Colonizers projected their self-image onto invented noble-Jew native peoples.

Evidence

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, 305

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies how the Moor/Jew binary supplied the two templates for classifying all colonized religious others.