Orientalist discourse also monstrously deformed the male Jew as morally ugly

Evidence

In Charles Didier’s writings on Morocco, we have an indication of how Jews were viewed in Orientalist discourse: The lowest passions of humanity, avarice and fear, are the two distinctive traits of the modern children of Israel; they wear its indelible mark on their face and in their entire person. They look at you with a sidelong and worried expression, and they mask the terror that possesses their heart under a syrupy smile that is painful to look at when studied. The Jew does not speak; he whispers like a prisoner who fears waking his executioner who has fallen asleep. The Jew does not walk; he glides along the walls, his eyes on the lookout, his ears pricked, and he turns corners closely, like a thief under pursuit… . The Jew’s ugliness is a highly specific ugliness and it belongs only to him. There is no deformity in his trait; yet, faithful mirror to his interior life, his physiognomy has an ignobility and a brutality about it that cannot be defined, which is striking at the first glance, and which is invincibly repulsive. It is a moral ugliness; it is the soul that is deformed, and which is reproduced in each of the features. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 411

Categorization

• XREF: This physical-moral ugliness of the Jewish man is a direct inversion of the same genre’s eroticized Jewess - a gender split that the reader’s inquiry into monster figures can exploit, since the male Jew here carries the deformed-soul monster trope.
• QUESTION: Didier writes in the 1830s-40s about Morocco; how does his Jewish male monster compare chronologically to medieval Muslim monster traditions? Does the manufactured-image-precedes-contact thesis hold for Jewish figures too?
• SEED: Essay angle: the Occidental gender split of dehumanization - how Orientalism simultaneously monstered the non-European man and eroticized the non-European woman as two halves of one projection of the West’s own contradictory desires.