European male artists uniformly eroticized the Oriental Jewess as mysterious and desirable

Evidence

The sensuality of Oriental women was one of the main themes in French representations of the Orient, and Jewish women were included in this imagery… . Men from disparate fields such as Hugo and the painter Eugene Delacroix—as well as the lesser known writer Charles Didier—all found in the Orient and its Jewess something that was sufficiently distant to be idealized and made mysterious, but which nonetheless retained elements of familiarity. All contributed to the ambiguous image of the Jewess who was both spiritual and carnal: beautiful, sensual, and knowing.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 412

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘distant enough to idealize yet familiar enough to desire’ formulation is a precise mechanism for how manufactured images work - supports the reader’s fear-without-object thesis by showing the image is calibrated by distance, not contact.