She pretended to […] pose him and sift him.

he shall become, of a fair archer, a stark squirter and dribber

Following Balibar's diagnosis, I argue here that Shakespeare's Othello provides a canonical articulation of this protoracism insofar as the play fashions the Muslim in the image of the Jew according to the protocols of Pauline exegesis; in Balibar's terms, Othello stages a culturalist rather than a biologistic ordering of intergroup relations, a religiously grounded discourse barely visible from the vantage point of the modern racial theories that have since displaced it, yet intermittently readable in the strange light of the neoracism that has emerged in recent years.

...flowers stood beside, in an alabaster vase—exotics, that say, our growth has been precious. A lute leant against the ebon stand; but the face of the lady wore the expression of deep and touching sorrow.