Christendom collapsed Jew and Arab together while insisting on their difference.

Evidence

Christendom had thus developed an array of narratives, categories, and classifications that made it easier to collapse the distinction between the Jew and the Arab, and it continued doing so for a very, very long time. … Yet one of the dominant ways in which this association was reinscribed and made operative was precisely by insisting on the difference, even the opposition, between Arab and Jew, by locating each of them in distinct discursive spheres. … The specific, if not always stable terms in which the complex web of associations and dissociations that organized this opposition was cast became constitutive of the theologico-political. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 218

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and the construction of the enemy as a single composite figure, and to the reader’s later work on how oppositional categories are maintained through simultaneous association and dissociation.