Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [47]
In this structure, religious designations—Jew, Muslim, Christian—delineated the boundaries. Without effective separation there was an uncontrollable risk to communal stability. Without prohibition there was a fear among Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike that the pollution barrier would be crossed. As in many societies, sexual transgression was both the most emotively charged and also the most immediate danger. The Muslim men of the law (ulema) observed the weakness of their own gender when confronted by women, and blamed women for the temptation. The desire for separation was found in each community, which saw the others as potentially dangerous. Yet the desire to keep apart was not necessarily an actively antagonistic or hostile attitude. The communities belonged to distinct and separate castes. The word “caste” is nowadays associated with Indian Hinduism. It was taken by the Portuguese to India in the sixteenth century and they used it to communicate—imperfectly—the complex social structure that they found there. But in the Iberian languages the word means “bloodline” or “clan”: sharing a common connection but also displaying profound differences. The pioneering Spanish philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal, in his early-twentieth-century study of the development of the Spanish language, found that the concept provided a useful analogy to describe the many different elements which made up the linguistic culture of Iberia. Often nothing linked them in terms of ethnicity, but he saw them as separate “castes” within a common cultural framework, interconnected but also separate.35 This accords with more modern definitions of “caste”: a form of social division based solely on lineage that totally constrains a person’s way of life.36 For all these reasons, I have adopted the usage here.
We cannot be entirely sure how Muslims, Christians, and Jews regarded one another. Certainly, statements of enmity predominated, but these may not represent the reality of everyday life.37 But all the evidence suggests that even when there was no active antagonism, the communities wanted to remain separate. Moreover, what David Nirenberg calls the “background static” of violence “never receded from practical consciousness. It influenced the daily actions and strategies of minority and majority alike: what clothes to wear, what route to take to work, how to accuse an enemy of a crime—the list is endless.”38 The negative views each group held about the others were often reciprocal. Muslims believed viscerally in the other castes’ unbridled sexuality.39 Christians believed the same about Jewish and Muslim sexuality. In the last of the Siete Partidas, the Castilian law code of the early fourteenth century, the jurists consider the case of Jewish men who have intercourse with a Christian woman: “Jews who live with Christian women are guilty of great insolence and boldness, for which reason we decree that all Jews who, hereafter, may be convicted of having done such a thing shall be put to death.”40 The Muslims were subject to the same penalties. In all medieval societies sexual transgressions were considered subversive of the entire social order. An English edict of 1417 declared that “the illicit works of their lewd flesh [are] to the great abomination and displeasure of God.”41 But for Christian, Jew, and Muslim alike, sexual acts across the boundaries of caste were a higher order of wickedness, akin to sodomy. Peter Damian’s castigation of sodomitical acts in his Liber Gomorrhianus (c. 1050) conveys an attitude applicable to both manifestations of illicit carnality: “It pollutes the flesh; it extinguishes the light of the mind … it is this which violates sobriety, kills modesty, strangles chastity and butchers irreparable