Solomon bar Simson שלמה בר שמשון

Three Hebrew chronicles carry the year 1096 to us: that of Eliezer bar Nathan, the "Mainz Anonymous", and this, the fullest. It moves city by city through the Rhineland—Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Trier, Cologne—and tells at length of those who chose death over baptism.

Of Solomon bar Simson himself nothing is known: no dates, no city, no occupation. Scholars allow that the name is a pseudonym and the text composite: the colophon assigns him only the opening part, the narration shifts between first and third person, and Robert Chazan treats the prologue and epilogue separately, as an editor's work.

The date is not simple either. The Cologne section contains a passage giving 1140; from this it is inferred that the chronicle was put together in the 1140s—half a century after the events, not in their immediate wake. The text survives in a single fifteenth-century manuscript, found only at the end of the nineteenth, with many copyist's errors.

None of this makes the chronicle unreliable—it makes it a community's memory of itself, set down by the grandchildren's generation. It should be read as such.