European artists began routinely depicting biblical Jews in turbans only in the fifteenth century

Evidence

If we can conjecture that the “orientalization of the Orient” began in the thirteenth century, we can be quite certain of it in the fifteenth, when the practice of depicting Jews in turbans became firmly established. Before the late 1400s, one only rarely sees a biblical Israelite depicted with a turban. … Even the early fourteenth-century work of Giotto avoids orientalizing the biblical Jew. He was familiar with the turban, and did place it on the head of the “Sultan” in his 1325 Scenes from the Life of Saint Francis, the famous fresco in the Bardi Chapel of the Church of Sta. Croce in Florence. But he never placed a turban on the head of a Jew. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 170

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did Giotto orientalize the Sultan but never the Jew? Worth chasing the political/theological distinction the author is building toward.