Medieval polemics framed both Jews and Muslims as followers of a false law.

Evidence

The final correspondence between the depiction of Muslims in the Caxton Siege of Jerusalem and that of the Jews in the alliterative Siege concerns the nature of the “misbelief” that earns death for the victims, whether they be slaughtered in the first century or in the eleventh. It is faith in a false “law”: in the alliterative Siege, the Jews are said to follow “Moyses lawe” (480, 582), while in the Caxton Siege, the Muslims are said to follow the “lawe of machomet” (274.24, 276.38). This parallelism, familiar from the Roman de Mahomet and the associated tradition of polemics against Islam, is evoked in the alliterative poem to suggest that the Jews, like the Muslims, are a kind of perennial enemy of Christianity. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 247

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Roman de Mahomet tradition and general anti-Islamic polemic — related to the broader theme of how medieval Christendom constructed its enemies.