Jews and Muslims occupied a shared proximity-distancing position in Christian self-definition
Evidence
According to Steven Kruger, both Jews and Muslims “stood in simultaneous proximity and distance from the Western European Christian; that is, in positions that guaranteed them a certain ideological and emotional significance within the processes of self-definition.” This resulted in fantasies of a Jewish-Muslim conspiracy in which the enemies of Christendom cooperate as agents of Satan, intent on overturning God’s order on earth through military invasion, trickery, and magic. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 96
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Kruger’s proximity-and-distance formulation explains the structural position that made both groups monstrous others.
Related
- Christians fashioned Jewish and Muslim monsters to define their own community (similarity 0.83)
- Passion narratives co-identified Jews and Muslims as a single enemy (similarity 0.81)
- Christians treated all non-Christian monstrous figures as interchangeable enemies (similarity 0.80)
- The Judeo-Christian category is a mid-twentieth-century construct that erases Islam from the West (similarity 0.80)
- Scholarship mapped Christian hostility to Jews yet neglected its Muslim parallel. (similarity 0.80)
- Islam’s proximity and shared sacred geography made it a unique spiritual threat to Europe. (similarity 0.79)
- Islamophobic writing functions to define the Christian author, not describe Muslims (similarity 0.79)
- Islam served as Europe’s constitutive outsider against which its civilization defined itself (similarity 0.79)
- Christian self-identity was constitutively dependent on ongoing Jewish estrangement (similarity 0.79)
- Anti-Muslim polemic functions primarily to define its Christian authors (similarity 0.79)
- Medieval Christians constructed Islam and Judaism as mutual templates (similarity 0.79)
- Medieval Christians clustered Jews and Muslims as one infidel genus (similarity 0.79)
- Medieval Christianity repudiated Muslims at a distance but Jews from within (similarity 0.79)
- The vilification of Jews and Muslims is one continuous historical process (similarity 0.79)
- Medieval Christian polemicists treated Islam as closer to true faith than Judaism. (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- The essay critically assesses the contemporary scholarship on Christian Islamophobia, arguing that it often overlooks the internal Christian divisions and portrays Christianity as a monolithic…
#expands(0.60) - Islamophobia is powered by the overlap of Muslims being both inside and outside
#expands(0.55) — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 698 - Medieval anti-Muslim rhetoric borrowed bodily-debility tropes from anti-Jewish writing
#corroborates(0.50) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 99 - Anti-Muslim hate replicates anti-Semitic tropes and spreads between targeted groups
#expands(0.45) — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 210