Rabbi Ephraim ben Yaakov of Bonn רבי אפרים בן יעקב מבונא
the man who recorded what befell the communities in the Second Crusade
An event lives exactly as long as the testimony about it lives. We know the massacres of the Second Crusade in detail and by name because a boy from Bonn who survived them at thirteen grew up and sat down to write.
The Sefer Zechirah—the Book of Remembrance—is not a chronicle in the ordinary sense. Ephraim lists communities and people, says where and how they died, gives names that would otherwise have vanished with the houses, and sets his own kinot between them. He also recorded what happened at Blois: how in 1171 a community was burned on a blood libel, and how afterwards a fast was fixed in France and the Rhineland. That is how we know where that day came from.
He studied with the Rhineland Tosafists and was one of them; his piyutim entered the selichot. But his chief work was deciding that the names had to be written down. In Jewish memory that is the work not of a chronicler but of a witness.
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Sources
Rishonim
- Sefer Zechirah of Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn — his own testimony, and his year of birth from his words
- The Ashkenazi machzor of selichot and kinot — the piyutim that entered the rite under his name
Basis: documents and evidence.