European art has historically depicted biblical Jews as Muslims

Evidence

In Christian art, it is a common practice to represent biblical Jews as if they were Muslims. Perhaps the most striking examples are some of the works of Rembrandt van Rijn. In David and Uriah, for instance, the two men’s Ottoman-style turbans play a dominant part in the composition (fig. 1). Later, in the nineteenth century, it became more common to imagine biblical Israelites wearing not the Turkish turban but the Arab headscarf or kaffiyeh. American popular culture has continued to quote this tradition. When we see the kaffiyeh on the heads of the Israelites led to the Promised Land by Charlton Heston, we are not surprised. In The Ten Commandments Hollywood builds on an artistic practice established during the previous five centuries and more. The Jews of Europe and North America have themselves accepted this pictorial language. Modern illustrators of Passover Haggadot often show the Children of Israel tending their flock in flowing robes and kaffiyeh, looking very much like traditional Palestinians. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 151

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: the politics of dressing the Bible — how a five-century artistic convention of dressing ancient Israelites as contemporary Muslims quietly shapes modern viewers’ assumptions about the Middle East, and how both Christian and Jewish iconography absorbed it.
• XREF: Connects to the orientation that Edward Said’s Orientalism opened up; also ties to the reader’s interest in how visual codes encode power and identity.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 151