Medieval Europe treated Jews and Muslims as two halves of one body of aliens

Evidence

Were the object of the present chapter confined to a historical question (in the narrow sense of the term), there would be little to add to the work of Cohen and Mastnak and little with which to disagree. Of exemplary probity, both Cohen and Mastnak refer numerous times to “the other other” of Europe, an other to which their book remains, however, explicitly and strangely opaque. Each proclaims and maintains an exclusive interest in only one of them, Islam or Judaism, the Jew or the Arab, but as Heng puts it, it is instead “as if the two infidel nations were halves of a single body of aliens” (hence, as an example, the Fourth Lateran Council assigned a distinction in clothing to mark off both Jews and Muslims, 145). Much like “the modern mind”-if there is such a thing-”the medieval ideological mind” was indeed well “able to confuse Jews with Muslims” (Heng, “The Romance of England,” 145), even and perhaps especially when it remained highly invested in distinguishing between them. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 922

Categorization

• XREF: Core of the genealogical spine - medieval Christians paired Jews and Muslims at the very moment of differentiating their dress.
• ADDENDUM: The Fourth Lateran Council clothing distinction connects to my complaints-about-immodesty article’s treatment of sumptuary-marking of religious others.