Medieval Christian ethnography explains human diversity as divine-historical consequence

Evidence

For Isidore, human geography is a consequence of human history: the confusion of peoples, languages, and customs in the world is the direct consequence of the Fall, the flood, and the confusion of the languages at Babel. We all descend from Adam, and indeed from Noah; our ancestors all spoke the same language, Hebrew, until God destroyed the tower of Babel and created the confusion of languages. For Isidore, again, the confusing diversity of humanity was rationally explicable and could (at least in theory), be traced to a unified origin, to a human ancestor, Noah. While he incorporated many details from classical Roman ethnographic tradition, he hung them on a biblical framework, imposing order on chaos. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 120

Categorization

• XREF: Grounds the vault’s Islam-West opposition by showing the pre-existing Christian epistemic frame into which ‘Saracen’ was slotted — the ancestors-hung-on-biblical-framework move parallels Aziz/Razack on how classification precedes and constitutes the subject. — connects to: Medieval hermeneutics functioned both doctrinally and as cultural assimilation
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 120