Christians fashioned Jewish and Muslim monsters to define their own community

Evidence

The creation of medieval Jewish and Muslim imaginaries is due in part to Christians’ efforts to understand themselves as a community. According to Steven Kruger, both Jews and Muslims “stood in simultaneous proximity and distance from the Western European Christian; that is, in positions that guaranteed them a certain ideological and emotional significance within the processes of self-definition.” This resulted in fantasies of a Jewish-Muslim conspiracy in which the enemies of Christendom cooperate as agents of Satan, intent on overturning God’s order on earth through military invasion, trickery, and magic. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 96

Categorization

• SEED: The projective identity logic — ‘monsters made to enable self-definition’ — is a ready-made core thesis sentence for the reader’s own inquiry into the Western imagination.
• QUESTION: The claim that self-definition drives monster-creation is strong — worth chasing the Kruger source to understand exactly how proximity-plus-distance triggers this specific ideological function.