Anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim images fused into one stock enemy

Evidence

This is not only an example of transference, or commingling, in which anti-Semitism and anti-Saracenism are joined. The Jewish Sarrazin is an early example of the charge of Jews and Muslims as Christianity’s eternal enemies, even more significant because these representations become stock characters in Renaissance paintings of the Crucifixion and the execution of Christian saints. The linkage of Jews and Muslims/Saracens was so common that it was “difficult to name the one group without conjuring up the other.” We find Jewish and Muslim figures side by side in these scenes, whipping Christ, stoking the fires of an executioner, and observing these scenes with perverse expressions of enjoyment. After the Renaissance, Jews and Muslims continued to be vilified in European discourse, a topic covered in the chapter on Orientalism. The purported relationship between Jews and Muslims as co-conspirators existed in the Christian imaginaire for centuries. It was not ultimately extinguished until Jews were finally considered capable of assimilating—something that didn’t take place until the late twentieth century and that has yet to happen for Muslims. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 171

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense mechanism: the two enemy images are commingled into stock Crucifixion characters — the image is manufactured for theological staging, and the transference is so complete that naming one conjures the other. The closing line also delivers a sharp, uncomfortable claim about Muslim assimilation status today.
• SEED: Potential essay: how the composite ‘eternal enemy’ figure of the Crucifixion scene — part Jew, part Saracen — survives into modern stock images of the Muslim villain, unchanged in structure.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what visual evidence in Renaissance Crucifixion paintings shows the Saracen/Jewish conflation most explicitly?
• XREF: connects to: Anti-Semitic ideology fused contradictory charges into a single universalist enemy image — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 1696; Media imagery drives public bias against Muslims and Arabs — Sahar F. Aziz, Sticks and Stones, the Words That Hurt:…, 74