Failed unification bids drive rulers to scapegoat Jews

Evidence

Isidore was “obsessed with Judaism.” Why? We have seen that paganism and heresy, for Isidore, had been dealt their death blows. The end of Arianism produced the unity of Spain, the marriage of the Goths and Hispania. The only stain on this unity was the continued persistence of one group of infidels: while numerically Jews could surely not be a threat to the Visigothic kingdom, psychologically they may have been. The much-hailed conversion of Reccared had not succeeded in bringing hoped-for unity and peace to Spain. In the search for scapegoats, eyes turned to the one continued group of voluntary outsiders, the Jews; it was certainly much more comfortable for King Sisebut to blame the Jews for his (and his predecessors’) failures to unite Spain in peace than to find fault with himself or his nobles. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 148

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to scapegoat dynamics familiar from moral panic literature and to how failed state-unity projects find external villains.
• SEED: Angle: psychologizing medieval policy — the gap between the numerical irrelevance of a minority and its psychological centrality to rulers.