Bestiaries encoded the Jew as animal predator attacking Christ as bird

Evidence

The stereotype of Jews as devious killers is portrayed in bestiaries through the animals that symbolized them—the hyena, fox, and dog—and the Jewish cynocephalie, dog-headed monsters featured in both literature and art. Scenes in these bestiaries often show one of the animals (a Jew) attacking a bird (Christ). An analysis of such a scene should take into account three factors: the composition of the scene, the actors, and their positions relative to each other. The religious scholar Jacob Kinnard describes this as an “ontological dialectical” relationship. This opposition identifies the villain, the victim, and the broader religious narrative at work. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 213

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: This visual encoding of ‘the other’ as predator on the sacred victim tracks with the sacrificial-logic analysis in ‘On Sacrifice’ — the villain-victim-broader narrative dialectic is a sacrificial scene.