Jewish and Muslim questions in Europe share one Christian-origin epistemology

Evidence

As Anidjar demonstrates, the Jewish or Muslim Questions are products of a Christian Question: the racialised, blood identity of Christendom—of Europe— from the time of the Crusades onwards. As our book also shows from the opening chapter by Andrew Jotischky, the Christian beginnings of a shared Judeo-Muslim epistemology are evident from this moment; in other words, the Christian, Jewish and Muslim Questions are of a piece, and of a time. This is not to say that they were the same, as is also demonstrated in the chapter by François Soyer on early modern Iberia and the specifics of the Jewish doctor as a conspiratorial agent. Yet the shared epistemology was there, and we maintain that it accounts for a great deal through to the Nazis’ Jewish enemy, and the West’s Islamic world conspiracy today. The era of European empires, including the Enlightenment, shifted the contexts, significance and coding of Christendom’s Muslim and Jewish Questions, but the overarching architectural foundations and schema remained. As the book also explains, the First World War and the beginnings of the Israel–Palestine conflict finally exploded the explicit category of the Semite and a Muslim–Jewish framework. From 1918, European notions of Muslims and Jews entered a new period that ended the explicit shared framework that began with the Crusades. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 85

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in the social construction of the Semite/racial categories and how an intellectual-architectural frame persists across period boundaries — related to Milgrom’s argument about institutions persisting as frameworks across scale changes.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether the post-1918 rupture really ended the shared framework, or whether it merely re-coded it — the author claims the shared schema survived empire and Enlightenment, so why would WWI explode it?