Medieval crusade writers distrusted Christians who spoke Arabic as culturally marginal

Evidence

Jacques warned his readers against indigenous Christians of the Holy Land who lived under Islamic rule: they could not be trusted, because although they claimed to be Christian, they spoke Arabic, which was the language of the Saracens. This made them, in some sense, a marginal people, who belonged neither to one side nor the other. The Jews—or at least some groups among them—likewise resisted strict categorisation by using both Hebrew and Arabic, and sometimes Aramaic. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 207

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels postcolonial work on hybridity as threat, e.g. the mistrust of ‘cultural creoles’ in colonial administrations.
• SEED: The mistrust of multilingual border people — Christians who spoke Arabic, Jews who used both Hebrew and Arabic — could anchor a piece on how hybridity itself, not any doctrine, marked groups as suspect in medieval and modern contexts.