry in the Wake of the Persecutions of 1096 and the Book of Nibelungen

The Piyyutim written in the aftermath of the almost annihilation of the leading Jewish communities in Ashkenaz in the summer of 1096 were after immediate ceremonial responses like memorial prayers the first literary response to the trauma. One of the motifs that expressed the reflection over the quantity and quality of the victims was based of the rabbinical tradition about the blood of Zecharya ben Yehoyada, that boiled at the place of his murder in the Temple until it was atoned by the killing of 80.000 young priests during the conquest of Jerusalem. Thus according the liturgical poems the blood of the victims of the persecution should stay uncovered to evoke the godly retribution. A testimony for a dramatic use of this motif is found in the Song of Nibelungen and the Klage/dirge that accompanies it as a Christian reflection about the first written version of the German Matter in German medieval literature. Taking into consideration the validity of the motif of the need to do justice facing the blood of a victim of violence in Medieval Germany the use of the motif in the Piyyutim was not only a recourse on rabbinical tradition but also on Germanic sense of justice by the survivers facing the majority culture.