The categories of Jew and Arab jointly constitute the Western concept of the enemy

Evidence

On these grounds, Gil Anidjar has rejected the hyphen as a relevant mark, and analyzed the continuous link between the Jew, the theological enemy and the Arab, the political enemy in Christian political theology since the Middle-Ages, until the extermination of the Jew as “Muselmann” in Auschwitz. His fascinating contribution gives the issue a new dimension: the history of the Jew, the Arab, is the history of the West: the history of the very concept of the enemy, the core of the Western political theology. The Mizrahi embodies both the Jew and the Arab. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 674

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gil Anidjar’s thesis in brief: the Jew and the Arab are the twin pillars of Western political theology’s concept of the enemy.
• DEEPTHINKING: Compresses a dense, paradigm-level claim — the history of the ‘enemy’ concept in the West is jointly constituted by the theological Jew and political Arab, folding Mizrahi identity into the core of European self-definition.
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Enemy-Making Machine: How Ourselves, the True, and Every Other Are Built from War”