Medieval crusade narratives paired Jews with Muslims, not with orientalism

Evidence

Although the Crusaders were fighting for a “real” land and their decline has typically been blamed on venality (they plundered Christian Constantinople) and carnal sin (many died of sexually transmitted diseases) they conceptualized their fight in biblical-historical rather than geopolitical terms. Akbari shows how some medieval tales of the Siege of Jerusalem conflate conquest by the Crusaders with conquest by the Romans, equating in complex ways the Christians with the Romans on one hand, and the Jews with the Muslims on the other. There was in these accounts, however, no indication that the Other under siege, be it Jew or Muslim, was thought of as oriental, that what was under siege was the Orient. The “Saracen” forces were at least as firmly established (and more menacing) in the southern and southwestern than in the eastern Mediterranean. “Imaginative geography,” as Said called it, did not yet write off the Orient to Islam. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 102

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages Said’s own ‘Imaginative geography’ concept and challenges it; connects to my Orientalism reading list.
• SEED: Angle: ‘the Jew as proto-Oriental’ — medieval texts already paired Jews and Muslims as the Other under siege, a template that later orientalism would inherit.