Thirteenth-century canon law treated Muslims juridically as Jews to prevent contamination

Evidence

There was indeed, from the thirteenth century onward, a growing volume of law restricting the legal status of Jews and Muslims and limiting the “polluting” contacts between Catholics and infidels. Over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Church legislation and legal commentaries tended to confirm this trend: for juridical purposes, Muslims were treated as Jews (rather than as pagans or heretics). The principal aim of this legislation was to prevent “contamination” of Christendom through contact with the infidel: sexual contact, social ties, religious contamination through the syncretistic rites of recidivist converts, and so on. The Muslim or Jew, like the leper, needed to be marked, isolated, quarantined, in order to protect the Christian. The twin (and seemingly contradictory) concerns were to keep the Christian community safe from all “contamination” from the infidel (living in the same house with him, being subjected to his power) and to convert the infidel (or at least to remove social and economic impediments to his conversion). — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1365

Categorization

• XREF: Direct ancestor of the modern ‘Muslim as polluting presence’ trope in Anidjar/Razack-driven vault claims; quarantine/leper framing is a startling concrete origin for securitization rhetoric.
• ADDENDUM: Supports and extends themes of isolation-and-danger language that parallel the exclusion logic traced in existing articles.
• QUESTION: When legally was the conflation first codified — Lateran IV 1215 or earlier decretals? Worth pinning the terminus.