Medieval Christendom both conflated and opposed Jew and Arab in its classifications.

Evidence

Christendom had thus developed an array of narratives, categories, and classifications that made it easier to collapse the distinction between the Jew and the Arab, and it continued doing so for a very, very long time. … Yet one of the dominant ways in which this association was reinscribed and made operative was precisely by insisting on the difference, even the opposition, between Arab and Jew, by locating each of them in distinct discursive spheres. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 218

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the book’s core theoretical move: association works through dissociating the Jew and the Arab, not just by merging them.
• XREF: This is the hinge of the entire antisemitism-Islamophobia bridge literature; echoes later works reading both as co-produced Christian categories.