Muslims and Jews were the template for categorizing New World indigenous peoples.

Evidence

The coming of racist violence and racism is curiously marked as anti–Semitism in this passage, a term that, as noted, came into usage in the mid-twentieth century. Winant attributes the shift in persecution from religious beliefs to the ”essence” of Jews and their outsider status, but he easily could have been speaking of Muslims. Conversion to Christianity or death for Jews and Muslims was itself an act of shifting religious conceptions into racial conceptions. For the explorers, it is important to note, Muslims and Jews constituted an early category of religious and racial other to transpose onto indigenous groups of the New World. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 154

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the genealogy of the race concept in Spanish Reconquista; parallels how studies of Islamophobia relate to earlier race theory work on antisemitism.