Colonists explained new peoples by mapping Europe’s Jew and Moor stereotypes onto them

Evidence

One part of the discourse imposed upon new and unknown societies was a construction of the “other” that colonists had brought with them from Europe. This, in essence, was to try and explain indigenous religions as well as indigenous racial types from the analogy of religious systems and racial types that were known to them. To medieval Europe the two most obvious forms of the religious other were Jews and Muslims and to some extent this binary construct continued into the twentieth century. The myth of the Moor (synonymous with Muslim in the European discourse) was one of its aspects and stood more or less for wild tribalism and a state of fairly but not entirely irredeemable savagery. The Jew represented a number of features, of which we should note a bucolic traditional way of life, a certain nobility, a more developed intelligence than was to be found among other groups and so on. Frequently the idealization of groups who are given these invented identities contained reflections of the fine qualities of the colonist; here alterity merges with introspection. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 340

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Saidian orientalism and the author’s broader thesis on how European categories of religious otherness were projected onto colonized peoples worldwide. — connects to: Anti-Ottoman crusader attitudes were transferred onto Native Americans by English colonists — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 206
• SEED: An essay angle: how the Jew/Moor binary from medieval Europe was exported globally as an interpretive template for ‘unknown’ peoples.