Christians weaponized bodily disease narratives identically against Jews and Muhammad

Evidence

Anti-Jewish rhetoric and anti-Muslim rhetoric are similar. Guibert of Nogent’s account of Muhammad’s death describes an afflicted body, mirroring contemporaneous anti-Semitic writings about diseased Jewish bodies. The account of Muhammad’s death in this work “echoes, in its focus on the body and bodily debility, the stories involving Jews in the Memoirs.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 99

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and the manufactured shared victimhood of Jews and Muslims; also parallels the reader’s existing incursions into how body-debility rhetoric recurs in monster-making across the medieval sources.
• SEED: Article angle: how the same diseased-body template (‘afflicted,’ epileptic, rotting corpse) does double duty across anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim polemic, from Guibert to Guibert’s heirs.