Scholarship mapped Christian hostility to Jews yet neglected its Muslim parallel.

Evidence

This lacuna is all the more striking when compared with the plethora of studies on medieval Christendom’s portrayals of Jews and heretics. Robert Moore’s Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (1987), explores the links between clerical ideologies of power and the identification and persecution of various groups of “deviants”: Jews, heretics, lepers, homosexuals—but not Muslims. Since 1945 many books have been written—in Europe, North America, and Israel— exploring and debating what are often called the “medieval roots of anti- Semitism.” Others have examined medieval strategies of caricaturing and demonizing “heretics,” often a convenient label pinned on dissenters from prevailing ruling or clerical ideologies. Yet others have exposed the medieval European image of the geographical other: Africa and the Far East. But no book has attempted on a broad scale to examine Christian images of Islam from this perspective; none has attempted to elucidate the medieval roots of modern Western attitudes toward Islam and toward Arabs. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 53

Categorization

• XREF: Confirms the reader’s motive: the genealogy of anti-Islam tropes was academically underserved relative to anti-Semitism studies, exactly the gap the vault aims to fill.
• SEED: Potential framing essay: why the ‘persecuting society’ literature treats Jews, heretics, and lepers but structurally excludes Muslims from the same analytic frame.