Jews and Moors were interchangeable stock figures of otherness in early modern Europe.

Evidence

Jews and Muslims played a central role in the medieval social imagination. For the average Christian, “[a] nti-Jewishness was a structural feature of late medieval society.” In plays depicting the Assumption, Jews were often portrayed as Satan or demons, in the same way that Muslims, especially Black Saracens, were represented, creating even more confusion in the minds of the medieval and Renaissance audiences. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 168 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Were the object of the present chapter confined to a historical question (in the narrow sense of the term), there would be little to add to the work of Cohen and Mastnak and little with which to disagree. Of exemplary probity, both Cohen and Mastnak refer numerous times to “the other other” of Europe, an other to which their book remains, however, explicitly and strangely opaque. Each proclaims and maintains an exclusive interest in only one of them, Islam or Judaism, the Jew or the Arab, but as Heng puts it, it is instead “as if the two infidel nations were halves of a single body of aliens” (hence, as an example, the Fourth Lateran Council assigned a distinction in clothing to mark off both Jews and Muslims, 145). Much like “the modern mind”-if there is such a thing-”the medieval ideological mind” was indeed well “able to confuse Jews with Muslims” (Heng, “The Romance of England,” 145), even and perhaps especially when it remained highly invested in distinguishing between them. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 922 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Religious othering of Jews and Muslims has historically been intertwined.; Europe read colonial others through its binary of Jew and Moor; Sixteenth-century Castilian could semantically distinguish Moriscos from Moors while asserting their equality (+15 more)

Broader Connections

• Jews and Muslims were interchangeable demonic figures in the medieval Christian imagination. #corroborates (0.97) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 168
• Jews and Moors served as Europe’s archetypal others for expressing strangeness #corroborates (0.96) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 952
• Medieval Europe treated Jews and Muslims as two halves of one body of aliens #corroborates (0.95) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 922
• Medieval Christendom named Muslims Saracens, Moors, Ishmaelites, and Agarenes interchangeably #corroborates (0.93) — Norman Daniel, Islam and the West, 106
• Jews were Europe’s sole minority but one among many in Islamic lands #complicates (0.80)
• Early modern Europe reframed religion as a human-constructed system. #complicates (0.72)