Jews and Moors served as Europe’s archetypal others for expressing strangeness

Evidence

It would be as well to note here that frequently in the colonial discourse under review Arabs or Moors are alternative structures of otherness. Although this chapter is concerned mainly with the way in which the Jewish element of the Semitic world acted on the European imagination, the Arabs or Moors (as well as other ancient peoples) also played an important role. In medieval Europe “Moorishness” like “Jewishness” was the essence of “otherness.” The Arabic languages, like Hebrew (in France “c’est de l’hébreu pour moi” signifies an incomprehensible language) was the epitome of the unknown tongue. In the Veneto, which has had a long history of symbiosis with Muslims to this day, parlar turco means to speak gobbledygook, and cose turche implies things that can scarcely be imagined. Even those not convinced by the Israelite or Moorish origins of strange people still saw Jews and Moors as archetypal others: Vespucci, at a loss to understand who the American Indians might be noted, “they cannot be called Moors nor Jews, but worse than gentiles … I judge their lives to be Epicurean.” In other words, as Vespucci looked around for suitable “others” to express the strangeness of the Indians, the most automatic first choice was a twinning of Jews and Moors. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 952

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism framework and to the broader theme of othering in the enclosed library — echoes the ‘twinning’ dynamic seen in postcolonial theory. — connects to: Shakespeare’s Moor and Jew characters encoded pre-modern racialized difference. — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion: Race,…, 27
• CANDY: The Italian idioms ‘parlar turco’ for gobbledygook and ‘cose turche’ for unimaginable things are fun language facts.
• SHARE: The Veneto/Turkish idiom bit is a narrow delight for anyone into Italian dialect or the history of Muslim-Christian symbiosis in the lagoon region.