Medieval Christians conflated Jews and Muslims into shared monster figures

Evidence

An archive of Muslim monsters must include their cousins, the Jewish monsters. Jews and Muslims were often confused in the minds of medieval Christians, a result of the myriad ways in which they were co-identified in the theology, literature, and art of the period. The joint vilification of Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages continued into the Renaissance. Medieval Muslim monsters like the Black Saracen, a Muslim-Ethiopian-Jewish hybrid, and the cynocephalus, which had both Jewish and Muslim incarnations, often exhibited anti-Semitic Jewish characteristics. Typically, the way this was expressed was through the actions of these monsters, who were shown harassing, torturing, and killing Christian saints, and also were depicted as the executioners of Jesus. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 162

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s thesis: the monster as a single container into which multiple ‘other’ groups were poured — ties to the ‘fear without an object’ thesis since the image is shared across entirely distinct groups.