Medieval anti-Jewish monster imagery supplied the template for the Muslim monster

Evidence

Jews were blamed for Christ’s death and many ills that befell Christian communities, a seemingly endless list of calamities including crop failures, plagues, and foreign invasions. Visually, Jews were portrayed as cannibals, murderers, demons, and monsters. In one painting, a Jew-Dragon consumes humans in an underground lair. European Jews were also cast as non-monstrous villains, most commonly as the murderers of Christ and countless other Christian innocents. Medieval narratives claimed that Jews kidnapped, murdered, and ate Christian children, fantasies portrayed in paintings from the Middle Ages onward. … These expressions of hate toward Christianity’s “internal” enemy are strongly implicated in the manufacturing of Muslim monsters, in particular, in the Black Saracen and cynocephalie, and later in paintings of the Crucifixion that feature Jewish and Muslim onlookers. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 95

Anti-Jewish rhetoric and anti-Muslim rhetoric are similar. Guibert of Nogent’s account of Muhammad’s death describes an afflicted body, mirroring contemporaneous anti-Semitic writings about diseased Jewish bodies. The account of Muhammad’s death in this work “echoes, in its focus on the body and bodily debility, the stories involving Jews in the Memoirs.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 99

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s guiding question about the ‘manufacturing’ of the Muslim monster — shows Jews as the internal enemy template onto which Muslim otherness was grafted. For Islamophobia discourse this parallels Edward Said’s observation that orientalism borrows from anti-Semitism. — connects to: the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”
• DEFINE: Introduces the analytical distinction between ‘internal’ enemy (Jews, within Christendom) whose imago was later projected onto Muslims as the ‘external’ enemy — a key categorical split for the reader’s monster/demon/giant taxonomy.
• SEED: Article angle: tracing how monster-building templates migrate from one out-group to the next — Jews to Muslims to Africans — as reusable infrastructure of fear.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 95; Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 99