"The suggestion that Sharia threatens American security is disturbingly reminiscent of the accusation, in nineteenth-century Europe, that Jewish religious law was seditious," wrote Yale University Professor Eliyahu Stern in an opinion piece for the New York Times bluntly titled "Don't Fear Islamic Law in America." Professor Stern noted that the conspiratorial fear that Jewish law bred disloyalty was not limited to political elites in Western societies either. He noted that leading mainstream European philosophers propagated these fears at the time with their noxious anti-Semitic personal views. For instance, the famous German philosopher Immanuel Kant had once argued that the particularistic nature of "Jewish legislation" made Jews "hostile to all other peoples." Fellow German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel similarly contended that Jewish kosher dietary rules and other Mosaic laws barred Jewish people from identifying with their fellow Prussians and called into question their ability to be loyal civil servants in government.

XREF: Connects historical patterns of religious-law suspicion to contemporary Islamophobia — a recurring framework in the study of prejudice.

XREF: Connects to broader work on how religious law is weaponized against minority groups across historical periods.

Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Gl…, loc. 610