Medieval Christians conflated Jews with other enemies of orthodoxy like Arians and Lollards

Evidence

Judaism was used as the template for the articulation of difference from Christianity throughout the Middle Ages. For example, Walter Cahn notes that the twelfth-century Porta Romana in Milan depicts figures identifiable as both Jews and Arian heretics: for the sculptor and his audience, Cahn suggests, “the categories of Jew and Arian … could be comfortably amalgamated.” … Lollards and Jews thus appear in the play, as Lisa Lampert puts it, as “separate but related enemies of the Church”; they are mutually reinforcing categories. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 302

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how ‘the other’ gets built by category-blending rather than by pure opposition — Jews, Arians, Lollards, Muslims blurring into composite enemies in Christian art and drama.