The Jew-Arab opposition is a sedimented historical product, not a natural lexical given

Evidence

This book will try to show that this historical impossibility is contingent upon the condition of religion and politics in “Europe,” a condition that Derrida has elaborated in his writings on the Abrahamic. 27 Nothing authorizes the collapse of religious (and historically dubious) markers such as Judaism and Islam with ethnic or political markers such as Arab and Jew. Yet already the dissymmetries inherent to the terms (“Jew” and “Muslim,” “Jew” and “Arab”) are carried by the history that seeks to account for their sedimentation as polarized identities. What appeared to be a lexical choice was not, therefore, ever quite one (even if the use of the term ‘illab,” with its emphasis on a linguistic dimension, makes it paradoxically more difficult to simply oppose it to “Jew,” a term whose religious history or inflection remains slightly more visible). — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 83

Categorization

• XREF: This is the genealogical spine claim itself — the anchor passage that the antisemitism-Islamophobia bridge literature builds on.
• DEFINE: Establishes the core theoretical premise: Europe’s religion/politics condition makes the history of the enemy possible.