Race and Religion

This essay proposes a new approach to the history of race and religion: that of simultaneously constructive and destructive comparison. It offers historical sketches of two biocultural processes, one in medieval Christianity (Iberia/Spain) and one in medieval Islam (Maghreb/North Africa), each of which can fruitfully be understood as ‘racializing’. Of each it asks similar questions. First, how did episodes of mass conversion or spiritual migration affect thinking about the heritability of certain characteristics within these religions? In other words, did such episodes effect something that today we might call the racialization of religion? Second, how do these episodes relate to each other? Can we speak of their histories in terms of origins, or of a causal or genealogical relationship to each other? Can we say that any of the three religions involved in these episodes – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – ‘invented race’ or practiced race-making?