Theological separation, not geography, first divided European Christians from Jews and Muslims.

Evidence

While our book is indebted to this historical framing, our lens is somewhat different—inevitably. For all of the significance of Orientalism in European ideas of the Jew and the Muslim, it is only a part of the story. Before the imagined geographical division between a Christian European civilisation and that of Islamic lands came the theological separation—of Christians from Jews, first of all, and then from Muslims. As the foundation of European thinking about Jews and Muslims, the Christian theological frame, broadly conceived, is not only the starting point of the story that we explore in this volume, but it continues in significance, despite the manifold changes, however momentous, in European thought since the birth of Islam. In addition, the history of European empire—again in the widest sense of the term—and its consequences determined much of how European conceptions of Muslims and Jews evolved over time and place. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 89

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the Saidian Orientalism frame that dominates postcolonial studies; connects to discussions of how European identity formation precedes the Enlightenment-era geographic imagination.