Medieval observers deemed people lacking organic historical integrity spiritually deviant

Evidence

The author of the Tractatus remarks that they are friendly towards the Franks while the Franks appear to be in the ascendancy over the Muslims, but when the situation is reversed, they help the Muslims and sell out the Christians. They are mendacious and inconstant, Jacques adds. Their religious practices, likewise, are mixed up: although most of them follow Islamic teaching, they were in origin Christians, and some elements of Christian practice, such as in their forms of prayer, are still in evidence among them. By implication, a society so demonstrably lacking in organic historical integrity will inevitably become spiritually deviant. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 218

Categorization

• QUESTION: This ‘organic historical integrity’ logic — that religious impurity follows from historical inconstancy — is a striking analytic move worth tracing into later racialized anti-Jewish and anti-Roma discourse.