Reading medieval anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim acts as Holocaust or colonial precursors distorts them

Evidence

Yet we risk seriously misunderstanding the medieval actors in these events if we see every piece of anti-Jewish legislation or every act of violence against a Jew as a sort of precursor to the Holocaust. Whatever one thinks of the French and British conquests of large parts of the Muslim world, they are not merely the reenactment of the timeless Western greed embodied in the Crusades, as some have claimed. To catalog the anti-Muslim sentiments from the writings of medieval Latin authors and expose them to the disapproving gaze of the presumably enlightened Anglophone reader of the twentieth century, as Norman Daniel has done, is little help in understanding what drove those authors to write what they wrote. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1370 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Yet the limitation of this kind of approach to studying the conceptual ties between antisemitism and Islamophobia across time is that we lose the critical importance of change over time—of an unfolding chronology. The relationship between Christian notions of Jews and Muslims is not the same today as it was one hundred, three hundred, or one thousand years ago—just as the Islamophobia of the war on terror is not the only historical form of anti-Muslim hatred, and genocidal Nazi antisemitism is not the only historical form of antisemitism. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 72 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: An established anti-Islamic literature existed in the West by 1350; The inside-outside model of Jews and Muslims as Europe’s enemies is historically erroneous — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 921; Historical forms of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hatred vary fundamentally across time — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in…, 72 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Teleological readings distort medieval anti-Muslim writing #corroborates (0.95) — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 1370
• Historical forms of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim hatred vary fundamentally across time #corroborates (0.92) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 72
• Medieval and modern antisemitism are linked by the conspiratorial Jewish world-power myth #complicates (0.82)