Europeans projected Jews onto unknown peoples to explain, save, and rank them.

Evidence

A hitherto unobserved feature of colonial discourse is the astonishing way in which a construction of Jews, quite unrelated to any objective feature pertaining to the Jews of the time, was used throughout the world as a means of explicating unknown or little-known peoples of wildly differing characteristics. This construction arose in part because past Europeans were so imbued with the Bible that it was the first thing they turned to when in doubt, and thus the ethnography of the Israelites was the most available. It arose also because Western and particularly Protestant missionaries longed for the return of the Christian Messiah, before which long-awaited event Jews had to be found in every corner of the globe; thus Jews were “invented” in the most remote regions to facilitate the Second Coming. Finally, it arose as a means of favoring certain “superior” peoples in the colonial enterprise of divide and rule. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 305

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘invented tradition’ concept and to how colonizers read familiar sacred texts into new landscapes — parallels the tamarisk/biblical framing in ‘Grafting & Growth’.