Medieval Christians imagined urban Jews as a multilingual fifth column

Evidence

The enclosed Jews appear almost completely alien, separated as they are by the boundaries of language: even if one of them should happen to escape, the narrator recounts, “thei conen no maner of langage but Ebrew, so that thei can not speke to the peple” (29; 193.17–18). The Jews of the cities, by contrast, are both familiar and strange, speaking the foreign tongue of their enclosed kindred as well as the vernacular languages of Europe. They are a kind of “Fifth Column” located in the vulnerable heart of Western power. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 300

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the general pattern in the book of how Orientalist frameworks map Jewish identity onto foreign-neighbor templates; also resonates with the same ‘fifth column’ logic Hannah Arendt described in contemporary antisemitism.