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🪵 The Threshold

Jews and Muslims were co-identified as Jesus's executioners from at least the 690s

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tagsja-picks, contrarian_or_surprising, singleton, xref, category/factual-claims
aliases@arjana_muslims_2015, loc. 226

4 min read

Jews and Muslims were co-identified as Jesus’s executioners from at least the 690s

Evidence

Both Jews and Muslims appeared as dog-headed men in a number of medieval texts and paintings that identified them as monsters associated with the devil. The association of dogs with Jews continues to the modern period; and while I do not provide a complete anthropology here, I would like to point to the importance of this particular anti-Semitic hate sign, which contributes to, and is supported by, Muslim dog-headed monsters. The association of dogs with Satan informs this relationship: The dog was interpreted as a manifestation of the Devil, especially in medieval times. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 226 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The identification of Jews as dogs—ravenous, wild, and cannibalistic—continued for centuries. In the eighteenth century, Jewish dogs were accused of eating children, narratives based on late medieval and Renaissance paintings of Jews and Muslims killing Christian children. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 232 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Judge George H. Hutton peered across his bench in the direction of George Shishim. Shishim, a longtime resident of California and native of the Mount Lebanon Province (modern-day Lebanon) of the Ottoman Empire, had come to Hutton’s court to petition for American citizenship. After living in Los Angeles as a resident alien and serving as a policeman for the LAPD, he was poised to finally become a naturalized citizen and a formal member of the country he served and for which he felt a great affinity. … Short on rebuttals, Shishim closed with the lone argument that he hoped would resonate with Judge Hutton and save his petition. It was a Hail Mary, a final plea. He rose from his seat, stood firmly with his LAPD badge glistening from his jacket, and testified, “If I am Mongolian, then so was Jesus, because we came from the same land.” Shishim was effectively stating that if Jesus were white, the court would also have to find him to be white, or render an admission that Jesus was not white—an admission that would undermine the construction of Jesus as a white man and of Christianity as a portal toward whiteness. Christianity was one of the primary hallmarks of whiteness in the United States in the early twentieth century, and Shishim’s spirited appeal insisted that although he was from the Muslim world, he was not a Muslim but in fact a Christian, and therefore white. … Hutton, conditioned to believe that anybody who hailed from the Middle East was Muslim, struggled with this dissonance. But Shishim’s brilliant appeal to Christianity managed to persuade Hutton, and Shishim became the first immigrant from the Middle East to be naturalized as an American citizen and judicially ruled white by law. “When the court finally determined Shishim to be a white person, thus allowing for his acquisition of citizenship,” a Los Angeles Times reporter wrote that “it made every feature of his dark, swarthy countenance radiate with pleasure and hope.” — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 177 (#responds-to, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: The vilification of Jews and Muslims is one continuous historical process; Blood-libel imagery linked Jews and Muslims eating Christian children. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 232; Jews and Muslims shared a canine monstrous identity in medieval literature — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 226 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

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