The West understood Islam as closest intellectually to Judaism.

Evidence

But it “could get no help from antiquity, and no comfort from the present. For an age avowedly dependent on the past for its materials, this was a serious matter. Intellectually the nearest parallel to the position oflslam was the position of the Jews. They shared many of the same tenets and brought forward many of the same objections to Christianity.” — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 213

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• SEED: Angle: how a culture conceptualizes a genuinely novel arrival through its nearest known analogue — here Islam via Judaism; could be extended to how we understand AI or other genuinely new phenomena.

Related

• Medieval Europe understood Islam through its existing category of the Jews (similarity 0.88)
• Medieval Christian polemicists treated Islam as closer to true faith than Judaism. (similarity 0.83)
• The West is framed as having surpassed religion while Islam remains mired in it (similarity 0.83)
• Islam was judged deficient for differing from Christian structures (similarity 0.82)
• Medieval Christians constructed Islam and Judaism as mutual templates (similarity 0.81)
• The West’s polemical image of Islam was self-serving rather than descriptive (similarity 0.81)
• The West’s defining critique of Islam centered on a contrast of indulgence versus asceticism. (similarity 0.81)
• European anti-Islamic polemic derived Islam from Christian and Jewish heresy (similarity 0.81)
• Medieval Europe held multiple coexisting frameworks for situating Islam (similarity 0.80)
• Scholarship on medieval Islamophobia has lagged behind that on Christian-Jewish and heretic relations (similarity 0.80)
• Western images of Muslims and Jews formed in inextricable conjunction (similarity 0.80)
• Medieval Christian polemics could only read Islam as affirming or negating Christianity (similarity 0.80)
• Medieval Christians imagined Islam as apostasy from Christianity, not a pagan-native faith (similarity 0.80)
• Christians could only conceive Islam as derivative of Christian truth (similarity 0.80)
• Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.79)