The orientalist depiction of Jews in Christian art did not stem from their absence

Evidence

The representation of the Jew in Christian art has a literature, but in general it pays no attention to orientalism, or mentions it only in passing and rather superficially. Thus Bernhard Blumenkranz in Le juif médiéval au miroir de l’art chrétien (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1966) attributes the orientalization of the Jew in Christian art of the fifteenth century to the fact that in France the Jews had been expelled in 1394, so that European Jewish models were no longer on hand (36–38). However, as we shall see, the orientalist mode existed outside France as well, and persisted during periods and in places when Jews were conspicuously present. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 827

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader thesis about orientalism as a frame applied to Jews regardless of their actual physical presence, related to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ interest in how visual/representational regimes encode identity.