Medieval Europe conceived Muslims and Jews as a single body of aliens

Evidence

These two books-Mastnak’s Crusading Peace and Cohen’s Living Letters—contain enough historical knowledge to explode the fundamentally erroneous, but widely held notion that Muslims were “the enemy outside Western Europe” and Jews “the enemy within Europe itself” and to begin anew (Heng, “The Romance of England: Richard Coer de Lyon, Saracens, Jews, and the Politics of Race and Nation,” 142; see also Harle, The Enemy, esp. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 921

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the standing interest in how ‘enemy’ identity categories are constructed and policed; echoes the moral-panic/scapegoat mechanisms from Cohen’s work.
• SHARE: For the reader’s medievalist or postcolonial-theory contacts: the claim that the Muslim-enemy-outside/Jew-enemy-inside split is a modern projection onto a medieval mind that actually conflated both.