Medieval theology explained Jewish pallor as divine punishment for deicide.

Evidence

All the punishments meted upon the Jews cause a lot of bloodletting, which requires the consumption of Christian flesh, well known in the anti-Semitic tales surrounding Passover in which Jews used the blood of Christian children in the baking of matsot. What is less frequently discussed, however, is the complexion of Jewish people. According to an early fourteenth-century text, the paleness of the Jews was due to their “superfluidity of gross blood,” which made the men bleed “from their anuses” and caused them to appear “sad, antisocial, pallid.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 532

Categorization

• DEFINE: Offers the reader a precise historical mechanism: the same penal-corporeal logic that racializes vampires also racialized Jews centuries earlier.
• XREF: Strengthens the reader’s comparative frame: both Jew and Muslim monsters are theological constructions attaching bodily stigma before any real encounter.