Medieval Christians used Jewish identity as a template to define themselves by exclusion

Evidence

Because the Jews, unlike the Muslims, were seen as permanently in exile, belonging nowhere yet found everywhere, the climate-based explanation of the nature of the Oriental body could not simply be transferred to the Jewish body. “Placing the Jews”—both temporally and spatially—would prove central to medieval attempts to define the nature of non-Christians and, by their exclusion, to define Christian identity. Jewish identity was used as a template to delineate both what features might be embraced as prefigurations of Christian identity, and what features must necessarily be excluded from the imagined community of the Church. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 232

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to theories of identity formation through defining the other, similar to work on how groups define themselves by exclusion of out-groups.