The medieval ‘Jews have horns’ myth still circulates among British Muslim children today

Evidence

As we later discovered in an interview with Sayyid, this time-old antisemitic discourse was still circulating in the UK today. After Sayyid told Fiaz about the failed inter-faith sports event, he added that while British Jews appeared to have unsettling concerns about British Muslims, the latter were susceptible to negative stereotyping too. Sayyid said: … Once I visited a Jewish museum, and a lady who worked there told me that recently they had a group of Muslim kids on a school trip. One of the kids, a nine or ten year old girl asked her to kneel down, because she wanted to see her horns. ‘To see what?!’ the lady said. ‘Your horns. My parents say that Jews have horns.’ — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1740

Categorization

• SHARE: The exact quote—a nine-year-old Muslim girl asking a Jewish museum worker to kneel so she can check for horns—is a striking anecdote worth sending to someone working on antisemitic tropes across cultures.
• QUESTION: Where does the horns motif enter Islamic/Levantine anti-Jewish discourse? Is it transmitted from medieval European Christian iconography, or does it have an independent Islamic genealogy? Worth tracing the provenance.
• SEED: An article angle: ‘The Horns Motif as a Transcivilizational Meme’ — how a medieval European caricature becomes live again in Muslim-majority diaspora communities, and what that implies about how tropes travel rather than being reinvented.