Europe’s racial anxieties about blackness paired the Muslim with the Jew

Evidence

The figure of the Muslim, alongside that of the Jew, has historically book-ended modern Europe’s explicit historical anxieties about blackness. “The Muslim” has haunted the continent from the earliest moments of its modernity, inherited of course from the medieval contest between Mediterranean Christianity and Islam. In Elizabethan England, “the Moor” characterized the mix of religion – godless members of the “sect of Mahomet” – and North African blackness. By the late Enlightenment racial hierarchization of national character, Immanuel Kant could wedge “the Arab,” “possessed of an inflamed imagination,” between the basest of (Southern) Europeans and the Far East, but significantly above “the Negroes of Africa.” — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 859

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s curatorial interest in how prestige authors (Kant) encode racial hierarchies into philosophical systems. — connects to: Shakespeare’s Moor and Jew characters encoded pre-modern racialized difference. — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion: Race,…, 27
• SEED: The ‘book-ended anxieties’ framing — Muslim and Jew bracketing European blackness panic — could seed an essay on how Islamophobia and antisemitism are structurally twinned in European racial imagination, not merely parallel.