Renaissance art showed Muslims and Jews murdering and eating Christian children

Evidence

The identification of Jews as dogs—ravenous, wild, and cannibalistic—continued for centuries. In the eighteenth century, Jewish dogs were accused of eating children, narratives based on late medieval and Renaissance paintings of Jews and Muslims killing Christian children. Even though the blood libel mythology attached to Jews was not applied to Muslims, the two appear side by side in artistic depictions of gruesome scenes in which a Christian, often a child, is tortured, killed, and eaten. The Muslims portrayed in some of the later paintings depicting such scenes of horror wear Turkish clothing and, in some cases, include a Black Turk. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 232

Categorization

• QUESTION: The blood libel was not applied to Muslims, yet the cannibal-child-eating image WAS — worth chasing why the accusation transferred to Muslims without the full ritual-murder mythology.
• XREF: Direct evidence for the reader’s ‘fear without an object’ thesis: images of Muslims eating children circulated in European art before and independent of sustained real contact.