Racial form in the medieval period is neither singular nor free of contradiction, as I began to say in Chapter 1, and accrues through variegated and shifting means. In some historical contexts, Jews and Muslims might be treated as proximately alike: so that crusaders setting out to exterminate the infidel occupying the Holy Land, for instance, found it logical first to exterminate the infidel resident in Europe – analogizing readily from one racial-religious enemy to the other – with the result that they wreaked devastation on European Jewish communities en route. In some literary contexts, a slippage between thinking about Muslims and thinking about Jews also leads to conflations of one people with the other: In his celebrated romance, Parzival, for instance, Wolfram von Eschenbach refers to the Caliph of Baghdad as “the Baruch” of Baghdad, as if the leaders of infidel Abrahamic communities were interchangeably alike.