Polemics and Multilingualism in the Crusading Near East

The thirteenth century saw a remarkable surge in the number of polemical tracts that were composed and disseminated in the Eastern Mediterranean. Both Muslim and Christian authors became involved in cycles of polemical exchange that lasted for decades. This corpus was viewed as an intellectual inflection of the militant hostility that is frequently associated with the period of the crusades, a hostility that is all too often imagined to have been aligned on, and further entrenched, rigid religious fault lines. Recently, however, scholars have begun to reconsider the nature of this exchange, allowing for the possibility that this unusually energetic polemical correspondence is, rather, a reflection of unique conditions that enabled a constructive dialogue. A particularly revealing example are the polemical tracts that a certain Melkite priest, Paul of Antioch, composed around the turn of the thirteenth century. The works that Paul wrote against Judaism and Islam triggered a series of spirited responses most likely because they provided polemicists with hermeneutical tools to view their own religion in a helpful manner. This talk will argue that Paul's attitude toward other religions, that was indeed highly "ecumenical," was possible through a unique philosophy of language that he articulated. His approach toward the language of revelation generated an unusually sympathetic attitude toward the scriptures of other groups. In this paper I will suggest that this philosophy of language is another important expression of the profound multilingualism that characterized the crusading near east.