Poetry and History

[...]on this occasion I do not intend to stray from the beaten path: I have gathered and selected selihot not for their literary value, but for the historical facts that they contain.2 Accordingly, he prefaced each of his texts - many published for the first time from manuscript sources-with a summary of the "facts" he had excavated. [...]Adabberah betsar ruhi," a poem commemorating the persecution and martyrdom of the Jews of Mainz in 1096, yields the following sort of information: According to Yuval, the recurrent motif of God's coat, stained with the blood of those slaughtered as martyrs, carried a demand for divine vengeance against the Christians in the messianic era. [...]modem scholars committed to redressing this historiographical imbalance have been reluctant to take on the martyrological texts. No matter how noble, mass suicide and slaughter were halakhically problematic and could hardly have been the sole option endorsed by the learned poets. [...]the poems also encouraged resistance to growing religious coercion.