Medieval Christians clustered Jews and Muslims as one infidel genus

Evidence

The Antichrist was often tied to Jewish and Muslim figures in theology, literature, and art. This was, after all, part of how Christians defined themselves against communities that stood in opposition for one reason or another. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen puts it, “the classification of the Jews together with the Muslims” was one of the major “subsets in a larger genus of hermeneutically constructed infidels who undermined the unity of the Christian faith.” These ideas did not end with the onset of modernity, a point raised by some scholars of Orientalism and anti-Semitism, who have argued that the vilification of Jews and Muslims is a continuously related historical process. Without one, it is impossible to fully understand, or acknowledge, the other. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 98

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the analytical category: ‘hermeneutically constructed infidels’ as the shared genus housing both Jews and Muslims.
• XREF: Directly cites Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, the monster-theory scholar whose framework recurs through this book; connects to the reader’s guiding question on how identity is manufactured against an external other.