Christians treated Jews and Muslims as interchangeable enemies in art

Evidence

Jews and Muslims were often represented as co-criminals. In some paintings, the hierarchical arrangement was shifted, and the Muslim villain was replaced with a Jewish one, or vice versa. In the Norsa … Madonna (c. 1499), the Muslim figure of Averroes seen in the Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas (c. 1323) is replaced with a Jewish family. These paintings represent the ways in which Jews and Muslims were interchangeable in the minds of Christians as enemies par excellence. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 251

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s article on moral panics over ‘immodest’ dress and the interchangeable-enemy theme; also parallels how ‘the monster’ categories collapse distinct groups into one undifferentiated enemy.
• QUESTION: What does the interchangeability of Jew and Muslim in Christian art reveal about the underlying structure of the ‘monster’ category — is it one enemy wearing two costumes?