Othello is a political enemy whose religious status stays ambiguous.

Evidence

Othello, on the other hand, “horribly stuffed with epithets of war” ( 0, I.I.1J), bears all the mark of a political and military enemy. Othello, whom Iago-that is, “I hate the Moor” Iago-and others call “the general” (2.3.310) is employed against the “general enemy Ottoman” ( 0, 1.3.49-50). Othello fights the Turk, and as the final scene suggests, he himself may very well be the “malignant” and “turbaned Turk” (5.2.351). As John Gillies writes, “his symbolic association with the Turks is a critical commonplace.” Othello is a Moor, and “the Moors were popularly considered barbarous, heathens naturally at war with Christians and Europeans.” And though he himself wonders “Are we turned Turks?” ( 0, 2.3.166), his conversion, and more generally his religious status, remains mysterious. As Julia Lupton puts it, “the play never decisively determines whether he was converted from a pagan religion or from Islam.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 538

Categorization

• DEFINE: Contrasts Shylock’s theological enemy with Othello’s political-military enemy, grounding the chapter’s two-bodies-of-the-enemy framework in Shakespeare’s paired figures.
• QUESTION: Lupton’s claim that religious difference in Othello is more powerful than racial difference is worth chasing into her fuller argument.
• SEED: A potential essay angle: the two figures of the enemy (theological Jewish moneylender vs. political Moorish general) as Shakespeare’s mapping of the friend-enemy distinction onto two distinct spheres.