European medical texts taught that race-mixing births created monstrous offspring.

Evidence

These reports about monstrous births reflect fears surrounding miscegenation. At the same time that Othello, a play about the mixing of races through the sexual union of Othello and Desdemona, is performed on the stage, such creatures were thought to exist. According to European sources from the era, the sexual union of different races and even distinct religions created horrible monsters. Ambroise Paré, a physician who lived in sixteenth-century France, wrote a book on these horrors, titled Des Monstres et Prodiges, in which he described the dangers of such relations: There are monsters that are born with a form that is half-animal and the other human, or retaining everything about them from animals, which are produced by sodomists and atheists who “join together” and break out of their bonds-unnaturally-with animals, and from this are born several hideous monsters that bring great shame to those who look at them or speak of them. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 312

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the addendum article on moral panics over cross-group mixing—here race as well as religion/class get coded as producing deformed offspring.