Medieval polemic fused Jews, Muslims, and heretics into one spiritual enemy.

Evidence

As Cluny’s spiritual head, Peter was particularly well placed to repulse demonic incursions: through pastoral care of his monks, through doctrinal works such as his De miraculis, and through his trilogy of theological polemics against Jews, heretics, and Saracens. The three groups were increasingly linked in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and were often seen to represent a common danger. As Dominque Iogna-Prat has shown, all three rejected the spiritual economy that Cluny embodied, where Christians through sacrifice could transform themselves and prepare themselves for the next life. This sacrifice centered around the Eucharist, reenactment of Christ’s ultimate sacrifice for humanity, which was to be performed by priests who had sacrificed their sexual life in order to devote themselves to God; Christian laymen could offer up their lands to God, turning them over to monasteries like Cluny whose monks would pray to shorten their benefactors’ purgatory punishments. The whole was meant to be harmoniously ordered, with the Pope at its head. Muslim, Jews, and heretics were united in their rejection of this system, clinging instead to this world in an irrational obsession with all that was physical and carnal. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 872

Categorization

• XREF: Grounds the Islam-West opposition genealogy: the triadic linking of Jews, Muslims, and heretics as a common danger is the medieval root that later vault analyses (Anidjar/Aziz on Islamophobia as genealogy) trace forward.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the sacrificial-order theme in my essay ‘On Sacrifice’ — here the charge is that Muslims/Jews/heretics reject a specifically sacrificial economy centered on the Eucharist and monastic prayer shortening purgatory.