Medieval authorities marked off both Jews and Muslims together as aliens

Evidence

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

Categorization

• XREF: The Fourth Lateran Council clothing distinction parallels sumptuary-dress moral panics already covered in ‘On Sacrifice’ and the dress article library.
• ADDENDUM: Direct supporting material for ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’: the Lateran Council’s dress distinction was applied to both Jews and Muslims as one marked alien body, not two separate groups.