European orientalist discourse about Jews and Muslims developed in parallel, not isolation

Evidence

To understand orientalism, we must read discourses about Muslims and Jews together, however embarrassing or disturbing the task may be politically, religiously, or emotionally. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 95

Hess posits that in eighteenth-century Germany there were two “parallel orientalisms,” one dealing with the Jews and the other with the Muslims. Though these parallel lines meet in Michaelis’s idiosyncratic “sugar islands” suggestion, the broader question of what they had in common is not answered. It is unlikely that orientalist discourses with identical features—excluding their object as Other, presenting it as either eternally unchanging or as degenerate, feminizing it, and so on—could have developed in the West regarding the Muslims and the Jews in unconnected ways. As Bryan Turner put it, there have been “two related discourses for Semites”: one about the Jews, the other about Muslims and Arabs. But what is the link between them? — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 79

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism and the core thesis of the whole book; also ties to Gil Anidjar’s ‘The Jew, the Arab.’
• SEED: Article angle: how Islam and Judaism have been twin religious Others in Western discourse, and why reading them together (Shylock and Othello) reveals the shared structure of orientalism.
• QUESTION: The chapter poses the link between the two discourses as an open question worth pursuing.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 95; Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 79