In Crusader Jerusalem, the royal-serf status of Jews attached to Bedouin instead

Evidence

The Jews, in principle, shared one further characteristic with another of the categories with which they are placed in close juxtaposition by the author of the Tractatus and Jacques de Vitry. Within Western Christian kingdoms, Jews had the legal status of ‘royal serfs’. They were the personal property of the king and, although they thereby came under his protection, they were also susceptible to arbitrary taxation or other treatment. This does not appear to have been the case in the kingdom of Jerusalem at any point in its two-hundred-year existence. The legislation governing Jewish conduct and dress promulgated by the papacy in 1179 and 1215 was never, so far as the evidence indicates, applied in the Crusader States. Yet the conceptual and legal category of ‘royal serfs’ did exist in the kingdom of Jerusalem—applied to the Bedouin rather than to the Jews. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 219

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s standing interest in how governance categories get transferred across groups — echoes the royal-serf framing in medieval law and how same legal logic relocates onto a different people.