Theological assumptions about Jews, Turks, and Moors controlled Shakespeare’s imagery

Evidence

Jews and Muslims were often represented as co-criminals. In some paintings, the hierarchical arrangement was shifted, and the Muslim villain was replaced with a Jewish one, or vice versa. In the Norsa … Madonna (c. 1499), the Muslim figure of Averroes seen in the Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas (c. 1323) is replaced with a Jewish family. These paintings represent the ways in which Jews and Muslims were interchangeable in the minds of Christians as enemies par excellence. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 251 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Beginning with the title, Shakespeare marked the distance between the two dimensions of the body politic, the two dimensions of the polis of Venice, and he did so under the figure of two enemies: the theological enemy and the political enemy, the merchant of Venice and the Moor of Venice. … The arbitrariness of the decision that separates between Moor and Jew, and historically between Muslim and Jew, between Arab and Jew, however, could not have failed to appear in Shakespeare’s own text. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 555 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Shakespeare’s Moor and Jew characters encoded pre-modern racialized difference. — Nasar Meer, Racialization and Religion: Race,…, 27; Shakespeare framed the theological and political enemy as Jew and Moor — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the…, 555; Medieval Christian art equated Jews and Muslims under shared imagery — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 394 (+19 more)

Broader Connections

• Christians treated Jews and Muslims as interchangeable enemies in art #corroborates (0.93) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 251
• Shakespeare framed the theological and political enemy as Jew and Moor #expands (0.92) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 555
• The medieval Christian image of Islam was self-referential and internally self-correcting #complicates (0.72)