Christianity’s perceived enemies were increasingly linked and persecuted together
Evidence
Others have suggested a link between the growing association between the various enemies of Christendom (or of those who were perceived as such) and the increasing violence and repression exercised against them. Many historians of Judaism in northern Europe have seen the anti-Jewish violence of the first Crusade as a watershed between the early Middle Ages, when Jews were accepted in Christian society, and the later Middle Ages, when they were subject to increasing persecution. For Jeremy Cohen, it is the missionary efforts of the thirteenth-century mendicant friars that marks the rise of intolerance, leading to an intensification of violence against Jews and to a sharp decline in their legal and social status; for him the “Muslim connection,” the increasing link between the anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish polemics of mendicants and others, may be in part responsible for this change. For Robert Moore, it was the twelfth century that saw the emergence of a “persecuting society,” a clerical elite bent on defining doctrinal and social orthodoxy and exercising repression and coercion against those who were outside this orthodoxy: Jews, heretics, lepers, homosexuals, prostitutes (curiously, Moore does not mention Muslims). “Reason,” for Moore, became in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the “flag” of this clerical elite, justifying its power over Christian society. Those who opposed that power, from inside or out, were branded as irrational. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1368
Categorization
- XREF: Moore’s ‘persecuting society’ and the clerical use of ‘Reason’ as a flag connects to Weber’s rationalization of authority and to Foucault’s power-knowledge critiques. — connects to: Constructed anti-Christian enmity redirected prior anti-Tamil violence toward a new invented enemy. — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 246; Paulines frame Christian struggle as against oppressive systems, not people — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 753; Power-over-others Christianity repeatedly drives believers toward atrocities — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 65
- SEED: An essay angle: how medieval ‘Reason’ functioned as a boundary-marking ideology that branded opponents irrational — a pattern with modern parallels in rationalism vs. ‘irrational’ Others.