Europe read colonial others through its binary of Jew and Moor

Evidence

Nonetheless, it is clear from this analysis that the imposition of the invented identity of a known other on colonized peoples in the form of the Jew or the Moor with attendant invented languages, cultures, and religions was a feature of orientalist colonial discourse. This imposition not only involved colonial countries like Britain and America but others such as France and Germany and served imperial needs throughout the world from Japan to Quebec from Peru to Zululand. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 340 (#expands, via linked claim)

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

It would be as well to note here that frequently in the colonial discourse under review Arabs or Moors are alternative structures of otherness. Although this chapter is concerned mainly with the way in which the Jewish element of the Semitic world acted on the European imagination, the Arabs or Moors (as well as other ancient peoples) also played an important role. In medieval Europe “Moorishness” like “Jewishness” was the essence of “otherness.” The Arabic languages, like Hebrew (in France “c’est de l’hébreu pour moi” signifies an incomprehensible language) was the epitome of the unknown tongue. In the Veneto, which has had a long history of symbiosis with Muslims to this day, parlar turco means to speak gobbledygook, and cose turche implies things that can scarcely be imagined. Even those not convinced by the Israelite or Moorish origins of strange people still saw Jews and Moors as archetypal others: Vespucci, at a loss to understand who the American Indians might be noted, “they cannot be called Moors nor Jews, but worse than gentiles … I judge their lives to be Epicurean.” In other words, as Vespucci looked around for suitable “others” to express the strangeness of the Indians, the most automatic first choice was a twinning of Jews and Moors. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 952 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Shakespeare’s Moor and Jew characters encoded pre-modern racialized difference. — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion: Race,…, 27; European views of Jews shaped and were projected onto colonial peoples; European colonial discourse imposed invented Jew and Moor identities on peoples globally — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 340 (+19 more)

Broader Connections

• European colonial discourse imposed invented Jew and Moor identities on peoples globally #expands (0.95) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 340
• Colonists explained new peoples by mapping Europe’s Jew and Moor stereotypes onto them #expands (0.95) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 340
• Jews and Moors served as Europe’s archetypal others for expressing strangeness #corroborates (0.93) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 952
• Jews and Moors were interchangeable stock figures of otherness in early modern Europe. #corroborates (0.92)