Medieval Christians deliberately blurred Jewish and Muslim identities into one body.

Evidence

Muslim places of worship were termed not only mahommeries (mosques), but were also described as synagogues, one of the many ways in which Muslims were framed as “new Jews,” a charge that continued to be made throughout the Middle Ages. One example of this is found in the Chanson de Roland, where Christian soldiers destroy the idols found in “les sinagoges e les mahumeries.” Paintings with Jewish Saracens and Ishmaelite Muslims also present a confusing picture of Jewish and Muslim identities. In the Roman de Mahomet, Islam is characterized as a religion whose followers, “seduced by the luxurious ‘miracle’ of a land flowing with milk and honey, are led to embrace the ‘law of Moses’ complete with a return to the ‘circumcision of the flesh.’ ” Passion plays included Jewish characters praying to the “almighty Mahomet” and featured “hideously deformed and dark-skinned Saracens along with the usual Jews.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 166

Categorization

• XREF: This conflation of Jews and Muslims into one enemy body connects to the reader’s guiding question about how the West collapses distinct others into a single container, and parallels how monsters fuse multiple threats.