Political theology’s two-body structure maps onto the Arab-Jew community

Evidence

In what follows, I want to pursue the work that has been done on political theology in Shakespeare and ask about the coming together and falling apart of another community, that of Arab and Jew. To be textually more precise, I want to ask about the community and “fellowship” (as Marlowe’s Barabas suggests to Ithamore), of those two Venetian bodies who, not quite ofthe community, are nonetheless “situated in a potentially threatening position very near the ‘inside’ of authority and power.” These two Venetian strangers and Venetian enemies are, then, the Moor and the Jew. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 513

Categorization

• XREF: This is the direct genealogical move tying king’s-two-bodies political theology to Arab and Jew, the claim other Islamophobia-cluster books will cite back to.
• SEED: Potential essay: how the Moor and the Jew as twin ‘insider enemies’ of Venice prefigure modern Islamophobia-antisemitism.