Medieval Christian writers gendered Jewish men as physically weak to justify their political subjection

Evidence

The monthly bleeding equates Jews with women, and consequently explains their lack of military capacity. Since the bleeding was imposed for the sinfulness of Cain, their political subjection to others, both Christians and Muslims, is theologically justifiable. The means by which this justified penalty is imposed, however, is by making Jewish men similar in physical (in)capacity to women. … The militarily weak and politically subservient slip from one language to another; in contrast, the national or ethnic groupings of whom Jacques approves, the Armenians and Georgians, are not only militarily powerful enough to maintain a measure of political independence, they are also easily identifiable by their use of a language unique to them. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 207

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to feminist scholarship on the feminization of colonized or subjugated men, and to the la the Jew-as-woman trope in later antisemitic discourse.
• DEEPTHINKING: The move of converting a divine curse into a gendered physical incapacity, then tying linguistic hybridity to military-political weakness, is a dense intellectual construction worth unpacking.