Orientalist race theory read moral degeneracy into Jewish male bodies as an innate mark.

Evidence

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

• DEFINE: Illustrates the physiognomic logic by which inner character is asserted to print itself on the body — a mechanism central to monstrous-figure manufacture.
• XREF: Strong parallel to anti-Semitic tropes of the Jew as predator/prisoner — connects to the reader’s broader question of who carries disgust vs. desire in Western imagination.