Statelessness and perceived difference distinguish Jews from Muslims in Western Europe.

Evidence

Demographics (and birthrate) aside, there are salient differences in the experiences of Jews and Muslims in the past and today. Jews had no national ‘homeland’—indeed, they were so defined as nomads or a pariah people (pace Max Weber and Hannah Arendt). They lived only in the Goles, the Diaspora, and seemed thus inherently different from any other people in Western Europe (except perhaps the Roma). Most Muslims in the West come out of a national tradition often formed by colonialism in which their homelands had long histories disturbed but not destroyed by colonial rule. And last but not least, the Israeli– Palestinian conflict over the past century (having begun well before the creation of the state of Israel), the establishment of a Jewish homeland, as well as the Holocaust seem to place the two groups—at least in the consciousness of the West—into two antagonistic camps. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 925

Categorization

• XREF: Names Weber and Arendt on Jewry as pariah people; builds on the reader’s prior reading of Milgrom and Bernstein on group reputation and outsider status.