The Mediterranean Other - The Other Mediterranean 3506785311, 9783506785312

Table of contents :
THE MEDITERRANEAN OTHER – THE OTHERMEDITERRANEAN
CONTENTS
Preface
The Mediterranean Other: Introduction
Constructing the Idea of “Identity” in the Mediterranean: Patterns and Practices
Routes, Migrations, Stories. Counter-Cultural Discourses from Multicultural Theatre in Italy
Moving Stories – Roma and the Oral Tradition of a Transnational People
Cosmopolitanism: The Mediterranean Archives
The ‘Other’ in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Crusaders and their Varying Images of the Muslims in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin
Zingarella or how Mediterranean and Gypsy Merged. The Story of a Certain Musical Genre
Ithaca Revisited – Homer’s Odyssey and the (Other) Mediterranean Imagination
Thinking through the Diaspora: Anthropologies of Mobility across the Mediterranean
The Mediterranean Cult of the Seven Sleepers: Counter-Narrative vs Official Representation in Islamic Devotion
Narrating the History of the Other(s). The Near East in European Historiographical Accounts of the 19th and 20th Centuries
Bibliography

Citation preview

THE MEDITERRANEAN OTHER – THE OTHER MEDITERRANEAN

MITTELMEERSTUDIEN

Herausgegeben von

Martin Baumeister, Mihran Dabag, Nikolas Jaspert und Achim Lichtenberger

Advisory Board

Peregrine Horden, Markus Koller, Irad Malkin, Silvia Marzagalli, Rolf Petri, Gisela Welz, Avinoam Shalem

BAND 21

Medardus Brehl, Andreas Eckl, Kristin Platt (eds.)

THE MEDITERRANEAN OTHER – THE OTHER MEDITERRANEAN

Ferdinand Schöningh

Titelillustration: Magar Balakdjian: “For an Uncertain Departure”

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Dieses Werk sowie einzelne Teile desselben sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung in anderen als den gesetzlich zugelassenen Fällen ist ohne vorherige schriftliche Zustimmung des Verlags nicht zulässig. © 2019 Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, ein Imprint der Brill-Gruppe (Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Niederlande; Brill USA Inc., Boston MA, USA; Brill Asia Pte Ltd, Singapore; Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn, Deutschland) Internet: www.schoeningh.de Einbandgestaltung: Evelyn Ziegler, München Herstellung: Brill Deutschland GmbH, Paderborn ISBN 978-3-506-78531-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-3-657-78531-5 (e-book)

CONTENTS

Preface ............................................................................................................ 7 The Mediterranean Other: Introduction .......................................................... 9 MEDARDUS BREHL, ANDREAS ECKL, KRISTIN PLATT Constructing the Idea of “Identity” in the Mediterranean: Patterns and Practices ................................................................................... 19 KRISTIN PLATT Routes, Migrations, Stories. Counter-Cultural Discourses from Multicultural Theatre in Italy ........................................................................ 59 CRISTINA BALMA-TIVOLA Moving Stories – Roma and the Oral Tradition of a Transnational People ............................................................................. 69 JULIA BLANDFORT Cosmopolitanism: The Mediterranean Archives .......................................... 79 PAOLO GIACCARIA The ‘Other’ in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Crusaders and their Varying Images of the Muslims in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin ............................................................ 105 SHLOMO LOTAN Zingarella or how Mediterranean and Gypsy Merged. The Story of a Certain Musical Genre ........................................................ 115 ANNA G. PIOTROWSKA

Ithaca Revisited – Homer’s Odyssey and the (Other) Mediterranean Imagination ......................................................................... 133 CHRISTOPHER SCHLIEPHAKE Thinking through the Diaspora: Anthropologies of Mobility across the Mediterranean ............................................................................ 153 PAUL A. SILVERSTEIN The Mediterranean Cult of the Seven Sleepers: Counter-Narrative vs Official Representation in Islamic Devotion ............ 169 ANNA TOZZI DI MARCO Narrating the History of the Other(s). The Near East in European Historiographical Accounts of the 19th and 20th Centuries ....................... 191 FELIX WIEDEMANN Bibliography ............................................................................................... 209

PREFACE

This volume is a collection of essays based on selected papers which were presented at an international conference held at the Ruhr University Bochum from 27 to 29 March 2014. The conference was hosted by the Zentrum für Mittelmeerstudien (Centre for Mediterranean Studies) which was founded in 2010 and generously financed for six years by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (Federal Ministry of Education and Research). We would like to express our deep gratitude to the Ministry for its support for the Center in general and for the conference in particular. The symposium entitled “The Mediterranean Other – The other Mediterranean. Subaltern Perceptions, Interpretations and Representations of the Mediterranean” was organised by the Center’s research unit “People on the Move – Migration as Regional Resource”, headed by Prof. Dr. Mihran Dabag, in cooperation with the Institute for Diaspora Research and Genocide Studies at the Ruhr-University Bochum. One of the main goals of the research directed by Mihran Dabag, and hence of the conference, has been to foster critical and alternative approaches to the study of the Mediterranean and its peoples. It is against this backdrop that scholars of Mediterranean Studies from a variety disciplinary fields were invited to analyse and question the Mediterranean from an ‘other’ angle and to focus particularly on non-nation-state and migrant communities’ perspectives on the Mediterranean. During the conference we received great support from all the staff of the Centre for Mediterranean Studies. We would particularly like to single out Eleni Markakidou, the Center’s secretary at that time, and Christine Isabel Schröder, whose participation in planning and organising the conference was so important for its success. We would also like to thank all those who were willing (and able!) to contribute to the conference from their field of expertise. Among them were Dr. Ferdaouss Adda, Dr. Moti Benmelech, Prof. Dr. Iain Chambers, Dr. Sebastian Elsässer, Prof. Dr. Christoph K. Neumann and Dr. Hratch Tchilingirian, whose presentations, much to our regret, could not be included in this volume for one reason or another. Special thanks are due to the panel chairs and discussants, Dr. Pradeep Chakkarath, Prof. Dr. Alexandra Cuffel, Prof. Dr. Dieter Haller, Prof. Dr. Nicolas Jaspert, Prof. Dr. Volkhard Krech and Prof. Dr. Ilse Lenz, for their excellent management of the discussions and inspiring input during the conference and beyond. Bochum, November 2018

MEDARDUS BREHL, ANDREAS ECKL, KRISTIN PLATT

The Mediterranean Other: Introduction Shortly after the turn of the millennium Zygmunt Bauman argued that in the course of globalization space has lost much of its importance, while simultaneously gaining enormously in meaning. There is no doubt that today’s global communications and unlimited travel have reduced the significance of physical space. Even late modern concepts of governance do not, at first glance, appear to be bound to ideas of geographical space. At the same time current security policies encourage the association of risk with heterogeneously populated regions. Alongside the changes in political agendas in the 21st century, it is indeed the new political constellations – the intensified friction between a ‘Christian Occident’ and a ‘Muslim Orient’ as well as the transformations brought about by the ‘Arab Revolutions’ – which push minorities, non-state groups and diasporas into new (even new ‘old’) margins and expose them to threats. While academic, political and public discourses on the Mediterranean are still dominated by hegemonic perspectives which eclipse other perceptions, interpretations and representations, the focus of the papers presented in this volume is on non-national groups, minorities and diaspora communities in the Mediterranean. For (even positively connoted) persistent images and narratives of the Mediterranean such as ‘the cradle of religion’ or the ‘the cradle of civilisation’ often overlook the fact that it was the coexistence of such various communities within heterogeneous societies which enabled (and often carried) these developments. These papers thus seek both to analyse and question current political developments, which label the Mediterranean in various ways as ‘the Other’, as well as to focus on non-nation-state, diasporic and migrant communities’ perspectives on the Mediterranean. Experts from the fields of migration and diaspora research, and Mediterranean studies as well as scholars from religious studies, history, the political and social sciences cast a critical eye over the Mediterranean in the past and present with particular emphasis on alternative visions: What pictures of the sea and the surrounding lands do we get when we leave aside mainstream perspectives and look for subaltern and antihegemonic perceptions, interpretations and representations? How are conceptions of space structured in such perceptions, how are their boundaries defined? How did migratory societies, trans-national groups and diaspora communities imagine, form and change the Mediterranean? What (narrations and perceptions of) breaks and transformations can be identified and how do these

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relate to established conceptions? How did slaves and refugees, merchants and those who crossed the cultural, economic and religious boundaries contribute to the historical development of the region? Where and how can we still find traces of their traditions? How are subaltern perspectives portrayed in film, art and literature? It seems as if the globalization of economy, politics, science, knowledge and everyday life has led to the fear that a multitude of perspectives and, hence, a resulting multitude of answers are causing uncertainty, or at least unease. Research seems to respond to challenges primarily by seeking to narrow down possible issues and emphasize or restore the stability of terms, categories and paradigms. Certainty or being at ease is closely related to both, on the one hand the confidence in having an objective position for new insights by tightening the analytical categories and adjusting the possibilities for comparison, on the other hand the expectation that stagnation may not lead to a richer analytical scope, but will at least preserve the researcher’s own perspectives and positions. It is against this observation that the papers presented in this volume explicitly seek to broaden current perspectives on the Mediterranean and provide varying and differing answers, depicting not a hegemonic, let alone homogenous Mediterranean, but a multi-layered, multi-perspective, complex, conflicting and disputed picture of Mediterranean peoples, minorities and societies. Such an intention not only requires a shifting of perspective and a view on specific research fields from the perspective of the ‘other’. This idea also seeks to replace the security of categories for uncertainty. Distinguished scholars and experts from a broad academic background reflect on these and related questions and provide stimulating and exciting answers from various interdisciplinary perspectives, touching on historical as well as on current events and processes, but all from the perspective of the ‘other’: dealing with topics, aspects and facets of ‘Othering’ and construction of the Mediterranean ‘other’, Mediterranean models of belonging and identity, crossMediterranean perspectives from people on the move, and, last but not least, subaltern concepts and Mediterranean counter-narratives. In the first paper, which also serves as an introduction to ‘the Mediterranean other’, Kristin PLATT reflects on “Constructing the Idea of ‘Identity’ in the Mediterranean: Patterns and Practices”. The paper outlines current tendencies in a politicization of non-state communities and investigates the historical and political frameworks of ‘Mediterranean identity’. Platt examines three aspects: observations about current manifestations of global Mediterranean identity, tendencies in current political views of identity and identity politics, and finally, reflections about the construction and reconstruction of identity based on classical sociology, social psychology or cultural anthropology. She stresses that whenever we speak about ‘identity’, it is never taken for granted that we are focusing on processes of inclusion and exclusion, of self-determination and external attributions. When speaking about ‘global identity’, Platt argues, we seem to be talking about ‘modules, characterized by open access; we think

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about building blocks, colourfully painted, freely movable, based on a digital foundation. The shape of global, transnational identity is a response to both a digitally modified knowledge of identity and a new awareness of space and belonging. Finally the paper reminds us that when we speak of ‘Mediterranean identity’, an old question should first be revisited: Who is speaking? With the re-emergence of ‘identity politics’, it is clear, the paper argues, that in current debates on identity knowledge and identity processes, three structures have been forgotten: space, national strategies, and values. Cristina BALMA-TIVOLA, in her presentation “Routes, Migrations, Stories. Counter-Cultural Discourses from Multicultural Theatre in Italy”, examines issues dramatized on stage that expose fully the personal and cultural biographies and narratives of migrants who otherwise would be condemned to subalternity and silence. Immigration to Italy is a phenomenon that only became visible in late 1980s and has continued to this day. Nevertheless, both media discourse and political actions still treat it as a temporary event to react to as an ‘emergency’ irrespective of the fact that immigrants make up a considerable portion of the country’s population. Their media and political depiction is – in contrast with the actual data – mainly tied to criminality. Finally, even when there is the effort to offer a broader picture, the mass media discuss the issue of multicultural society through the lenses of exoticism and stereotypes, and contribute little to a real comprehension and representation of the matter. Hence, the paper laments the complete lack of national cultural policies aimed at recognition of immigrants’ identity, at their integration into Italian society and finally, for the latter, at renewal in a multicultural and intercultural direction. At grass-roots level, however, Balma-Tivola argues, the situation is different: at the very same time as the first migrants arrived on Italian shores, a new form of theatre emerged, as a popular instance, that features companies of multicultural composition and brings onto the stage issues such as cultural identity and diversity, migrants' biographies, post-colonial, multicultural and intercultural discourses. Expressed in permanent realities, annual projects, and temporary experiences, its contribution varies greatly and acknowledges many forms of cross-cultural encounters and speeches, but it represents an effective means of addressing Italian citizens’ general ignorance on the matter, so that, from the beginning, it has been quite clear that it is a response to the sort of sociocultural crisis now going on. The paper focuses on the multicultural theatre reality of AlmaTeatro and particularly on case-studies of its performances Righibé (about migrations from the southern hemisphere of the world), Storie Sommerse (a countercultural narration on human migrations) and Scarti (about multi- and interculturalism in the Mediterranean area) which propose that we recognise ourselves as the result of ancient worldwide creolisations (in line with scientific and historical findings) as opposed to media and politics discourses which are still

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framed in monolithic, settled, static and unalterable cultural identities to protect those within the boundaries of the ‘fortress Europe’. Migration and storytelling albeit from a different angle is also the topic of Julia BLANDFORT’s contribution. In “Moving Stories – Roma and the Oral Tradition of a Transnational People” she discusses the Roma and their fairy tales. Roma are either said to have no own tradition of storytelling whatsoever or they are supposed to be the carriers of tales originally from the Indian subcontinent to the whole world. These argumentations are emblematic for Europe’s largest transnational minority. Somehow Roma seem never to belong, their lives appear to be in constant transition and in-between extremes. In their 600 year presence in Europe their position at the margins of society has rarely altered as past and current discussions of their social situation show. However, as Blandfort argues, these debates tend to focus on social problems and – even if they are undoubtedly a pressing problem for a large part of the Roma communities – disregard aspects of cultural exchange that show lively interactions between literary spheres. In fact, a closer look at the oral tradition of Roma reveals that far from being a sign of total exclusion Romani fairy tales serve as a cultural ‘contact zone’ while at the same time helping to maintain the features that distinguish the Roma. Strikingly, Roma tales are still mainly orally transmitted in sharp contrast to their predominantly script-based surroundings. Hence, the study of the oral tales helps understand how diasporic borders are infringed but also how literary texts help establish and maintain them. Transcripts of these stories and published anecdotes provide us with a unique insight in the Romani worldview and their ways of transmitting common norms and values. By exemplary analyses of these Blandfort illustrates the reaction to different cultural and individual circumstances and pursues a diasporic perspective of the oral Romani tradition. A different type of archive is under scrutiny in Paolo GIACCARIA’s paper on “Cosmopolitanism. The Mediterranean Archives”, namely postcolonial literature. Giaccaria argues that existing literature privileges the British and French imperial/colonial history which mirrors the ongoing debate on the relationship between cosmopolitanism, universalism, and imperialism. While these debates take for granted the Kantian and Hegelian hierarchy of European civilizations, the southern shores of Europe and the broader Mediterranean space are marginalised. Drawing on Mignolo’s notion of ‘border thinking’ and on Isin’s account of the city as a ‘difference machine’, Giaccaria addresses the issue of how imperialism, colonialism, and cosmopolitanism come together and relate to each other in the context of the (allegedly) cosmopolitan Mediterranean cities. In particular, cosmopolitanism is read as the outcome of the reciprocal adjustment of interior and exterior borders in the making of modernity/coloniality in the Mediterranean. Focusing on the Ottoman millet system, the paper argues that cosmopolitanism worked as a peculiar device within the urban difference machine, enabling the city to sustain the tension between different accounts of citizenship.

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Another chapter of Mediterranean imperial/colonial history, namely the relationship between the Crusaders and the local Muslim population is addressed by Shlomo LOTAN in his contribution on “The ‘Other’ in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Crusaders and their Varying Images of the Muslims in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin”. It has always been widely accepted that in the eastern parts of the Mediterranean basin in the 12th and 13th centuries the Crusaders, as the new occupiers of the region, treated the local Muslim population harshly. This argument gained currency in the second half of the 20th century, at a time when Crusader studies were being established and the paradigm of the colonial character was becoming one of their main elements. Since the early 1990s, a new trend has emerged in Crusader research, arguing that the Crusaders did not conquer the land and establish remote and alien colonial rule; on the contrary, they tried to fit in and become part of the kingdom’s landscape and population. One of the breakthrough moments in this field came when several Israeli researchers, including Ronnie Ellenblum and Adrian J. Boas, argued that the historical research and archaeological findings within the boundaries of the Latin Kingdom, especially in the cities of Acre and Tyre and in the Galilee mountains, show different, unconventional methods, unlike those of the 20th century paradigm. It seems that the Crusaders integrated into the local population, settled in their territory, studied their habits and adopted some of their ways in agriculture, trade and language. As a minority, the Crusaders tried to find a positive path to the local Muslims, who remained in their own settlements and pursued their way of life even more intensively under Crusader rule. Lotan’s contribution draws a distinction between the two sides, and cites sources which include evidence of integration between the different cultures. He emphasises that the dominant occupying society remained intact and struggled to impose its ways; nevertheless this was a minority which needed economic and political ties to the local society. At a time when the Crusader kingdom was weakening, in the second half of the 13th century, and no longer enjoyed the same military superiority, the social element became stronger, bringing together the two different societies. For researchers, this changed the accepted image of the eastern Mediterranean basin within the boundaries of the last Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Anna G. PIOTROWSKA directs our attention to a forgotten musical genre in her contribution on “Zingarella or how Mediterranean and Gypsy Merged. The Story of a Certain Musical Genre”. The Mediterranean contribution to the history of European music is usually associated with Italian attempts to ‘resurrect’ ancient Greek tragedy which in consequence led to the creation of a new musical genre – opera e.g. Peri’s Euridice or Monteverdi’s Orfeo. In that sense Mediterranean professional music has traditionally been linked with what can be labelled as the mainstream of European music, and developed parallel to the narrative of ‘the cradle of civilisation’. And yet, almost forgotten in the realm of musicology is the fact that in the 19th century

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Mediterranean themes related to the mysterious aura associated with European ‘Others’ – Gypsies. This exoticisation was encouraged particularly by their looks (although inherited from their Indian legacy) as well as the ‘oddity’ of their customs (in comparison with European ones). In the early 19th century the interest in Gypsies, stimulated by scholarly research, found its reflection in musical life. It is no coincidence that around that time composers began to compose simple songs which they called zingarellas, stylized in accordance with – popularized by then – ideas of Gypsy culture and their singing practices. Zingarella was conceived in the early 19th century, as a form of artistic song based on a fictional, non-existing Gypsy song. In fact there is no particular, original song – of any Gypsy group – that could serve as a point of reference. However, Mediterranean, especially Spanish and Italian connotations were evident during the formative years of the genre, and are thus reflected in the title ‘zingarella’, or the alternatives ‘zingara’ or ‘zingaresca’. Piotrowska shows that zingerella can serve as a perfect example of how European intellectuals constructed the image of the Other, their culture and musical traditions, based on certain presumptions and projections connected with the Mediterranean, utilizing the conventional musical measures they had at their disposal. It was deemed necessary to investigate the ‘reality’ hidden behind prejudices, convictions, and simplifications in the realm of musical culture, especially as these were strengthened by literature and iconography. Zingarellas served as Mediterranean born/anchored ‘Gypsy’ songs full of allusions to – broadly defined – exotics and never aspired to take the place of authentic Gypsy songs. The contribution further argues that the Mediterranean roots of zingarellas influenced the fate of the genre, which never achieved the status enjoyed by other romantic genres, such as nocturnes. By drawing attention to this forgotten musical genre, its Mediterranean implications, and the mechanisms of its exclusion from musicological narratives the paper addresses the questions of how boundaries and standards are defined and how subaltern and anti-hegemonic conceptions influence the perception of culture, including that of music. Unlike Piotrowska, Christopher SCHLIEPHAKE examines a well know cultural treasure, albeit from an unusual angle. Homer’s Odyssey, written in the 8th century B.C.E., stands as one of the oldest texts of the Western literary canon and has long figured as a central repository of various cultural imaginations and representations of the Mediterranean (or of that “sea in our part of the world” (Hecataeus F18b), as the ancient Greeks referred to it). In antiquity the story of Ulysses, the king of Ithaca, who, after the destruction of Troy, struggles to return home, was already being read as an exploration of the dynamic interrelationships between man and his (natural) surroundings, between the homely sphere of culture and the unknown ‘Other’ of that world as well as a reflection of man’s place within it. The Homeric epic was thus a text concerned both with the negotiation of identity and with opening up an imaginative space for dealing with the heterogeneous and diverse aspects of a world in

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constant movement (symbolized by both the wanderings of the hero as well as the fluid, unstable nature of the sea itself). Ulysses, the protagonist of the ancient epos, is, as the first line of the text makes clear, a ‘man of many wanderings’ (polutropos) who travels far and wide in the Mediterranean world in a desperate search for his home country. Beyond Ithaca, however, the spatial dimension of this world is only sketched out vaguely in Homer’s text – it encompasses specific geographic locations as well as unknown places of grave danger, utopian islands and even the ‘Underworld’. Ulysses’s own status within this imaginative microcosm is equally undefined: although he is wellknown in the ‘civilized’ world, he appears, for the most part of his adventure, as a stranger in disguise (and operates in the dark) – he is, at the same time, ‘a man’ and ‘no-man’. “Ithaca Revisited – Homer’s Odyssey and the (Other). Mediterranean Imagination” traces on the one hand the manifold and diverse modes of ‘othering’ in the Odyssey, which can be seen as textual strategies that underline the fantastic elements of the narrative, but that also attest to the socio-historical context of its writing (namely the dawn of naval exploration and Greek colonization) as well as to the various sources which were embedded in its fabric (especially of Near Eastern and Mesopotamian origin). On the other hand, the paper uncovers the deeply heterogeneous and ambivalent role that Homer’s text has played in Mediterranean culture. Not only has the epos been read – from Roman Imperial times to the period of the sea powers of Early Modern Europe – as a parable about man’s ambition and drive for exploration and frontier spirit in the face of the wilderness and an unknown world, but it has also served as a tale about Western imperialism and cultural dominance. The episode of the Cyclops Polyphemus (book nine of the Odyssey) in particular is considered an example of the complex representation of the relationship with the ‘other’ that has had a lasting and problematic effect on the history of cultural imagination in the Mediterranean world. Against this background, Schliephake explores the counter-narratives and subaltern perceptions that have reversed the roles of Ulysses and Polyphemus and that have re-read the Cyclops from a postcolonial point of view which seeks to disentangle Homer’s text from the imperialist (ab)use of the classical canon. In the same vein, he argues that the Odyssey itself contains alternative views which highlight openness, diversity and heterogeneity, imbuing the narrative with an ethic which asks its listeners and readers to respect the ‘other’ – both the humans that roam and live in the Mediterranean as well as its unstable nature, far removed from human influence. Mobility seen from a diasporic perspective is central to Paul A. SILVERSTEIN’s contribution. “Thinking through the Diaspora: Anthropologies of Mobility across the Mediterranean” states that scholars have long seen mobility as a foundational aspect of community formation and trans-formation in the Mediterranean region, but only recently have peoples ‘out of place’ become an explicit object of study in itself. The article reviews the theoretical, methodo-

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logical, ethical, and political underpinnings of this new attention to Mediterranean diasporas. Generally speaking, ethnographies have tended to privilege a perspective from either the ‘homeland’, the ‘diaspora’ itself, or the various ‘hostlands’: whether focusing on the impact of diasporas on the social, religious and political worlds left behind and the efforts of government actors to recapture and redirect the loyalties and monies of diasporic populations to particular political and economic projects in the name of the ‘nation’; underlining the poetics and performances, the media and materialities that unite migrants across space and time, that constitute the social space of a diaspora qua diaspora; or examining the fraught dynamics of incorporation of diasporic subjects in the host countries, their racialization as ambiguous subjects, and the social worlds they build for themselves within and beyond the nation-state. Silverstein elaborates on each of these perspectives, drawing on his own research between North Africa and France, while at the same time insists that these three dimensions of diasporic life are ultimately intimately, indeed inimically, conjoined. A Mediterranean interreligious interconnection of the three monotheistic faiths is discussed by Anna TOZZI DI MARCO in “The Mediterranean Cult of the Seven Sleepers: A Counter-Narrative vs. Official Islamic Representation”. The myth of the Seven Sleepers is a shared cultural heritage amongst Christians and Muslims, which is widespread in many Mediterranean countries. Its origins are Christian, dating back to the 5thcentury Asia Minor. From there it spread to Eastern Christianity through Syriac congregations, and on to the Arabian Peninsula. Typically the shrines are caves, but sometimes a church or a mosque can be the site of veneration. Some of these holy caves highlight the multi-confessional nature, as is common practice in many other Mediterranean shared sacred shrines and sanctuaries. Tozzi Di Marco considers the Islamic version of the legend which differs from the Christian one, according to the 7th century Arab context. The Christian Seven Sleepers’ tradition is found in the Koran, in particular in the first verses of the sura XVIII, titled ‘Al Kahf’, that means ‘the cave’. The Seven Sleepers’ myth and its current Islamic devotion have been analysed from a double perspective, as authoritative official representation and people’s interpretation of the cult. The numerous localizations of the seven sleepers’ cave are pilgrimage sites that can be divided in two groups: the first consists of places which have evolved into transnational sacred and heritage touristic destinations; the second involves places attended mostly by local people where the seven sleepers are perceived as saints. However, in some cases this categorization is not so rigid and there are locations where both characteristics are to be found. Tozzi Di Marcos’s anthropological fieldworks in Syria, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Turkey have also revealed incorporation of local beliefs beyond the various modalities of the Islamic Seven Sleepers cult. The rituals performed at the many caves encompass an enormous variety of devotional practices and traditions. This complex of traditions traces collective and

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personal sacred geographies which represent a counter-narrative to the official representations by the State and the religious authorities. For Islam the veneration of the saints is considered bid’ah (heresy). Hence, in some cases the seven sleepers’ pilgrimage sites have recently undergone a State programme of ‘heritagization’ through a hegemonic construction, classification and display of the past. This procedure involved a ‘sanitization’ of these formerly religious places through various forms of control, and consequently of regulating the individual spiritual experiences. The paper focuses on those localizations considered as heterotopias, in Foucaultian words, spaces of otherness, where groups of people, ignoring the dominant discourses on Islam, still perform archaic forms of ritual to the Seven Sleepers. As an example of these counternarratives the rituals performed in the cave near Tarsus in Turkey are examined more deeply. The article argues that the counter-narratives on the Seven Sleepers’ caves formulate alternative notions of heritage and, moreover, challenge and contest the ways in which states control the religious beliefs, and in general, the lives of citizens. In the final article, “Narrating the History of the Other(s). The Near East in European Historiographical Accounts of the 19th and 20th Centuries”, Felix WIEDEMANN argues that historical references have always played a vital role in European representations of ‘the other’. Hence, they are an important point in the ongoing debate on ‘Orientalism’ in the Saidian sense of the word. According to a familiar postcolonial narrative Europeans invented or created the Near East – including, of course, the Eastern Mediterranean – in the late 18th century as a distinct geo-historical space and have since used it as a negative foil from which European history could be distinguished. This included some more or less fixed narratives or topoi such as the infamous ‘oriental despotism’ or the interpretation of Near Eastern history as an endless circuit of rise and fall. Ultimately, it has been argued, all these narratives could be boiled down to the opposition between a supposedly repetitive or circular history of the Orient and a linear or progressive history of the West. Looking superficially at European historiography of the 19th and 20th century it is by no means difficult to find evidence of this view. According to Wiedemann it would be misleading to reduce the historiographical discourse to its supposed orientalist biases. Closer reading rather reveals narratives which are much more complex. The process of ‘Othering’ never refers to a fixed unity of entities but in fact includes a very heterogeneous ensemble so that ‘the other’ always appeared in the plural. European representations of the Near East includes multiple historical or contemporary actors ranging from different peoples such as the Babylonians, Assyrians and Arabs to diverse religious groups such as Jews, Muslims and Christians. However, each of these groups could be divided into smaller entities. What matters most here is the fact that all these entities are embedded in a complex and varied network of positive and negative identifications. Historians in the 19th century, for instance, tended to construct a single Semitic family of nations opposed to the so

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called Indo-European or Aryan peoples. Later on, however, this category dissolved into very different entities, distinguishing, for instance, Jews and Arabs or the Bedouin from the city dwellers. Rather than presenting all ‘Orientals’ in the same way, European writers engaged in playing different peoples – current as well as historical – off against each other and in initiating cultural proxy wars. Wiedemann demonstrates the complexity of this historiographical ‘othering’ by looking at European accounts of Near Eastern (or Eastern Mediterranean) history and discusses its theoretical consequences. Will the articles find a place in current Area Studies? We hope that the further steps follow the step taken by the authors in this volume, namely to move the questions from being about the peculiarity of the Mediterranean area, to being about the peculiarity of relations that connect the ‘Other’ with a Mediterranean region that is shared, and a Mediterranean idea, before which they stand as beholders. Finally, the consideration of the mutual constitution of region and space, structural stability and uncertainty opens up possibilities for a Mediterranean perspective that approaches the experiences of the ‘Other’ not as a part of Mediterranean history but as the history of the Mediterranean itself.

KRISTIN PLATT

Constructing the Idea of “Identity” in the Mediterranean: Patterns and Practices In creating a publication on the Mediterranean, it neither appears difficult to find the right photos, nor to find the right captions of photos or pictures. We combine images of amphitheatres and olive trees, white clouds over a clear blue sea, cliffs, a lemon tree, a spice market – and a refugee ship. It is considered as agreed upon and approved that the Mediterranean Sea is a region of an intensive and lively exchange for trade, culture, history, or religion; a region that opened his space for merchants and travellers, explorers and warlords. Birth and death in the Mediterranean are seen as genesis and fulfilment. The history of the Mediterranean is both rise and decline, grandeur and decadence, building and destruction, wealth and marginalisation – not as an inner principle, a reoccurring pattern or a specific universal law of the region, but always as the result of political and social evolutions. The images of the Mediterranean have a long history and a supratemporal validity, which is based on the fact that they do not serve as symbols. Although we firmly associate specific images with the Mediterranean, they are not representative of a “Mediterranean identity” but instead allow the disclosure of motions and characteristics that can be assembled into a picture that we recognise as “the” Mediterranean. Considering this observations, we can reconnect the two well known key designs of the Mediterranean area: On the one hand we can follow Fernand Braudel’s perspective, who defined the Mediterranean as processes of exchange, trade, diffusion and connectivity, linked together and adding up in a common historical reality, shaped by inseparable associations and relations between the different places and areas of the region. On the other hand, we can recount the Mediterranean picture according to the outline of Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, showing the Mediterranean region as an assemblage of micro-ecologies or social-political junctions, separated by distinctive agricultural and social practices, not shaped, but challenged by mobility and connectivity and with this flows faced with the environmental, economical and social risks of the globalised presence. While the first design is about a common origin and culture, the second design is based on common challenges and a commonly shared sphere of action: Is what we can recognise and quote as “the” Mediterranean a certain order of multipolar elements? A mosaic of divergent elements?

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“No single definition or spatial confinement can contain what we are seeking to talk about”, Iain Chambers pointedly discussed.1 After all, in talking about the “sea with many names”,2 we seem to negotiate between different figures of addressing and different periods, languages and cultures of denotations. But David Abulafia’s image of a dynamic space of interaction or a space of connectivity, which was mentioned and described as fluid by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell,3 is not a paradigm that was established as a descriptive formula. These figures rather follow existing perceptions. Is “the” image of the Mediterranean primarily a result of a (western hegemonial) discourse and therefore, although it will probably be seen as a stereotype, a code that indicates certain discoursive patterns or political strategies? What is emerging here “is a problem of horizons”, as Michael Herzfeld noted.4 These horizons must clearly be perceived as spatial. The question of what and who exactly the representation of the Mediterranean is addressing will always anticipate and expect different answers, depending on the coast from which the respondent looks at the Mediterranean sunset. Withal, are there any “perspectives” in the political-strategic drafts of the 21st century or do we rather a priori refrain from talking about perspectives? Not least to minimise the potentiality of possible answers? Until the “refugee crisis” emerged, the figure of a dynamic, fluid space, which can be traced back from the ancient world to the modern period from different cultural and political centres, has been invoked in a variety of publications. The image of the Mediterranean as a region of exemplary diversity and connectivity is still drawn in political discourses. One of the most persistent narratives that represented the Mediterranean region was centred on the image of the “cradle and crossroads of civilizations”. It seems that neither reports of political think tanks, nor programs of cultural events, nor scientific studies were able to refrain from this image. For example, in the final conclusion of an international ministerial conference in 2008, the iconic image of the Mediterranean as the historical origin of cultures was cited first. Building on this, a notable opportunity for dialogue and a commitment to cultural education was discussed, which underlines the idea of a Mediterranean identity as an exceptional identity of commonality and cosmopolitanisation: 1 2 3 4

Ian Chambers: Space, memory, rhythm, and time: Constructing a Mediterranean archive, in: New Geographies 5: The Mediterranean, edited by Antonio Petrov, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2013, pp. 135-142, here p. 135. David Abulafia: The great sea – a human history of the Mediterranean, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, here: Introduction, p. xxiii. Peregine Horden and Nicholas Purcell: The corrupting sea: A study of Mediterranean history, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000. Michael Herzfeld: Practical Mediterraneanism: Excuses for everything, from epistemology to eating, in: Rethinking the Mediterranean, edited by William V. Harris, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 45-63, here p. 48.

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Ministers understand that the Mediterranean basin is a place of memories as well as the cradle and crossroads of civilizations. […] In this regard dialogue between cultures may be seen as a key element in uniting the people of the region and, in parallel, spreading awareness of their differences and particularities. […] Ministers stress that particular attention should be paid to the specific cultural, linguistic and educational needs of minorities, in accordance with national legislations and international obligations of the countries concerned, while appreciating the EuroMediterranean concept of identity, as a result of cosmopolitan interpenetrations, which is also a way of preventing the fragmentation of identity in our societies.5

Today the so-called “refugee crisis” has noticeably weakened the figure of the dynamically interconnected geographies and cultures. In view of current patterns of crisis and decay, a shift in the discoursive formations can be detected. Thus, the Valletta Declaration on Strengthening Euro-Mediterranean Cooperation through Research and Innovation (May 4th, 2017) also stipulates that the image of the common culture has been overshadowed by the image of continuous crises: Considering that the Mediterranean area is experiencing intense social, economic, environmental and demographic changes; that population growth, urban concentration around coastal areas and a climate-sensitive agriculture amongst others, result in water stress, while the incidence of extreme climate events is likely to increase in the region in coming years; that our Mediterranean Sea witnesses the strife and desperation of thousands of migrants who are driven to leave their home countries to escape conflict-stricken territories or to improve their living conditions; […].6

Certainly, thinking about crises is generally a part of today’s understanding of the social and political present. But while the crisis is antagonistic to the developments of modernisation and globalisation, in the image of the Mediterranean the crisis is part of a construction of authenticity. It stands out that the binary nature of the political, social and cultural characteristics encountered in speaking of the Mediterranean represents a certain “grammar”. The binary intertwining, in which the images are quoted, aims to protect, authorise and authenticate the intended statements. The function of the overly present pairs of images can be seen in the task to establish a stable order as a reference frame for speaking about the Mediterranean. Setting a binary coexistence allows a harmonisation of discourses on the Mediterranean (following the concept of Gilles Deleuze, who noted with reference to Lewis Carroll that the “smooth

5 6

Le Partenariat Euromed: Agreed conclusions of the third Euro-Mediterranean conference of ministers of culture, Athens, 29-30 May 2008 (Doc. de séance n 139/08, en date du: 30.05.2008). Valletta Declaration on Strengthening Euro-Mediterranean Cooperation through Research and Innovation, 4 May 2017, Valletta, Malta, [accessed March 8, 2018, emphasis in original document].

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surface” can be considered as the main feature of a discourse).7 Because the elements of coexistence are not competing, and even reverse each other in respect to potential conflicts, they stay side by side and are the framework for current forecasts: climate catastrophes, refugee crisis, economic marginality. As quoted from an analysis by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs: The Mediterranean is today a ‘geopolitical paradox’: it has become more fragmented and – at the same time – more interconnected. On the one hand, it is ravaged by virulent crises, hegemonic competition, ideological and sectarian clashes. On the other, it is a platform for the economic, energy and infrastructural connectivity between Europe, Africa and Asia.8

It was only in 2011 that this tension, which at the same time represents a geographically, climatically, economically and socially defining state of affairs, was described as a ‘chance’. This, for example, can be seen in the following statement by the European Commission: The Mediterranean, seen as an area of conflict, distorted perceptions and preconceptions with several of boundaries and partitions, nevertheless offers a great potential for cooperation between states, industry, civil society organisations and people. This is demonstrated by every day interpenetration and interactions between both sides of the Mediterranean which underline numerous common interests.9

Undoubtedly, a crisis diagnosis is currently given preference. A Policy Brief by the German Marshall Fund of the United States underpins the current political centrality of the region: Recent developments on the security scene on Europe’s southern periphery, and in Europe itself, underscore the Mediterranean’s centrality in transatlantic concerns. […] U.S. political and military engagement will be important elements in regional stability. But the relatively diffuse nature of Mediterranean security risks, a substantially reduced permanent military presence, and some marked differences in the European and U.S. approach to the region will complicate policy looking “south.”10

Talking about the history of the Mediterranean is associated with an early colonisation, the early transfer of culture and ideas, a competition between pow7

Gilles Deleuze: Logik des Sinns, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2017 (first publ. Paris: Les Èditions de Minuit, 1969), p. 27f. Cf. also Lewis Carroll: The dynamics of a parti-cle, Oxford: James Parker & Co. (first publ. in 1865), p. 9: “Plain Superficiality is the character of a speech, in which any two points being taken, the speaker is found to lie wholly with regard to those two points”. 8 Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation: The Italian strategy in the Mediterranean. Stabilising the crises and building a positive agenda for the region, Rome: Farnesina, 2017, p. 3. 9 European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation Social Sciences and Humanities: EuroMed-2030. Long term challenges for the Mediterranean area, Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2011, p. 109. 10 Ian O. Lesser: The United States and the future of Mediterranean security: Reflections from GMF’s Mediterranean Strategy Group, GMF’s Mediterranean Policy Program, Policy Brief April 2015, p. 1.

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ers and religion, the emergence of markets, the collapse of economies, the destruction of landscapes, the formation of cities, and not least earthquakes, fires, water and droughts. Political images, historical developments as well as cultural figures and narratives are always closely related to each other. This can be regularly seen in current political reports: The historical legacy arises from the intensity and density of past experience across the region that informs the consciousness and collective references on both sides and still conditions personal and political dealings. From the crusades, through colonisation and wars of liberation to modern issues of immigration, fundamentalism and terrorist attack, relations have often been marked by tension and anguish. To ignore this legacy would be foolish and it must be accepted without taboo if the Euro-Mediterranean dialogue is to progress.11

However, our image of the Mediterranean is determined not only by the narrative of recurrent or specific tensions between “hospitality and hostility,”12 culture and decay or wealth and poverty, but also by forms and colours: a clear blue for the sea and the sky, the warmth of terracotta, the textures of dry beige earth and dark wood. We recognise the Mediterranean in mosaics, in white Greek island churches or the ornaments of Moorish architecture. While the colours of the Mediterranean mosaic represent the central role of the Mediterranean in the development of global civilisation,13 it is noteworthy that we have never stopped to ask for the unique Mediterranean idea in dealing with historical, artistic, literary, social, economic, religious, or cultural topics touching the Mediterranean coasts. Can this restless, sometimes nervous querying be attributed to our awareness that we live in decades marked by destructive interventions in nature and culture? Is this uneasy attempt to reassure ourselves of a Mediterranean identity caused by our knowledge about numerous civilisations that were obliterated throughout history? Can we therefore meet a sense of responsibility by asking the question: “what is the specific Mediterranean?” Otherwise, we might perceive the question of what is “typical” and “unique” about the Mediterranean as a methodological requirement. Isn’t there the risk to fall into the trap of political efforts to shape and reshape the regions of the Mediterranean as “one” Mediterranean? Perhaps the analysis of what we understand by the concept of Mediterranean identity, or the attempt to find a binding idea for an enlarged Europe in the Mediterranean, is not of socio-political and political interest at the moment. In fact, there is a more fierce struggle for borders and the protection of identities – national identities – ever since the end of the Second World War. Financial 11 EuroMed-2030 (note 9), p. 79. 12 Paolo Giaccaria and Ugo Rossi: O – Ospitalità/Hospitality, in: Mediterranean Lexicon = Lessico mediterraneo, edited by Paolo Giaccaria, Paolo Paradiso and Ugo Rossi, Roma: Soc. Geografica Italiana, 2012, pp. 197-211, here p. 210. 13 Antonio Petrov: Worlds, regions, cities, and architectures, in: New Geographies 5: The Mediterranean, edited by Antonio Petrov, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2013, pp. 53-56, here p. 53.

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crisis situations in the European south have shown uneven developmental levels, deficiencies of economic systems, ecological catastrophes, and crises of political participation and regional identities due to gaps in incomes and social relations. Perhaps the Brexit vote was not even needed to illustrate that there can be no common European identity. But can we not at least stick to the idea of a common European history? Whether the Mediterranean region has shown that we can think of regions in the form of a characteristic identity is questionable. It is not questionable, however, that the peoples of the European regions see themselves as members of exclusive communities – stronger than ten years ago. But could there not also be room for a revitalisation of cosmopolitan identities or for the construction of a Mediterranean-maritime identity, which would develop a Mediterranean identity detached from the territorial conditions, and could carry the potential to mitigate exclusions by defining new relationships with ethnicity? In contemporary politics, the Mediterranean region is present in two forms – but none of these can be seen as an echo of the transnational images that we have attributed to the idea of the Mediterranean in recent years. First, there seems to be a “Euro-Mediterranean” region, which is understood as an independent space of political orders and interests – with an independent (and newly confirmed) external border. Undoubtedly, the geostrategic and political considerations are based on constructions of the 19th and 20th centuries. This affects both the idea of a geographical unity and the idea of a north-south difference, as well as the construction of the south as a risk. The “rediscovery” of the Mediterranean as a European border and an area of interest can be traced back to the European Council Summit in June 1992, during which the stability risk was clearly articulated: The southern and eastern shores of Mediterranean and the Middle East are both 14 areas of interest to the Union, in terms of security and social stability.

The reconstruction of the Mediterranean region as a political anchor point for the future of Europe followed the reorientation of the EU in light of the wars in Yugoslavia. In the future, Europe should be perceived as a united, describable, recognisable and developable continent on the political map of a global world society. The “Barcelona Declaration or Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) Initiative”, which followed this path in 1995 and gave it a programmatic starting point, focused on the development of regional and cultural integration for a broad promotion of economic, political, cultural, sport and social initiatives. The idea of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership combined various programs of social and cultural orientations in order to achieve the goal of a 14 Emanuel Adler and Beverly Crawford: Normative power: The European practice of regionbuilding and the case of the Euro-Mediterranean partnership, in: The Convergence of Civilizations: Constructing a Mediterranean Region, edited by Emanuel Adler, Federica Bicchi, Beverly Crawford and Raffaella A. Del Sarto, Toronto et al.: University of Toronto Press, 2006, pp. 3-48, here p. 42.

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stable regional integrity by changing and shaping identities through the creation of a “social communication”.15 The second form is that of a “sea of crises”. Financial crises (Spain, Greece) and the refugee crisis have by no means only recently been linked to the region. As early as the mid-1990s, the prognosis of both crises was found in the context of global risk considerations.16 In the 1990s, it was not only warned about the fragmentation of geopolitical regions, i.e. the establishment of new borders or non-governable spaces, but also about the fragmentation of cultural spheres due to antagonistic cultural and political ideas.17 The fact that the Mediterranean region has become the “model” for the crisis regions of the world can be linked to the global connection of migration18 and climate risks19 with “fragile” states. However, the “sea of crises” can not be defined spatially but has a characteristic temporal structure instead: the “sea of crises” connects the present with the past and signals to stand in the way of the future. It breaks through the idea of processual policy developments by making it necessary to consider forms of static or circular times.20 Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that we can not clearly speak of replacing the “traditional” image of the Mediterranean, i.e. the romantic sunsets over peaceful connectivity, with a picture of a hopelessly crisis-ridden region. On the one hand, it is interesting that in respect to the Mediterranean we often work with images – and these images appear to be highly specific and historically proven. Time and space of the Mediterranean can be represented in stories of the connectivity of pottery vessels as well as in the refugee crisis, in the form of an ancient high culture as well as in the bar diagrams that simulate the destruction of landscapes by climatic changes. On the other hand, these images, which can be easily translated into narratives, seem to be linked in a certain 15 Adler/Crawford: Normative Power (note 14), p. 16. 16 Cf. Robert D. Kaplan: The coming anarchy: How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet, in: The Atlantic Monthly Febr. 1994, pp. 44-76; Threatened peoples, threatened borders: World migration and U.S. policy, edited by Michael S. Teitelbaum and Myron Weiner, New York NY; London: W. W. Norton, 1995; Franz Nuscheler: Globale Herausforderungen am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts, in: Globale Solidarität. Die verschiedenen Kulturen und die eine Welt, edited by Franz Nuscheler, Stefan Krotz, Karl-Heinz Nusser and Peter Rottländer, Stuttgart et al.: W. Kohlhammer, 1997, pp. 1-23, here p. 5. 17 See for example the discussion “Is the World Fragmenting into Antagonistic Cultures?”, in: Crosscurrents: International relations in the post-cold war era, edited by Mark Charlton, Scarborough et al.: Nelson Thomsen (3rd ed.), 2002, pp. 45-86. 18 James F. Hollifield: Migration and International Relations, in: The Oxford Handbook of the Politics of International Migration, edited by Marc R. Rosenblum and Daniel J. Tichenor, Oxford; New York NY: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 345-380, here p. 347. 19 Cf. for example: Climate change and displacement: Multidisciplinary perspectives, edited by Jane McAdam, Oxford; Portland OR: Hart, 2010; Migration, risk management and climate change: Evidence and policy responses, edited by Andrea Milan, Benjamin Schraven, Koko Warner and Noemi Cascone, Cham: Springer, 2016. 20 See below in the section on “Divergent Temporalities of the Mediterranean”.

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way. What attracts little attention, however, is the consideration of how these images are linked. Usually, very little attention is paid to the question of linking codes, images, symbols and words in discourses. Despite the omnipresence of the concept of discourse, the elements of a discourse and the performative production of relationships and contexts are rarely distinguished at all. Examining the connection of discoursive elements concerning the narrative of the Mediterranean reveals the construction of a highly specific spatio-temporal order. While it was shown elsewhere that discourse elements can be constructed and authenticated by their positions in knowledge-related figures (“topological arguments”21), it should be pointed out here that the connection of the discourse elements can also prove certain statics. It is noticeable that peculiar interweaves of times and spaces can be found in images of the Mediterranean: curtailments and even ablutions of temporalities are not uncommon constrictions of spaces; shifts of real historical-geographical spaces into imagined cultural spaces could be proved repeatedly. Nevertheless, we “recognise” the images as “authentic”. Yet, this possibility of recognising is not grounded in the images themselves, but in the form of the interconnected union, the associative connection, here in the phenomenon that we understand the culture and history of the Mediterranean as a “mobilé” that represents culture, crises and development. The elements hang next to each other on sensitive threads, and yet they are recognisable as a unit. The question is whether the contradictions in the narrative of the Mediterranean merge into a single entity, or whether the narrative of unity is not an overarching proposition that wants to prevent the binary patterns of the region from evolving into antagonisms. The preferred answer here, which tends towards the second assumption, should consider that development and crises do not storm (only) from the outside against the mobilé, but are already integrated into the wind chime itself: as one of the identically perforated colourful glass elements hanging on the arms of the Mediterranean mobilé. The subsistence of the mobilé can be proved by the fact that the new developments and crises from outside may be derived from reflections in the individual glass elements of the mobilé itself. They are already anticipated because the special statics of the Mediterranean mobilé has adapted to these crises in its internal structure. The notion of “Mediterranean identity” does not suggest a clearly defined figure; the importance of the Mediterranean can be varied with respect to different answers. But the main principle of “Mediterranean identity” indicates a remarkable connection by binding a binary in itself. Because the “other” can not become the opposite – as a single glass plate of the mobilé it can at best determine the dynamics of the movement of the entire body. Since this binary 21 Kristin Platt: “Im ertödtenden Blicke des todten Beschauers.” Krise und tätiges Handeln in Universitätsreden 1933 bis 1934, in: Wissenschaft im Einsatz, edited by Käte Meyer-Drawe and Kristin Platt, München: Wilhelm Fink, 2007, pp. 28-74.

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is also predestined as a construction, because each binary pair takes the shape of the Mediterranean mobilé, the idea of the Mediterranean can always enter history anew: as a political entity or a social problem, as a cultural past or a political risk. The resource of the meaning of “the” Mediterranean does not lie in its individual elements, i.e. the individual images, but in the way in which their pictorial figures are shaped. It is, so the main argument of the discussion at hand, the grammar with which the construction of “Mediterranean identity” is carried out and which has led to the manifestation of a very substantially defined political argument: The Mediterranean is (also) our living space.

1. When Do We Speak about Something as “Mediterranean”? The advertising promises: “Good, fresh and healthy food from Noora’s Kitchen”. The Lebanese-Mediterranean restaurant that advertised this slogan could be found in an Imax-theatre in Auckland, New Zealand – and it was hardly different from thousands of other Mediterranean restaurants all over the world.22 Noora’s Mediterranean Kitchen should be emphasised here because of two exceptions: On the one hand, it attracted attention through its precisely defined basic concept, in which the entire design (from the plates to the colours on the walls) was associated with an idea of Mediterranean warmth; on the other, it was a modern food court restaurant in a prime location. No cheesy rubble dummies on the walls, no olive tree pictures, but a clear, no-frills design, in which the image of the Mediterranean was translated to a fast food environment. The centre of the design, which also won an award in 2009, was the modern logo, arranged with an “a” shaped into a heart. To quote the explanation of the marketing agency Storm Corporate Design Ltd.: The heart was used to symbolically represent the healthy food of Noora’s, to express closeness, well-being, heartiness. The font chosen should speak of harmony and style, modernity and dependability.23 Another central idea was the colour red: Red is seen as a symbolic bearer of the sustainability of the effect. The colour is considered to be stimulating, also for the appetite, which is why red is often used in the food industry. Red is also associated with characteristics like passion, dynamism, sensuality and pleasure in making decisions.24 Advertising agencies see such designs of corporate identity as an important resource not only to communicate a company’s identity to the outer world. It is also about the symbolisation of values, the linking of names, expectations and needs to form a particular message. The marketing goal is not to invent a 22 See the presentation of the restaurant: [accessed May 24, 2018]. 23 See [accessed May 24, 2018]. 24 Cf. Rebecca Harrington: Here’s why all fast-food signs are red, in: Business Insider, Sep. 30, 2015.

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name and “embellish” it, but to create a message and to ask what the best symbolisations for this message are. The picture of a name has to embody both the present and the future. Despite the takeaway packages of the modern fast food restaurant, the customer should think of a woman called Noora, who cooks traditional dishes and serves them over the counter. Here, Mediterranean food, which above all stands for fast, light and healthy cuisine, tells the story of a cosmopolitan home. The design picks up the modern and global individual in a place which appears to be familiar to him, the (red) world of fast food, and carries him to a culturally different place: a place that makes the global everyday life open to everyone, a place that is inexpensive, not exclusive, fast, communications-intensive, but that tastes like home, giving warmth and generating memories. Currently, research on food and cooking as a representation of certain cultural relationships and developments can be seen as an emerging interdisciplinary field of study.25 It is presumed that food studies are not just about cultural habits, but also about people’s knowledge of life, health, nature and environment. The discussion of the connection between food and identity is based on considerations of the anthropological foundations of human community, and, additionally, on social and psychological assumptions regarding the configuration of person and personality – food habits are not least the habituation of particular lifestyles, they are specific for economic classes and to religious rules as well. “Food choices tell stories of families, migrations, assimilation, resistance, changes over times, and personal as well as group identity”, Gina M. Almerico noted.26 Certainly, the relationship between the global western individual of today and food habits expresses something about the ability to actively shape oneself and master the challenges of one’s environment. Nutrition is first and foremost thought as part of optimisation programs, which are about coaching personal resources for a happy and successful biography. But this covers up the fact that food habits initially represent a communication via shared values and an understanding of possible statements and meanings.27 This understanding does integrate the signals that are created, for example by food producers and marketing agencies, apart from this it responds to the perception that food habits reverberate social experiences and memories.28 Food is not least a part of cultural notions of “good life”, and the pursuit of social 25 Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies, edited by Ken Albala, London; New York NY: Routledge, 2013; Food culture: Anthropology, linguistics and food studies, edited by Janet Chrzan and John Brett, New York NY; Oxford: Berghahn, 2017. 26 Gina M. Almerico, Food and identity: Food studies, cultural, and personal identity, in: Journal of International Business and Cultural Studies 8, 2014, pp. 1-7, here p. 3. 27 Arthur Lizie: Food and communication, in: Food culture: Anthropology, linguistics and food studies, edited by Janet Chrzan and John Brett, New York NY; Oxford: Berghahn, 2017, pp. 27-38. 28 Jon D. Holtzman: Food and memory, in: Annual Review of Anthropology 35, 2016, pp. 361-378.

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coherence and affirmation.29 The social construction of food as a centre of traditional family relationships, a home and a social symbol of naturalness, purity, exceptionalism or even luxury, does not contradict itself, but is closely linked in portraits of the Mediterranean cuisine. With the food habits of the region, naturalness and exquisiteness, familiarity and individuality, singularity and globality can be highlighted. Again, does this not seem to be more about the discoursive figures of the Mediterranean rather than the memories of the people in the region? If one can attribute food to the capacity to inscribe memories, does this memories support the peculiarity of Mediterranean cuisine or do they create distances and emphasise something private instead? While inventing a “Mediterranean diet” does the Mediterranean cuisine not experience a detachment from its defining characteristics, namely the religious traditions and regulations? Visconti and Di Giuli assume a specific form of Mediterranean marketing,30 in which the reconstruction of connectivity and hybridity plays an essential role. In claiming to articulate a definition of connectivity that differs from the majority of scientific studies, their perspective is based on “the confrontation of different but not necessarily opposite” elements, or “a sense of measure as well as space for more extreme hybridizations (e.g., provocations)”.31 It is evident from Mediterranean brands that the “made in” label is not necessary to proof the products Mediterranean origin; the label does not have to include “Greece”, “Italy” or “Marocco”.32 The spatial connectivity is based on the referential authenticity that gives brands a place in history and time. “Referential authenticity is said to improve consumer perceptions of brand genuineness”;33 it is not based on origin but on telling about experiences that should be recognised as authentic due to the Mediterranean narrative. The shift from cultural habits to the idea of a personal capacity to master business and everyday life is reflected and promoted by countless media planning. The most exciting notion is that the Mediterranean cuisine meets today’s strategies: The Mediterranean food is fresh and healthy, consists particularly of vegetables and olive oil, is always cooked quickly, it is simple and yet sophisticated. Television documentaries and publications about the Mediterranean cuisine repeatedly portrayed a star chef with his mother, grandmother or an 29 Mark Meister: Cultural feeding, good life science, and the TV food network, in: Mass Communication and Society 4, 2, 2001, pp. 165-182; Guy Cook, Matt Reed and Alison Twiner: “But it’s all true!”: Commercialism and commitment in the discourse of organic food promotion, in: Text and Talk 29, 2, 2009, pp. 151-173. 30 Luca Visconti and Alberta Di Giuli: Principles and levels of Mediterranean connectivity: Evidence from Prada’s “Made in Worlds” brand strategy, in: Journal of Consumer Behaviour 13, 3, 2014, pp. 164-175, here p. 164: “Mediterranean marketing is an ideological approach to marketing grounded on a corpus of distinctive values characterizing the market orientation of companies located both within and beyond the Mediterranean basin”. 31 Ibid., p. 166. 32 Ibid., p. 169. 33 Ibid., p. 169.

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inspiring old lady. This symbolises that the perfection does not lie in further advancing the cuisine, but in preserving the original spices, smells, colours and flavours. The “Mediterranean Way is about light and colors, flavors and scents, eras and trends, history and daily life, ideas and ideals, but, above all, culture and cultures”, an exposé of the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition concludes.34 It is remarkable that the strategic efforts to design a corporate identity consciously assume overlaps and use these overlaps – meaning that: Marketing agencies assume that the target audience is a complex society in which individuals have different memberships and affiliations, preferences and ways of life. Today, preferences and characteristics of ways of life are only conceivable as crosscutting categories35; they exist in overlaps between ingroup and outgroup, differentiation and assimilation. The task of designing a corporate identity is therefore to offer a symbol or a metaphor that stands for the company and the product at the same time, as well as for the persons and the name. This task also includes the challenge to resolve inconsistencies, to balance processes between expectation and product fulfilment, name and product attributes, and to do so by creating unifying statements, namely by emphasising specific values. With the design of Noora’s Mediterranean Kitchen, the global world of consumers is speaking. Is the Mediterranean speaking here too? The elements briefly highlighted here, such as colours, plants or food, cannot only be recognised as “typical” for the Mediterranean, we also see them as a “cultural heritage of a place and of a people”.36 This undoubtedly enables initiatives for conveying and promoting quality agriculture in the Mediterranean to find recognition and support. Mediterranean “cooking” and “nutrition” show the very connection between the past and the future, between heritage and modernity as well as diversity and unity, which can be read together on almost all cultural, social and political levels in the Mediterranean. And yet, there are different ways to cook lentil soup, and different ways to justify that the own recipe is the “real” one. And yet, in the design of the corporate Mediterranean identity of Noora’s Kitchen, which also includes interior furnishing, napkins and the professional clothing of staff members, there is a foreign factor: an owner who carries his origin (from Lebanon) with male

34 Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition: The excellence of the Mediterranean Way, Parma, 2010, p. 4. 35 Marilynn B. Brewer: Social identity complexity and acceptance of diversity, in: The psychology of social and cultural diversity, edited by Richard J. Crisp, Malden MA et al.: Blackwell, 2010, pp. 11-33, here p. 12f. 36 Aida Giulia Arabia: Agro-Food typicality and cultural heritage: The case of the Mediterranean diet, in: Food diversity between rights, duties and autonomies: Legal perspectives for a scientific, cultural and social debate on the right to food and agroecology, edited by Alessandro Isoni, Michele Troisi and Maurizia Pierri, Cham: Springer, 2018, pp. 177-189.

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charm into the restaurant is clearly too individualistic, too warm and too “heritage”-focused for the global heart of Noora’s.37 It must be added to this discussion that “food” can be understood as a cultural construct, whose objectivity is connected with the space in a special way: in the object itself, i.e. the lemon, the leaf of the olive tree or the tomato, the fruitfulness or dryness of a particular region as well as the farming systems, the harvesting techniques, and the seasons. It has been emphasised in cultural anthropological studies that with the everyday practice of eating, “specific modes of relation between a person and the world, thus forming one of the fundamental landmarks in space-time” are represented.38 As voyagers in the ordinary, we had remained in a familiar world, inside a society to which everything attached us, our past, our education, our experiences, and our expectations.39

Eating and drinking are both vital and social activities that structure the order of family, gender, economy, and what we describe as “cultural identity”. The material and immaterial quality of the object in which food is encountered reveals the correlation of cultural objects, which can be experienced as familiar and peculiar, but also as “old” or “dead”, “meaningless” and “outdated”. One can alienate himself from these objects, but they can also be rediscovered, remembered and peculiarly shaped. The sense of experience, the ability to name something as part of one’s own identity, is based on interrelated movements of perceiving something as familiar or strange.40 It is highly noteworthy that public discourses on food and especially marketing policies exploit the fact that in the confrontation with food, people construct a sense of collective belonging and cultural identity.41 Regarding the discussion about the Mediterranean restaurant in New Zealand, a new question must be considered: what do we see as “Mediterranean” or where do we see something “Mediterranean”? Don’t we see a breach when something is declared Mediterranean, but at the same time, a peculiarity is emphasised? If the way of making dolma, particularly the way of defining the proportion of onions, is not just explained as a special variety but is empha-

37 The owner has since given up the restaurant and established a much more “traditional” one in a different place. 38 Luce Giard: Part II: Doing-Cooking, in: The practice of everyday life, edited by Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, pp. 149-247, here p. 183. 39 Luce Giard: Times and Places, in: The practice of everyday life, edited by Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, pp. xxxv-xlv, here p. xxxix. 40 Tilman Habermas: Geliebte Objekte: Symbole und Instrumente der Identitätsbildung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999 (first publ. 1996), see here, for example, p. 46 et seqq. 41 See here, for example, as a case-by-case examination Laurence Tibère: Food as a factor of collective identity: The case of creolization, in: French Cultural Studies 27, 1, 2016, pp. 85-95.

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sised as distinct and original, do we not consider this as a contradiction with the Mediterranean narrative? If we are trying to conceive the “Mediterranean” in concepts and theories and interpret it as the interweaving of contrasts into a cohesive construct – without these contrasts being thought as binary oppositions or even as ambivalences –, does such a discoursive frame leave a place for the emphasis of peculiarity? Or is the anthropological, social and political (and even genetic) attribution of Mediterranean characteristics as a recognisable integrality an offer to frame history and identity, without having to delineate the other (or even without being able to emphasise singularity)? Should the narrative of the Mediterranean’s peculiarity be understood as an emphasis of constancy and heritage to counteract differences? First, it should be noted that the cultural foundation of the Mediterranean and the political region of the Mediterranean are not complementary or supplementary, but rather commutative or even exchangeable. Likewise, it should be noted that when talking about the space of the Mediterranean hardly any question is asked about the specific geographical notions. The geographies are instead defined by the cultural thematic images that are predetermined by the relations of Mediterranean thought. In this sense, the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP) movement that began in the 1990s is not just a continuation of the Global Mediterranean Policy (GMP)42, developed in the 1970s, which sought the concentration of interests, but a policy proposal with a creative aim: To configure a normative basis for the integration of material, social and cultural differences in this fragmented region.43 The goal of a multilateral network of cooperation in the fields of trade, finance, technical and natural resources was therefore extended in the second attempt. Now, twelve Mediterranean partners were added to the EU countries: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Malta, Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, and the Palestinian Authority.44 With this expansion, the goals became “easier” as well: “The EMP institutional architecture did not involve international treaties or formal agreements but was established through political documents and substantial agreements.”45 Nongovernmental projects and neighbourhood projects 42 Etel Solingen and Saba Şenses Ozyurt: Mare Nostrum?: The sources, logic, and dilemmas of the Euro-Mediterranean partnership, in: The Convergence of Civilizations: Constructing a Mediterranean Region, edited by Emanuel Adler, Federica Bicchi, Beverly Crawford and Raffaella A. Del Sarto Toronto et al.: University of Toronto Press, 2006, pp. 51-82. 43 Cf. Federica Bicchi: The European origins of Euro-Mediterranean practices, in: The Convergence of Civilizations: Constructing a Mediterranean Region, edited by Emanuel Adler, Federica Bicchi, Beverly Crawford and Raffaella A. Del Sarto Toronto et al.: University of Toronto Press, 2006, pp. 137-167. 44 Libya entered the EMP with an observer status in 1999. Malta and Cyprus entered in 2004, in 2007 Mauritania and Albania followed. 45 Stefania Panebianco: The EU and the Middle East, in: The Foreign policy of the European Union: Assessing Europe’s role in the world, edited by Federiga Bindi, Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010, pp. 183-196, here p. 185.

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now determined the range of topics of this desired cooperation. The aim of the EMP was a region-building that followed the conceptual idea of constituting peace, stability and integration on the basis of a common understanding – and history.46 The founding text of the EMP, the so-called “Barcelona Declaration”, sets out the agreement of the signatories to recognise “the traditions of culture and civilization throughout the Mediterranean region” and underlines that the “dialogue between these cultures and exchanges at human, scientific and technological level are an essential factor in bringing their peoples closer, promoting understanding between them and improving their perception of each other.”47 The Euromed report “The Cultural Agenda” from 2009 starts with the statement quoted below: The establishment and evolution of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership is one of the best illustrations of successful intercultural dialogue concerning countries, institutions, civil organisations, professional associations, companies, and above all, dialogue between people.48

The picture used for this conclusion is well-known: For millennia, the Mediterranean has been a bastion of civilisations and cultures, both as a crossroads between Europe, Africa and the Middle East and as a region with its own unique heritage and shared history. The Mediterranean Sea has enabled the exchange of people, goods and ideas while remaining central to the unique and shared identities of the region.49

Projects that had been funded during the reporting period included films, a youth orchestra, festivals, exhibitions or seminars. The presentation distracts the view on togetherness and communication, experimental art and juxtaposed young women with and without headscarves. The EMP is “an experiment in normative power projection”50, Emanuel Adler and Beverly Crawford stated. What is interesting with respect to the normative strategy of Mediterranean policy is that its themes are identical to their explanations and justifications: cultural heritage. However, the contemporary observer can ask the question, to what extent the draft of a Euro-Mediterranean policy failed to meet the challenges of the migration crisis (which is a border crisis). That would also mean 46 “Barcelona Declaration”. Adopted at the Euro-Mediterranean Conference, 27-8 Nov. 1995: “The Council of the European Union […] stressing the strategic importance of the Mediterranean and moved by the will to give their future relations a new dimension, based on comprehensive cooperation and solidarity, in keeping with the privileged nature of the links forged by neighbourhood and history; aware that the new political, economic and social issues on both sides of the Mediterranean constitute common challenges calling for a coordinated overall response; resolved to establish to that end a multilateral and lasting framework of relations based on a spirit of partnership, with due regard for the characteristics, values and distinguishing features peculiar to each of the participants; […].” 47 Ibid. 48 European Commission: The Euromed Partnership: The cultural agenda. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2009, p. 7. 49 Ibid., p. 9. 50 Adler/Crawford: Normative Power (note 14), p. 5.

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a failure of the political agenda towards a logical positivism of situationally oriented politics (or towards an ideological, political agenda of the new populist movements that seek to transform Europe).

2. Representation of Mediterranean Peculiarity Currently, we can find the following four principal representations of the Mediterranean in literature and science: (a) The Mediterranean as an identifiable region. In this respect, we are speaking of the Mediterranean as a geographical region, as a political region (with sub-regions), or as a region of conflict. The often overlapping economic and cultural relationships come into view as well. It is interesting that the region’s connectivity, which became a topos, still does not describe the relationships that were suggested by Arjun Appadurain with the notion of transnational “ethnoscapes”.51 Appadurain’s term can be used to describe social and cultural relationships that are space-bound and only grow into a recognisable context through space-spanning interactions. The sphere of the ethnoscapes, which arises from group communications that cross national territories, does not parallelise the equally space-spanning, in fact also space-bound economic or media relations, but forms an independent area. Contrary to such connectivity, which was not designed as a transgressional movement, but rather as a space-dissolving intensivation of relationships, the idea of a stable core or a stable anchoring can be found in the Mediterranean space. Mediterranean connectivity apparently has a foundation in its precisely determinable cultural heritage. According to the Mediterranean narrative, not a new quality of communication, but the cultural heritage itself makes transnational relations possible. In the narrative of Mediterranean identity, transgressive movements of globalisation do not lead to “second spaces”, but they rather circulate around something like a Mediterranean “core identity”. Therefore, the question of whether the post-national Mediterranean space is, in fact, a globally redesigned space is hardly raised. It almost seems too clear that both in terms of cultural as well as political assertions, it is at the very most a global representation of a region that has already been developed historically. Do the fractures, which emerge between “north” and “south” or “centre” and “periphery”, only deepen the fault lines in each case, which were already effective at different times? Critical analyses have repeatedly pointed to the fact that the current political strategies aiming to “redevelop” the region as a Mediterranean space are closely 51 Cf. Arjun Appadurain: Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. in: Theory, Culture and Society 7, 2/3, 1990, pp. 295-310, here p. 297: “By ‘ethnoscape’, I mean the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guestworkers and other moving groups and persons constitute an essential feature of the world, and appear to affect the politics of and between nations to a hitherto unprecedented degree”.

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following “old”, especially hegemonic-western goals.52 But perhaps the Mediterranean as a global region is not an updated form of a historically plural space, but rather a palimpsest of traces of the historical construct, whose strategic marketing provides images that as a normative offer of identity are intended to function bordering and integrating at the same time. (b) The second representation is the Mediterranean as an interface between coherent cultures. Here, one can even speak of a paradigm. The image of cultures forming a symbiosis is similar to that of the immanent region in the history of the Mediterranean: again it is not about networks and global transgressions, but about reconstructions of heritage. The idea of a Mediterranean culture includes “Italy” and “Egypt”, images of sunken ships and lifted amphorae. It is a story about the past – but without the past being told in detailed terms, i.e. mentioning certain powers, social imbalances, crises or wars. The Mediterranean culture has a past of meanings. This meanings are not based on a historical genesis, on the contrary, they are based on images, creating the dehistoricised appearance of what we typically describe as cultural characteristics. Mediterranean culture consists of olive trees, lemons, soap from Marseille and Aleppo, Moroccan argan oil, hummus, sunsets... “It’s miniaturization in the souvenir trade nicely expresses its irrelevance (with a few exceptions) to modern life and its association with a nostalgic and prettified view of the past”, Michael Herzfeld reflects.53 Is this in fact “commercialized nostalgia”?54 The assumption must be contradicted that such objects might have lost their significance for cultural and identity formation by becoming souvenirs. Indeed, not the objects themselves make up the common culture of the region, but it is the relationship of both objectual and symbolic objects with cultural values, i.e. the objectual “souvenirs” and retold images with a proposition, that is preserved by the Mediterranean cultural narrative. More precisely, even though the objects may become “irrelevant”, the relationship between objects 52 Cf. Münevver Cebeci and Tobias Schumacher: Deconstructing the EU’s discourse on the Mediterranean, in: MedReset Methodology and Concept Papers 2, Oct., 2016, p. 3: “Our major argument is that the EU’s discourse on the Mediterranean is constitutive of, and legitimizing, its geopolitical, securitized, depoliticizing and technocratic approach to that space”. See also the relentless report of the Think Tank IPEMED (L’Institut de Prospective Economique du Monde Méditerranéen): Europe and the Mediterranean: Propositions for building a major region with global influence. Report for Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament (Authors: Abderrahmane Hadj Nacer and Carmen Romero), Bruxelles, 2013, p. 4: “In the Mediterranean area, for fifty years, various political projects were drawn up and projected from the North: ‘Mediterranean policy’, followed by the ‘new Mediterranean policy’ the ‘Euro-Mediterranean partnership’, ‘Neighbourhood policy’, ‘Union for…’, etc. These political projects were thought up by a North looking down upon the South, with an emphasis on institutional state-by-state construction, taped up in complex procedures, applied to geographical areas resulting from diplomatic choices made by countries in the North, with little consideration for the countries or societies of the South.” 53 Michael Herzfeld: Po-Mo Med, in: A companion to Mediterranean history, edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita, Malden MA et al.: Wiley, 2014, pp. 122-135, here p. 128. 54 Ibid.

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and value-creating narratives shape the “Mediterranean culture”, which is complemented by the cultures of different religious, linguistic or historical regions and accepted as part of one’s own identity. For this to be possible, i.e. that the representation of the “convergence of civilizations” around the Mediterranean Sea can be reconstructed over generations,55 it must not only be possible to recognise the (object-related) signs as a presentation of this common culture, but also to remember the values associated with these signs. Therefore, the souvenir shop makes sense not merely for the tourists, even if the possibilities to reconstruct the character of the region on the basis of these souvenirs are obviously limited. Nevertheless (the same) souvenirs, as objects in the Mediterranean cultural narrative, also have validity for the “natives”: in the reconstruction of a cultural narrative they emphasise a notion of togetherness and closely connect the idea of belonging to the ideas of peculiarity, especialness – and liveability. The cultural objects speak of a “dynamic”, “living”, “natural” and “evolving” convergence, of a closeness that includes the individual without making him invisible, and a peculiarity that has already proved itself in history. The liveability of the Mediterranean is a liveability precisely because of the unequivocal nature of the culture, not as a form of the living environment but as a thought “foundation”. The meanings of the objects always seem to be clear (that is why they can become souvenirs in the first place). However, the culture of the Mediterranean does not gain its authority because of its historical origin in this specific space, but because culture follows the dynamics and rhythms of space, of the peoples and their social and political forms of life. Not the object that became a souvenir is the basis of the lived culture, but the souvenir shop, which allows to put an image in a room and to negotiate its meaning. (c) A third representation is based on the idea that the Mediterranean forms an “identity” – if one looks closely and gives history a chance. The Mediterranean, as already noted, is seen as a realisation of “old” identities, while at the same time the region is accredited with a certain power to create renewed identities. The Mediterranean is a region where the echoes of “old” identities are audible, but in which continuously renewed identities are also promoted. The Mediterranean identity narrative is less about the mastery of the environment or individual learning and becoming, but about mediation between moving and staying, the “own” and exchange. In so far, the identity narrative of the Mediterranean is primarily spatially oriented. It is bound to cultural objects both in terms of the dynamics it follows and in terms of the elements of stability – therefore it is not place-tied, but place-attached. Referring the identity narrative to the Mediterranean region is relational: the languages, places, people, habits or forms of action that are attributed to each other are changing. Is there any superior “spatial identity” when it comes to the geographical area as a whole? 55 See Adler/Crawford: Normative Power (note 14), p. 5.

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By looking at the narrative of belonging to spaces, the attachment to a place, the perceptibility and recognisability in the form of a “local bond”, it is possible to ask about the identity of a place by examining the processes of assigning a person to the selected place (regardless of whether it is a shared living environment). This, in turn, highlights the importance of the Mediterranean “characteristics”, because if the “Mediterranean identity” is to be understood not only as an identity of a region but as an identification with a region, then this identity is, in fact, an identification “with” something. In the differentiation of place-binding and place-identity, the latter would be about an identity narrative that had to accept more or less distinctive characteristics of persons and places.56 However, in the identity narrative of the Mediterranean region, the “Mediterranean identity” is thought of (or denied) as an additional relation to the relation of the “self”, and not as a primary relation. To speak of relations always means to speak of borders, because the question of a relationship essentially is about “crossing borders”.57 Since the social world, as experienced by the individual, is not only predetermined, but its order also develops relationally, identity narratives are indeed demarcations between the “self” and the “other”, but also narratives about the form of the border itself. This may exactly be the narrative of Mediterranean identity: a narrative not about the “own” in relation to the place, but about the way in which the borders of the “own” to the “other” are shaped. (d) The fourth dimension is that of the uncomfortable inhabitants of the Mediterranean region. They are (next to climatic disasters) the most difficult, perhaps the most significant risk in the region. As Michael Herzfeld described, the inhabitant of the Mediterranean appears to be skilful and eager to live, in no way conflict-avoiding, and always standing on the border to enmity: For, by conforming to a model of Mediterranean peoples as unreliable, imprecise, and spontaneous – all virtues that are highly regarded in the inside spaces of Greek cultural intimacy – they are also providing both an excuse for their own failures in the larger spheres of competition and an excuse for others to despise them.58

The Mediterranean is attributed to traditions of irregularity – based on the unclear allocation of the not yet rejected force of the past. Undoubtedly, this force has carriers. Today’s “trouble carriers” are Kurds, Albanians, Catalans... – as pirates were perceived in former times. The Mediterranean Sea was an important route for merchants and travellers not only during antiquity and renaissance. It allowed trade and cultural exchange between peoples of the re56 Concerning a discussion on place-attachment and place-identity cf. Habermas: Geliebte Objekte (note 40), pp. 154-160. 57 Athanasios Karafillidis: Grenzen und Relationen, in: Relationale Soziologie: Zur kulturellen Wende der Netzwerkforschung, edited by Jan Fuhse and Sophie Mützel, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010, pp. 69-95, here p. 71. 58 Herzfeld: Practical Mediterraneanism (note 4), p. 57.

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gion and grew with the intersection of trade routes between Amsterdam and Madras, Venice and Aleppo. However, in the history of the region, the “foreign merchant” gained an economical, as well as an important social and cultural position: in Carthage, Genoa, Rome, Nor Jugha, Damascus, or Constantinople. It is quite noteworthy that both Fernand Braudel and Jacques Le Goff59 saw the Mediterranean mercantile community and families, whose significance can be traced back to the 11th century, not as mere forerunners or founders of the capitalist modernity, but as independent historical actors, whose replacement was accompanied with the loss of a certain civilisation. Because when asked, “What is the Mediterranean world?”, Braudel replied: “The Mediterranean is not even a single sea, it is a complex of seas […]”.60 To repeat one of the most quoted passages: The Mediterranean is a thousand things at once. Not a landscape but countless landscapes. Not a sea but a succession of seas. It is not a civilization, but a series of superposed civilizations.61

In his studies, Braudel did not draw a distinctness that becomes a part of totality in space, but described the non-simultaneity and inhomogeneity of a “compound world”.62 The Mediterranean world does not open up a hitherto unknown view at the history of our world, it promotes “a ‘different’ understanding of history.”63 Braudel also repeatedly emphasised that history is never free of violence64 and history-writing, as well as history-making, cannot be separated from the respective self-understanding of one’s own history, civilisation (culture) and nation.65 Based on their inhabitants, the images of the Mediterranean are not stereotypes but codes, as they – contrary to the first appearance – do not indicate properties but relationships. “Mediterranean identity” is an identity of overlapping relationships. It has a past and remains indeterminate or elusive to the present. 59 Jacques Le Goff: Marchands et banquiers du Moyen-Âge, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France 1956. 60 Fernand Braudel: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II, Berkeley et al.: University of California Press, 1972 (first publ.: La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, Paris: Armand Colin 1966).), p. 17 (Preface to the First Edition). 61 Fernand Braudel: La Méditerranée. L’espace et l’histoire, Paris, Flammarion, 1977, p. 10. Fernand Braudel, Georges Duby and Maurice Aymard: Die Welt des Mittelmeeres, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2013 (2nd ed., first publ. 1987; frz.: La Méditerranée. L’espace et l’histoire, les hommes et l’héritage, Paris: Flammarion, 1986), p. 7f. 62 Braudel et al.: Die Welt des Mittelmeeres (note 61), p. 9. 63 Ibid., p. 10. 64 Fernand Braudel: A history of civilization, New York NY: Penguin Books, (first publ.: Le Monde actuel, histoire et civilisations, Paris: Librairie Eugène Belin, 1963), 1993, p. xxxiv. 65 Ibid., pp. xxxiv-xl; Mihran Dabag and Kristin Platt: Herausforderungen einer Mediterranisierung nicht-beliebiger Ortlosigkeit. Zum Schreiben der Geschichte von nicht-staatlichen Gemeinschaften und Diaspora im Mittelmeerraum, in: New horizons: Mediterranean research in the 21th Century, edited by Mihran Dabag, Dieter Haller, Nikolas Jaspert and Achim Lichtenberger, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink; Ferdinand Schöningh, 2016, pp. 45-90, here p. 59.

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Is “Mediterranean identity” therefore also an identity of certain other places? In her global history of the Mediterranean, Julia Clancy-Smith has focused on the history of the region in places: the structure of cities, the function of coffee houses and taverns for trade, smuggling, political intrigues, migration.66 The public culture of the Mediterranean may not have specific places, but it is attributed a particular design of places: openness (to the sea), accessibility, and a character that is not focused on the “own”, but on arrivals, refugee movements, dynamics and diversity instead. The spatial entity of Mediterranean places is continually changing in terms of its social and demographic makeup – but not in the ways in which the population is living in it. The phenomenon of integration is inherent in Mediterranean social structures. This does not mean that Mediterranean places make an offer to be absorbed by them. They offer to find and design an own space, maybe in the centre, maybe on the edge of a particular place.67 It is the view of the nation states which, with the amalgamation of the idea of representation and sovereignty as well as the translation of representation into homogeneity for the Mediterranean region, identified a fashion of regionalisms or realisations of local egoisms. Even though regionalism is generally discussed as a global phenomenon, Mediterranean regionalism is seen as a form in which the “mosaic” of the region presents itself as a resource of conflict or in which a “traditional" conflict zone has inevitably developed into a global circuit of conflicts. Finally, the idea of “regionalism” itself explains the interest of the EU in the Mediterranean region. This is revealed by the fact that the EU, as a global paradigm for regional integrations, directs its attention precisely to politically “unstable” regions, assuming “egoistical demarcations” that could affect the stability of the EU as a whole. Even though the problematisation of regionalisms was recently given special emphasis, talking about the identity of the Mediterranean has always been linked to the idea of unity in diversity and the idea of a risky emphasis on singularity. The narrative of the “Mediterranean identity” in terms of its inhabitants consists of descriptions of traditionalism and tradability, of independence and pride, but also of the awareness of bearing the weight of the past. It is striking that the images associated with the people of the region are not congruent with the images of Mediterranean cultural identity in the EMP-draft. Can the political attempts to define a Mediterranean identity be seen as an endeavour to deliberately undermine forms of accentuating a peculiarity (as a singularity of the Other), which are as well understood as feared as typical for the region? 66 Julia A. Clancy-Smith: Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an age of migration, c.1800-1900. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2011. 67 For this aspect see a single case study: Nadia Charalambous and Ilaria Geddes: Spatial memory and shifting centrality, in: Suburban urbanities: Suburbs and the life of the high street, edited by Laura Vaughan, London: UCL Press, 2015, pp. 77-103.

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The Convergent Spaces of the Mediterranean Thinking about the Mediterranean space is only possible in singular terms. The Mediterranean region, however, can only be understood in plural terms: They point to seaside areas along a 48,000 km coastline, the sand and stone beaches, tourist areas and industrial ports, dolphins and water rats, pictures of sunsets and oil pollutions, aircraft carriers and historic two-masters, the search for Atlantis and “blue-helmets”. The frequently cited pictures barely leave the dialectical relationality between space and culture or place and people. The theoretical approaches set and establish the peculiarity and the limits of cultural coherence precisely based on the discoursive images. What role does the sea play as space? While the figures of the Mediterranean narrative indeed serve the attempt to place the idea of a Mediterranean identity on a “cultural-anthropological” basis, the reference to the sea does not “naturalise” the identity narrative – on the contrary, arguments of naturalising authentication are preferably part of the national cultures of the West and can be seen in relation to the Mediterranean at most where they complement the Italian or Greek narrative of the West. Undoubtedly, the idealisation of the cultivation of olive trees, of traditional crafts and specific social issues, especially family values, are part of the Mediterranean narrative of peculiarity.68 Religious, cultural, language specific, ethnic or national characters are always accentuated, but they are narrated as developments that emerge from a shared history or a common destiny, not from a geophysical heritage. One might suspect that the sea plays a central role in addressing the relationship between maritime mobility and sedentary cultures. Has the Mediterranean region any unique maritime culture? Interpretations, in which the sea as a geographical and political space are closely intertwined, can be increasingly recognised today. Thus, in recent years archaeology came forward with research on mobility and migration that differs from the earlier utilisations of migration in archaeological concepts, by emphasising that not only drinking vessels, fibulae or seals migrate, but the people themselves are put into a “multidirectional, non-centralized network”, which was accompanied by strong local cultural developments, especially in the eastern Mediterranean.69 68 Athanasios Moulakis: The Mediterranean region: Reality, delusion, or Euro-Mediterranean project?, in: Mediterranean Quarterly 16, 2, 2005, pp. 11-38, here p. 14; Almut-Barbara Renger and Isabel Toral-Niehoff: Genealogie und Migrationsmythen im antiken Mittelmeerraum und auf der Arabischen Halbinsel: Einleitung, in: Genealogie und Migrationsmythen im antiken Mittelmeerraum und auf der Arabischen Halbinsel, edited by Almut-Barbara Renger and Isabel Toral-Niehoff, Berlin: Edition Topoi, 2014, pp. 7-21. 69 Gunnar Lehmann: The Late Bronze – Iron Age Transition and the Problem of the Sea Peoples Phenomenon in Cilicia, in: “Sea Peoples” up-to-date: New research on transformations in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 13th-11th centuries BCE, edited by Peter M. Fischer and Teresa Bürge, Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2017, pp. 229-255, here p. 247.

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For example, the focus is on the so-called “Sea Peoples” of the 13th to 11th century BC and the controversy over their geographical origins, names, languages and ethnic groups – although other groups such as the Aramaeans must also be seen as cultural carriers of a historical migration and mobility idea.70 The phenomenon of the Sea Peoples demonstrates an Aegean and then a Mediterranean style, a connection between the emergence of technological transfer and material, systematic and material management (especially the textile industry). This narrative should not be understood as a compilation; it is not a project that follows the goal of integrating the different narratives of space. To the contrary, it is a story that claims to be free from the difference of space and wants to be seen as an independent history of the Mediterranean. The tendency of culturalisation, which stands out in the narratives of the Mediterranean region, can, therefore, be recognised as a global political topic in Mediterranean politics.71 This tendency is the framework for linking today’s trade agreements across the Mediterranean with traditional mercantilism or for trying to interpret current political developments with the analysis of the emergence of democratic, liberal and even authoritarian thinking in the traditional Mediterranean. In the continuation of the culturalisation movement, there are also figures in which politics and economics are discussed (“Arab Spring”, “regional resource economy”). This contributes to the fact that the political geography of the region appears to be more fluid. The conceptualisation of the Mediterranean region can refer to the fact that the question of space has already been asked in historical contexts, and figures have been formed who, like the figure of the North-South difference, have had a decisive influence on social and political realities. The effect of such figures can be explained by the method of agglomeration, which is typical for the Mediterranean narrative: the narrative of the North-South difference is based on the differences between dry and fertile, city and country, Christianity and Islam, developments and problems. Talking about the Mediterranean is continuously based on the idea of culture on the one hand, and patterns of dynamic problems on the other. The structures of the different communities are also described as ingrained for the region. Especially the conception of “community” is considered to be typical Mediterranean – a notion of a social structure that is never fully translatable into the category of “ethnicity”. Today, it is rec70 See Peter M. Fischer and Teresa Bürge: Reflections on the outcomes of the workshop: Problems and desiderata, in: “Sea Peoples” up-to-date: New research on transformations in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 13th-11th centuries BCE, edited by Peter M. Fischer and Teresa Bürge, Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2017, pp. 1120. 71 On the topic of “global themes in Mediterranean politics” see Richard Gillespie and Frédéric Volpi: Introduction: The growing international relevance of Mediterranean politics, in: Routledge Handbook of Mediterranean Politics, edited by Richard Gillespie and Frédéric Volpi, London; New York NY: Routledge, 2018, pp. 1-10, here pp. 3 et seqq.

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ognised that the Mediterranean “mosaic” of places and cultures presents a special historical heritage – as a particularly problematic social and political condition. In this respect, the “memory” of the region is not something that is remembered and appears to be a “living” legacy. To the contrary, “memory” is a defined political argument in the Mediterranean narrative, which seems to be removing, perhaps even protecting, the image of the region from the memory of individuals (and others). The “Mediterranean Memory” is a political construction of culture, outside of the local cultures of the communities, outside of the different places, and thus detached from the communities that claim to own a specific place. It can only be pointed out here that the space, as it is contemporarily perceived, can even now be seen in political studies since the beginning of the 20th century and has especially prevailed in the 1930s: Am Mittelmeer (Ludwig, 1927), Il Mediterraneo dall’Unità di Roma all’Impero Italiano (Silva, 1933 et seqq.), Méditerranée, mer Rouge, routes imperials (Bitetto, 1937), Das Mittelmeer. Ein politischer Entscheidungsraum (Hummel, 1938), The Mediterranean in Politics (Monroe, 1938), Mediterranean Crisis (Greenwall, 1939).72 The geopolitical theorist Otto Maull had already pursued the idea of “cultural provinces” in an essay from 1917, in which he explained the problem of political nature with the reflection of geographical nature. He argued that the morphogenetically induced dissolution of Mediterranean zones into a large number of single countries, peninsulas and islands created a “accumulation of political organisms” (“Häufung politischer Organismen”), whose change between “merging and subsequent decay” (“Zusammenschluß und dann wieder Zerfall”) has determined the specific political structure of the Mediterranean.73 Maull’s spatial-theoretical analysis of the Mediterranean, as well as his prediction that the region was heading towards an “increase of conflicts and multiplication of problems (“Mehrung der Konflikte und Vervielfältigung der Probleme”)74 not only connected the region to a thematisation of geographical conditions, but also to the respective social and political forces, which arose from space-specific acting-traditions (of the sailors and merchants) over generations. For Maull, the political fault lines of the Mediterranean are constituted first and foremost by the difference between coastal and non-coastal inhabitants,75 but also by the historical formation of a south-east-north conflict and 72 Emil Ludwig: Am Mittelmeer, Berlin: Reclam, 1927 (transl. The Mediterranean: Saga of a sea, London: Hamilton, 1943); Pietro Silva: Il Mediterraneo dall’unità di Roma all’Impero italiano, Milano: Ist. per gli studi di politica internaz, 1933-1941; Carlo Cito de Bitetto: Méditerranée, mer Rouge, routes imperials, Paris: B. Grasset, 1937; Hans Hummel: Das Mittelmeer. Ein politischer Entscheidungsraum, Köln: Schaffstein, 1938; Elizabeth Monroe, The Mediterranean in Politics. Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press, 1938; Harry James Greenwall: Mediterranean Crisis, London: Nicholson & Watson, 1939. 73 Otto Maull: Die politischen Probleme des Östlichen Mittelmeeres, in: Geographische Zeitschrift 23, 5, 1917, pp. 233-257, see p. 233. 74 Ibid., p. 234. 75 Ibid., p. 237.

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the emergence of “transition regions”,76 by the emergence of transport, trade and culture “bridges” as well as the “people’s mosaic”.77 Maull’s recommendation for strengthening German influence in the Mediterranean was therefore simple: to practice “cultural politics”.78 The scientific and political narrative of the Mediterranean identity, in which a spatial-cultural unity is set as history and heritage, must nevertheless be seen as an antithesis to the narrative of the space of possible movements and divergent developments, as it would be told by the Mediterranean communities. It should also be added that the majority of cultures in the Mediterranean regions do not identify themselves as “seafarers” but as coastal inhabitants, because they have not conquered the sea. But even the sea itself hardly changed and rarely attacked its coastlines, in contrast to other maritime regions. It has only occasionally become the enemy of cultures and communities. In the Mediterranean region, there is a kind of coexistence, a sense of peace between the people and the sea, sometimes even a mutual ignorance. It is the political powers that have caused enmity and destruction, while the sea promised advancement, emancipation, culture and freedom.

The Divergent Temporalities of the Mediterranean In contrast to the images of the Mediterranean, which can be used to open up a space word-for-word, the view of the temporal structures, which report and work on the Mediterranean, does not show the movement of closing an overall figure, but of breaking up divergences. The Mediterranean first encounters the past. To speak of space and culture means to speak of what has been made, the “heritage” of interrelations, the cultural “traditions”, the evolved historical knowledge. Yet the picture we draw of the Mediterranean is never the picture of simultaneous cultural presence. We are versed in interpretations of development inequalities as a “throwback” or “retreat” in the past and a legacy of obsolete habits and traditions. Talking of culture is generally about a “reaching through” on temporal levels and the question of the penetration of the new and the old. In an encyclopaedia of human history, the chapter on the Mediterranean region would have the function to speak of yesterday’s developments in civilisation, the decline of cultures and their mythical heritage. It can be illustrated with archaeological drawings of terracotta, photos of ruins of Greek temples or even with modern orange research submarines on the hunt for Atlantis. The Mediterranean narrative does not synchronise, it intertwines the future with the past and thus dissolves chronologies. The past is “real” in the Mediterranean – this 76 Ibid., p. 237. 77 Ibid., p. 249. 78 Ibid., p. 257.

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is a problem from one point of view and an opportunity for preservation from another perspective. The past of the Mediterranean is not linear. In fact, the past is so powerful that it permeates the present and prevents a concept of the future. The communities and states in the Mediterranean do not deliberately cling to the past, it is the past itself that is engraved in the coastlines. Whereas in modern science the past is critically questioned and must be overcome to shape the future, the Mediterranean’s past is neither dialectical nor must it be overcome. It has to be integrated – but it often also beats back. The importance of the Mediterranean is not measured by its capacity for development but by its relation to the past. Precisely the political-strategic narratives of the 19th and 20th centuries on the Mediterranean, in which Western European geopolitical visions and the strategic-conceptual visions found a condensation, but also the strategic offer of the EMP to discover a temporal dynamic, shaped the basis of the Mediterranean identity design. Narratives are always drawn by different temporalities. It can be looked at forms of linearity or chronicity, the narrator’s positioning in or out of the event (as a chronicler), an existing or resolved inner historical contingency, or – by connecting or breaking conventional temporal orders – the construction of a temporal order of its own. Concerning the Mediterranean as an identity region, narrative mechanisms that try to establish a temporal coherence can be examined. A temporal dynamic is not designed in relation to the figures of the space and its history, but to the figures of the Mediterranean culture: the modes of event sequencing follow non-linear cultural developments and distinguish between the making and the disruption of culture,79 not between a beginning, a course and a result of placespecific historical growth. The temporality of the Mediterranean does not use the past as a starting point but as a horizon. Although it reflects the geopolitical order of the individual places, it relates to non-linear relationships of cultural narratives. However, in its divergence the temporality of the Mediterranean also implies myths and religions, because the Mediterranean space still is a space of ruins and the dead. Those reveal the human cultural ability, but besides the Möglichkeitsraum (“space of possibilities”) of the gods. The Mediterranean connects with the conditions of the natural and social space but also relates to the structures of the religious space and its extension through different eternities. While the spatial geography of the Mediterranean can be thought of as a “variable” bus also a convergent geometry,80 the temporal geography of space is characterised by divergences. These divergences form a stable discoursive element, due to the possible presence of the past at any time and despite dif79 Regarding the analysis of temporal structures see David Herman: Basic elements of narrative, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, p. 76. 80 Cf. Eran Lerman: The Mediterranean as a strategic environment: Learning a new geopolitical language, Ramat Gan: The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, 2016, p. 9.

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ferent demands to advance the pattern of a civilisational continuity of space. The Greek and the Italian Mediterranean or an Egyptian mutawassatiyyah (“mediterraneity”) are just a few of the narratives that want to tell the story of the region, not only through different actors but also with different tempi. Even the EU’s political attempt to offer the figuration of a commonly accepted Mediterranean identity, on the one hand with the assertion to preserve the pluralism of the place-identities, on the other in order to being able to counteract the essential crises (migration, Islamism, economic crises, climate crises), has the tendency to strengthen the past to make the future possible (without addressing the future itself). Thinking of modernity is generally determined by the awareness of crises. Linear progressive thinking is based on an antagonism of linear and cyclical time, reflected in the perceived atmospheres of the respective periods: the hectic 1920s, the turbulent 1930s, the frozen 1950s. The temporalities of the Mediterranean narrative differ from the identity narratives of other regions by the detachment from spatial developments and the inseparable connection to dechronologising cultural figures. It is interesting that the social and political phenomena of the Mediterranean region also carry those divergent temporalities in itself: the picture of overcrowded boats in the sea points to a political catastrophe of today, but it can also be aestheticised to the non-contemporary mythical image of the “boat people” and their uncertain journey over the sea.81 In referring to the humanitarian disaster, the narrative would relate to migrants and their fates; in the universalised narrative of fleeing and danger, the picture of the “boat people” concerns “all of us”. “We are all”, is a popular formula of mobilised mourning publics, remembrance or protest (“We are all Hrant Dink”, “We are all Charlie Hebdo” ...). With respect to the Mediterranean narrative, it is precisely the dissolution of linear times that makes it possible to shift the positions of the narrators and to use a “we”, which also causes a change in the narrative itself. Because the “we” is not sitting in the boat, it is not even a spectator at the coast. It is generally affected because the Mediterranean is also “our” history.

3. The Pictures of What Constitutes the Mediterranean The spatial and temporal topology of the Mediterranean space is determined by images of the inside and outside, of ascent and decay and of evolution and crisis, which are all closely related. The symbols characterising the Mediterranean have no specific meaning of their own: they only gain their significance 81 Naor Ben-Yehoyada: Time at sea, Time on land: Temporal horizons of rescue and refuge in the Mediterranean and Europe, in: Migration, temporality, and capitalism: Entangled mobilities across global spaces, edited by Pauline Gardiner Barber and Winnie Lem, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 63-79.

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by confirming the Mediterranean topology (olive trees, red colours...). However, the movement of symbols, their tendency to become both ambivalences and convergences, defines the continuity and coherence of what it means to speak of the Mediterranean. Consequently, the images of the Mediterranean are related to each other, but the overall picture itself is not variable but codified. The question of Mediterranean identity, which is usually understood as both an identity in and of the Mediterranean space, is met by the above-mentioned images, which testify to a unity of plurality but also by images that show tradition and a non-linear development to modernity. Spatial unity and temporal indecision create a tension to which globalisation, economic and refugee crises contribute, but they also provide codes used by political identity offers. Within the discussion about “identity” in the global, postdigital era, there are, of course, different approaches to the relationship between identity and globalisation. Today, when we speak about “identity”, it can be emphasised that we, first of all, consider processes of inclusion and exclusion. Above all, we are talking about the marking of differences, the construction of boundaries. Dominant, however, is the perception that ingroup-outgroup distinctions – as a result of identity processes – may lead to hostility and violence. Indeed, this evolution needs specific conditions, especially political efforts to strengthen a single identity. However, there are hardly any other arguments with comparable popularity. In social anthropology, sociology, or social psychology there has been a long tradition of scientific attention to how boundaries between groups are expressed in social interaction. From a social psychological perspective, one would not be able to stop at asserting that ingroup-outgroup distinctions themselves lead to exclusions, without considering discourses of categorisations, social formations of action and behaviour, or without making a more definite distinction between social identifications and political identity conceptions. The fact that the simple grammar of the ingroup-outgroup boundary can continue to claim popularity particularly in the political discourse lies not only in its explanatory potential; it can also be attributed to a strategic potential. Undoubtedly, the possibility to spatialise the distance in an ingroup-outgroup relationship and to discuss maps of group positioning will have contributed to the strengthened position in present-day diagnoses, in which the consideration of “regions” has indeed gained remarkable importance. It has already become apparent that “identity” is used as a substitute for “political culture”. It has also become clear that the Mediterranean identity design is following the goal of “integrating the different” by emphasising that there is something similar and familiar and that the entity precedes the difference. Mediterranean identities, traditionally narrated as dynamic and vividly changing, politically appear as a single and gestalt-like identity, which carries its differences in itself – as well as its dynamic, or even irrational preferences for social and political actions.

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The well-known patterns of demarcation and integration, which are central to the strategic political notion of Mediterranean identity, do not provide a gap for the identity narratives of communities in the Mediterranean. One reason for this is because they were not created in the places that are determined by boundaries, but in spheres of an “in-between”. The Mediterranean region is not what Europe likes to see at all – a constellation of states along three continents: Africa, Asia and Europe. On the contrary, the Mediterranean also has to be recognised as an area of opposing coasts and as a region with an especially great diversity of non-state groups and communities, of forms of communities and concepts of communities. Narratives of non-national minorities produce distances, but in doing so they do not resolve uncertainty into certainty (that is a significant difference to national narratives). On the contrary, in the making of boundaries, the “in-between” is narrated constantly. A tension remains in place, even when a decision on a particular proportion is made – of onions. At this point, it becomes notably evident why in the European conception of the Mediterranean identity, notions of a political culture on the one hand and a value-based culture on the other hand come to a confrontation. What can be seen is an explicit friction between a conception, in which values are declared as universally applicable, and the groups and communities, which emphasise belonging and experience as essential conditions for identity and regret the absence of recognition in the offer of universal values. The proposal of a “Euro-Mediterranean identity” is hardly compatible with the understanding of identity in groups and communities of the Mediterranean region. National narratives nowadays explain that they harbour populations with multiple pasts, who had brought memories and traditions with them, which remain as regional or traditional habits in a generally shared identity. Mediterranean perspectives interfere with this explication. They are struggling to show that their identifications are not habits, based on traditional food or clothing, but a historical and social knowledge, generated by an independent linkage of past and present. The national narrative presumes a relationship between identity, memory and heritage. The diasporic Mediterranean narrative regards itself as a re-construction of threatened belongings, a fragmented memory and a loss of heritage – far more important: the knowledge that identity, memory and heritage still have a history of their own, is crucial for identification processes in Mediterranean diaspora communities. Sure, the proposal of the political figure, concentrated in the EMP conception of “Mediterranean identity”, follows an emphatically shaped aim: to understand the differences between human beings, who come from different cultural backgrounds, and to understand the similarities between all human beings. Thus, a normative scheme is constituted, which is legitimised by political values – whereas what is politically discussed as a value refers to building components of identity narratives in the Mediterranean region itself, which are

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neither normative nor value-based, and which are therefore not an “identity” on their own, but can at most be reconstructed by an identity. By the discussions outlined here, the politically functioning conceptions of Mediterranean identity can be subdivided into three figures. These figures will be briefly summarised below: (a) Mediterranean identity as a region with diverging pasts, (b) Mediterranean identity as global identity, (c) Mediterranean identity as a risk-identity.

Mediterranean Identity as a Region with Diverging Pasts The current rethinking of the Mediterranean has been encouraged by the fact that the present area is a complex space in the making of culture, and involves overlapping and intersecting relationships of social and political realisations. The political conception of a Mediterranean identity indeed assumes that the Mediterranean is a complex region with diverging pasts and developments. Moreover, despite the current, frictioning crises (Middle East, Arab Spring, Iraq, Syria...), the tendency is maintained that the Mediterranean region is a geopolitical unit which ties nations with common concerns and shared interests together. The adherence to this picture is on the one hand based on the fact that European politics is not interested in the Mediterranean as a region of diverse cultures, but as a region that involves the leading states and leading international organisations in the world. However, on the other hand, it is precisely the crises which legitimise the idea that stability and security in Europe are dependent of stability and security in the Mediterranean region. Today’s migration and refugee movements often take the central Mediterranean route, crossing historical paths that since the 16th century led Europeans to Africa and (by force) Africans to Europe. These paths also influenced the decolonisation era of the 1950s and 1960s but were also the ways of pirates and smugglers. Even historically, migrants from the Global South have taken ways to Europe that crossed the Spanish Canary Islands, the Spanish territories of Ceuta and Melilla, Malta or Lampedusa.82 Remembering the historical routes reinforces the stability of the grammar that is intensively discussed here: The Mediterranean Sea is one of the great centres of human civilization. As a most dynamic place of interaction between different societies, its significant role in shaping world history is unsurpassed. […] The Mediterranean has come to represent a migration frontier, concentrating major economic, political and demographic differences. It is now a geopolitical and cultural space that separates the European states from the rest of the Mediterranean countries, an ocean 82 Ifeoluwa Koladep: Swimming against the tide: Examining the EU response to irregular migration through the Mediterranean Sea, Geneva: Geneva International Centre for Justice, 2015, p. 4.

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boundary between different religions and systems of government. […] The Mediterranean is now considered the world’s most hazardous sea route in use by migrants and refugees.83

Both the current refugee and migration “crisis” and the Syrian war, the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, the problematic transformations of Libya and the civil war in Yemen, are related to Mediterranean issues that are on the one hand displaying recent political challenges, but are on the other hand close to historically consolidated schemes of action: defining boundaries, taming ethnic fragmentation, mitigating the dynamics of decay and reconstruction, and mediating the convergence of different religions and political forces. Since 2011 the European institutions (particularly visible in documents of the European Union External Action Service) have repeatedly justified the fundamental support of the democratic change in the Arabic world. This was mainly based on the „M-offers“: „Money, Market and Mobility“, which means higher financial contributions, improved access to the European markets, and easier mobility for the citizens of the transition states in order to move freely in Europe.84 The fact that these areas are in the foreground, i.e. economic collaboration, development policy and external trade policy and, as a third area, visa, migration and asylum policy, is hardly surprising. All three areas concern the orders of politics and market situations and show Europe as a fundamental agent of order. Indeed, the European institutions do not overlook the fact that in the Mediterranean regions one is also dealing with possible economic competitors or in any case with actors striving for power – above all Turkey and the Gulf States. The war in Syria also firmly established the proxy war in the Mediterranean, accompanied by catastrophic clashes in Yemen and Libya. A further problem continues to be challenging to handle for Europe: With the socalled “Arab Spring”, voices which are marked by a robust Eurocritical stance have been institutionalised. The strategies developed by the EU declare their validity by being faced with the problem of having to formulate a promise of participation, allowing the strengthening of security in the Mediterranean region itself to secure economic growth, to reduce poverty, social inequality and the consequences of flight and migration, and to mitigate ecological risks. With this assumption, two goals come together in the conception of a “Mediterranean identity”: First, the idea that European Mediterranean policy must not leave something open that has not yet been solved for Europe itself – the question of a shared culture. Second, the assumption that participation 83 Tim Stokholm: The Mediterranean migrant crisis: A critical challenge to global nation‐states, London: University of East London, Centre for Social Justice and Change, 2016, p. 5. 84 Cf. Andreu Bassols: Europa und die arabischen (R)evolutionen, in: An der Zeitenwende – Europa, das Mittelmeer und die arabische Welt, edited by Bernd Thum, Stuttgart; Berlin: Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, 2012, pp. 12-19.

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must be something that alleviates identity-related conflicts and partitions (without actually sharing the market). To summarise this first descriptive approach: The idea of a Mediterranean identity in European politics can be combined with four perspectives – matters of foreign policy; the idea that stability and security in the Mediterranean is equated with security and stability in Europe; identity as a making and retaining of boundaries; the idea that a shared historical relationship and cultural belonging can create solidarity. Given these aspects, it is noticeable that the political identity strategy, which is part of a formative spatial policy, is based on awarding a gift: the strengthening of the narrative of Mediterranean peculiarity and singularity. However, with the current discussion about the necessary stabilisation of the European border area, the offer seems to be on the way of being withdrawn. In any case, the rift between North and South is more recognisable, and the story of having shown that a common nature can be developed despite diverging pasts seems to be increasingly called into question, even by the Mediterranean peoples. Today we can see the Mediterranean region as a space, whose borders are deconstructed and reorganised, whose national sovereignties are called into question, whose position in the global market is weakened. The symbolic images of the Mediterranean are still remembered, but they are also proved to be a political discourse, perhaps even a “containing discourse, designed to cover up and hide both the postcolonial symbolic archive and the material reasons for the migration.”85 The function of the Mediterranean discourse is to equalise the differences and fault lines – not only in the present but also for the remembered past, because the normative political picture of the Mediterranean has always been accompanied by a cultural narrative that we customarily envision as a shared memory.

Mediterranean Identity as a Global Identity Globalisation can be understood as multi-level processes that are characterised by transnational flows of trade, money, information and culture, as well as by an increased concentration on the economy, by population growth, and a progressively worldwide vulnerability to crisis. The shifts in global politics can also be displayed concerning the thinking of space, in which global economic and financial networks became factors that relativised spatial boundaries: multinational companies have started to compete against states. For today’s politics, making global political realities does not only mean to act on the challenges 85 Gaia Giuliani: Afterword. The Mediterranean as a stage: Borders, memories, bodies, in: Decolonising the Mediterranean: European colonial heritages in North Africa and the Middle East, edited by Gabriele Proglio, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, pp. 91-103, here pp. 93 et seqq.

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posed by “risky” actors but also to build barriers as embankments against new dangers, which approach in the form of streams: refugees, floods, bacteria. The global world order is shaped and secured in the discourses of international politics primarily by pushing forward the notion of a “common identity” of the members as well as agreements on security and order issues. De-nationalization, secularisation and a common interest-building of the members are discussed as preconditions. At first, however, the thinking of globalisation does not envisage the strengthening of “identity”, but the development of new dynamics, also in relation to the figures of “self” and “other”. Globalisation could mean a shift from local or transnational identification processes to transnational units of identification, perhaps even to a new “cosmopolitanism”.86 However, this has not resulted in thinking of political identity as “de-territorialised” or in preparing a decrease in geographical boundedness. Although diversity was still discussed as a structural element of globalisation in the late 1990s, the digitisation of global cultures has not led to a multiplication of identity offers. In the face of recent developments, pushed forward by populist movements in Europe, the idea of Mediterranean identity has even been downgraded from trying to stabilise it as an agenda to a risk scenario framed by red warning lights.

Mediterranean Identity as a Risk-identity In the light of the refugee crisis, will the character of the Mediterranean region as a risky region become increasingly intensified and will it increase without a political alternative? This question possibly would not be decided by the political agendas, in which the role of the Mediterranean is negotiated or in which Mediterranean actors themselves play a role, but rather by the future of Mediterranean values. Sociologists and social psychologists have shown that there are surprisingly few values in numbers. Concepts such as honesty and courage, peace and wisdom, are recognised in all human cultures. In addition, in the academic literature of the last decades, it is described that values stand shoulder to shoulder with attitudes and behaviour. This means that values must not be seen merely as institutionalised forms of social communication. Clyde Kluckhohn, who is a somewhat unjustly forgotten sociologist and cultural anthropologist, argued in his seminal essay “Values and value-orientations in the theory of action” (1951) that values are part of the “symbolic social systems”. As such, values can be “understood” rather than “explained”.87 Values can be related to the 86 Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart: Cosmopolitan communications: Cultural diversity in a globalized world, Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 87 Similar to Parsons, Kluckhohn understands culture as a system that is defined by symbols and shows an inner connection as well as a tendency to preserve itself.

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satisfaction of personal needs, but they are also a critical link between the individual and society, insofar as they provide orientation for action and behaviour. Kluckhohn analysed values as a symbolic system with an essential role in ensuring the cohesion of a society.88 Within the discussion of possible modes, means and objectives of social action, and by connecting the observation that values consolidate the individual’s impression that his own cultural belief and practices are normal and natural, and those of others are strange or even inferior or abnormal, Kluckhorn develops his definition of values as: A conception, explicit or implicit, distinctive of an individual or characteristic of a group, of the desirable which influences the selection from available modes, means and ends of action.89

“Identity” is enforced where values and norms are negotiated with the “desired”. To explain this connection, Kluckhorn introduced the concept of “preferences”. However, these preferences always have a history: they are anything but bound to a current situation, because there are not just the individual needs that unfold in them. Preferences are shaped by the knowledge that applies in a particular society or group. Kluckhohn’s theoretical approach reveals that values are mutable and yet persisting. Value implies a code or a standard which has some persistence through time, or, more broadly put, which organizes a system of action. Value, conveniently and in accordance with received usage, places things, acts, ways of behaving, goals of action on the approval-disapproval continuum.90

Values are solutions; they are accepted as a solution when they are associated with “the desirable”. It is not the single value-based solution itself that can be differentiated, but the preferences according to which it is selected. Besides, Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils have worked with Kluckhohn’s propositions and noted: A given value-orientation […] may be interpreted as imposing a preference or giving a primacy to one alternative or the other in a particular type of situation.91

It is remarkable that the Euro-Mediterranean identity design is based on the assertion that the Mediterranean region is connected through values that are shared by the European world itself and are essentially of universal meaning.

88 Clyde Kluckhohn: Values and value-orientations in the theory of action: An exploration in definition and classification, in: Toward a General Theory of Action, edited by Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1951, pp. 388-433. 89 Ibid., p. 395. 90 Ibid., p. 395. 91 Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils, with the assistance of James Olds: Values, motives, and systems of action, in: Toward a General Theory of Action, edited by Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1962, pp. 45-275, here pp. 78f. (accentuation by the authors).

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The argumentative structure, with which the political identity design was enforced, emerges with an interesting combination of attribution, politicisation and historicisation of the Mediterranean images (as mentioned above). It promotes a strong value-based approach – by rejecting the stories of identity, narrated in the regions itself. Interestingly enough, the attributes themselves are no longer valid as typically Mediterranean. They indeed become universal properties of the civilised modernity (this is the second level of cultural objects becoming souvenirs). Universalisation is achieved by equating the framing narrative of the EMP (the diversity of the Mediterranean world) with the overall defining characteristics of modern societies. The shift of significances is achieved by declaring diversity both as cultural property and political reality. Thus, a notably effective identity marketing can be seen in the choice of historical images, or, more precisely, images of civilisation and spatial evolution; even the strategy of historicisation, that is pursued with the design of the Mediterranean identity, is not built on commonly shared battles, but on valuebased civilisational developments. The Euro-Mediterranean identity is a political design, in which unity is emphasised by the fact that historically there is a unit. This historical unit is emphasised by the illustration that there are common values. And the resemblance of values is explained by referring to the same geo-political region that was historically shared. The mutual regional origin is important because of the common culture – while the common culture resulted from a shared value system. This argument can be repeated and sharpened: The Euro-Mediterranean identity proposal is not only a closed, hermetically sealed design, which explains its characteristics by the quality of its characteristics. It is uniform and consistent in itself because diversity is common to all people as a universal global good. Moreover, the proposal is an ahistorical one, which allows no room for opposing experiences and stories. Earlier ideas of the Mediterranean were informed by realities of trade, conquest, and migration, i.e. movements and relationships. Today’s conception of a Mediterranean identity consists of ethnic, religious, cultural and economic characteristics which, when placed with each other, open up the possibility to be recognised as the hallmark of a region. In this respect, olive oil and individual states would co-exist next to each other without any problems. Recognising the characteristics as shared hallmarks of a region means explaining that lifestyles and political organisations follow similar mechanisms and structures: the literature has similar themes, and the landscape has similar challenges. The idea is that this similarity would allow us to speak of sharing cultural characteristics.

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Therefore, if one assumes that the Mediterranean identity proposal has one central facet – creating a new agenda that will confront the currently most critical dangers by revealing the common heritage of the peoples in the region –,92 then at first glance, this modular offer of identity does indeed carry an opportunity for dialogue. The offer appears especially attractive by considering the fact that not only an integration into histories is provided. “Mediterranean identity” also attracts with the promise to accept the others’ ability to create history themselves. How is this achieved?

4. Summary and Outlook: Three Movements of European Mediterranean Identity The political European conception of Mediterranean identity is built on three main movements: first, it functions through a historialisation (the attribution of a historical character) – but without the possibility to narrate historical experiences in a temporal order (this would be a historicisation). The movement of historialisation creates a historical quality – without the histories having to be told; without aspects such as origins, developments or causes. It is not about finding the historical place of individuals, groups or communities, of religions or cultures within a general historical context; it is rather about the elaboration of particular acquisitions of a civilisation, in which all have a share – food, drink, catching fish, trade, dealing with money, making music. Or, by referring to some models from David Abulafia’s Mediterranean biography, it is about copper and bronze, about faith, about lighthouses. The history of the Mediterranean is told by using these pictures; and, in this way, it is typological and also topological. The second noticeable movement is that of attributing emotions. The Mediterranean identity is a “lovingly” designed identity. Olive trees are as important as sun and sea, creativity and joie de vivre. People like to identify a special symbiosis between man and nature within the history of the Mediterranean, moreover a particular manifestation of man and emotion. It is not only the political actions of people which shape this region, but also “access to friendly ports”, as David Abulafia notes. He concludes that science “involves the study of the irrational as well as the rational”.93 Withal, it must not be forgotten that everything that can be used as a postcard or a souvenir does not speak about traditions that have arisen from the cultural habits of homogeneous entities in evolved places. “Culture” in the Mediterranean region can only be understood by considering it in the context of the living conditions of the social and political entities that have determined the Mediterranean region. For 92 As it is stressed in Alexandra Nocke’s study: The Place of the Mediterranean in modern Israeli identity, Leiden: Brill; 2009, cf. the foreword by David Ohana, pp. xiii-xviii. 93 Abulafia: The Great Sea (note 2), Introduction p. xxxi.

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the religious and cultural communities, “culture” was never a shared pool of defined resources. Mediterranean “culture” as the other culture is above all the remembrance of experiences as “history”, constantly new to establish. This history is not bound to an identity narrative, but to the commitment to preservation, not to the knowledge of the own culture, but to the knowledge of the imperilment of cultural objects, narratives and meanings. Thus, the food of the Mediterranean region responds to religious traditions and laws: symbolising a history, reminding of religious experiences, fulfilling a religious law.94 The dynamic space which they primarily represent is not the connectivity of a dense communicative and equalising network in the region (clearly not an “ethnoscape”), but rather a network of relationships that connects with different times and spaces and that arises because “culture” must always be reconstructed anew. Besides, the reconstruction of a spatial Mediterranean identity is not closed with respect to a distinct past but is open towards the goal of creating a cultural narrative in the respective present. A third movement is, as mentioned above, the tendency for politicisation. The Mediterranean region is seen as a decision-making arena for matters of security and stability, although it is also discussed as a decision-making arena for civilisational fates. Against this background, a politicisation of cultural beliefs and practices is apparent: Culture becomes political culture. This phenomenon affects the areas of religion, language or trade,95 which always represent the history, but also the risks of the region. The metageographic question therefore not only asks for the purpose of the “Mediterranean identity” agenda but also how it is argued – and why it makes thinking of “other” Mediterranean identities impossible, based on the grammar of its arguments. The answer lies in the structure of the mobilé, in which the “other” is thought of as inherent and the entire figure results from the fact that the individual coloured glass plates are only seemingly swinging freely: in fact, they are balanced, their rhythms calculated, and their dynamics bound. The “other” has a counterpart in the mobilé, but no single representation. It manifests itself in the overall body of the figure. Perhaps the drawing of boundaries is actually a fundamental structure for the analysis of identity formations of traditional communities in the Mediterranean. But, if one wishes to interpret the drawing of boundaries as identity processes, does it not take place in a much more multi-faceted manner? Or 94 Cf. Laurent-Sébastien Fournier and Karine Michel: Mediterranean food as cultural property?: Towards an anthropology of geographical indications, in: Taste, power, tradition: Geographical indications as cultural property, edited by Sarah May, Katia Laura Sidali, Achim Spiller and Bernhard Tschofen, Göttingen: Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2017, pp. 77-86, here p. 79f. 95 Cf. Bernard Spolsky: The Mediterranean as sociolinguistic ecosystem, in: Language policy and planning in the Mediterranean world, edited by Marilena Karyolemou and Pavlos Pavlou, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, pp. 12-22.

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remains what, in the words of Mihran Dabag, is called “occidentally tainted” – olives, tomatoes and mint in the dolma (and definitely the wrong amount of onions)? What in this respect makes the “Mediterranean cookbook” rather attractive for the European book market, but questionable from the perspective of the groups and communities in the region of the Mediterranean itself, is the fact that the amount of onions in the dolma has nothing to do with habits or custom, but rather with tradition, and therefore interpretation. The fact that the different recipes ultimately lead to a similar result should not be misinterpreted as meaning that the paths to this result are the same. In non-state and diasporic groups and communities, the emphasis of a difference does not serve purposes of demarcation; it is instead a part of locating oneself in the area of the “in-between”. To live in a diaspora or a minority situation has always meant reconstructing separation and estrangement with respect to the traditional homeland, the host society – and the meanings of transmitted narratives. James Clifford wrote that diaspora cultures embody a “lived tension […] of separation and entanglement”.96 The relationship between diaspora and heritage will never be one of coextensive harmony – diaspora is always in conflict with what is nowadays called heritage, due to the reconstruction and interpretation that has to be performed by each generation. The Mediterranean Other is not an entity based on another resource but has the potential to reconstruct a differentness. To summarise the main ideas of this discussion: With the three movements or strategies of the Mediterranean identity proposal – the historialisation of value-based characteristics, the attribution of emotions and multi-level politicisation – it should be highlighted that the grammar of the Euro-Mediterranean identity proposal does not exclude or separate itself from the “other”, but integrates (and thus tames) the difference. In the view of groups and communities, who did not carry national identifications, but are dependent on a dialogic practice to re-construct “identity” by re-constructing tradition, cultural values can hardly be of universal significance. It can be said that the non-state communities and diasporas are sensitive to the Euro-Mediterranean proposal because they feel a different materiality: the image of the olive tree stands against the materialised olive tree of global politics, which has classified its varieties, is regulating the seed, and can create symbols (and not least a logo) out of the signs and metaphors of the traditional socio-spatial narratives. This even reflects the temptation of the Mediterranean identity proposal: The seductive capability of the political idea of identity clearly lies in the assertion of a shared history that promises integration; whereas in non-state or diasporic groups values are negotiated in concrete social relationships. The values of the others are considered to be fragile and to be at risk of being for96 James Clifford: Diasporas, in: Cultural Anthropology 9, 3, 1994, pp. 302-338, here p. 307.

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gotten. They are not recognised as strong preferences, which help to establish valid and socially accepted solutions for social situations. By contrast, the preferences must be found and re-constructed within traditional narratives, within stories about the past, by looking back to past experiences. The uncertainty regarding the meaning of a single value is a key aspect in understanding the multiplicity of plotlines for identity in non-state or diaspora groups. This clearly shows that not least the idea of “Mediterranean identity” provides a prescriptive approach to the current discourses on heritage. There is an unambiguous identification of what is included: Food and plants, some animals, skills in shipbuilding or knowledge of map-reading. Especially because the proposal explains that it is about values – when in reality it comes down to characteristics –, its “integration offensive” begins with a definition of identity as political culture, based on universal categories, but on an essential geographical, geomorphological and geobotanical ground. Under the objective of promoting a dialogue, the preferences that strengthen these values and protect them against alternatives in situations of social and political action, are primarily political ones. At this point it becomes evident that the proposal of Euro-Mediterranean identity is not a proposal of international order; it is neither limited to an order of political or financial power nor to the task of designing a premise of societal integration. The proposal of EuroMediterranean identity decidedly aims to redefine the pasts. The question of what is specific about the Mediterranean is always accompanied by the reflection of what is common about the Mediterranean. But where “identity” is an invitation to talk about characteristics, “identity” refers not only to a memory of the region’s history but further to a political-strategic concept that responds to the risks anticipated for a region. Thus, the olive tree and the painted fictile bowls are symbols of a scientific and political thinking in the Mediterranean, which from the Western point of view is focused on the claim of unity – to exclude a space for geography, the people and the culture of the “other”. Where does the strategy of Euro-Mediterranean politics continue the image developed in Mediterranean research at the beginning of the 20th century, when political unity was derived from natural geography? In fact, global policies have a strange closeness to the patterns outlined in the political literature on the Mediterranean at the beginning of the 20th century: a unity, derived from “geographical components” (“geographischen Komponenten”), from rain and temperature, from vegetation and wildlife, in which the geographical region in its entirety gives the political concept of the Mediterranean a firm, indestructible grounding.97 The emphasis on an “independent 97 Hummel: Das Mittelmeer (note 71), p. 9: “Aus allen geographischen Komponenten gemeinsam, aus den Kennzeichen von Morphologie und Geologie, von Regen und Temperatur, von Vegetation und Tierwelt, […] schält sich der geographische Begriff des Mittelmeerraumes ab, der – wie selten ein geographischer Raum der Erde – mit seiner Geschlossenheit dem politischen Begriff des Mittelmeerraumes eine festgefügte, nie endgültig zu zerreißende natürliche Untermauerung gibt.”

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imprint” (“eigenständigen Gespräges”) and a “homogeneous living environment” (“einheitlichen Lebensraums”)98 has always had the political task of transforming interests into a strategic narrative. It seems that the political discussion resulted in a picture of the Mediterranean, which by virtue of its structure (not particularly a spatio-temporal unity, but a spatial convergence with temporal divergences) has a stable autonomy as well as an equally scientific and political impact. Therefore, contemporary normative agendas to strengthen a Mediterranean identity do not have their foundations in geography, religions, and cultures of the region, but in 19th century European bookshelves, in which the knowledge evolved that a nation must be founded on the fundament of space.

98 Ibid., p. 10f.

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Routes, Migrations, Stories. Counter-Cultural Discourses from Multicultural Theatre in Italy New relationships, not new aesthetics or contents, invade the habitat identified with the theatre, occupying the suburbs and go to previously unthinkable places and goals. It is not another ‘theatre’ that was born. Other situations begin to be called ‘theatre’. […] The personal need becomes action, crosses boundaries and goes into history.1

Imagination as a Battlefield Complex modern societies have become typical of social organisation in the 20th century where the cultural flow – passing through different contexts and subjects – reaches collectivities and individuals shaping global cultural landscapes, specific cultures, and, finally, personal cultural identities. For this reason Ulf Hannerz speaks of these in terms of “perspectives”, and about the ensemble of such a large number of perspectives – i.e. the culture – as a “network of perspectives”.2 Arjun Appadurai points out that, among the different panoramas of contemporaneity, today’s cultural scene seems to be mainly characterised by the encounter of two imaginaries: that of people in movement and that of representations generated by images and mass-media information dissemination in the world. The two dimensions are closely related, affect each other and together converge in the work of imagination:3 it is because of this work of imagination that migrants move to the Northern countries of the world in search of different life opportunities, but their presence and its media representation also shape the imaginary of the local inhabitants in the countries they reach. In such a situation, the colonisation of imagination – already planned and achieved by specific powers and interest groups in order to construct “imag-

1 2 3

Eugenio Barba: Teatro. Solitudine, Mestiere, Rivolta, Roma: Ubulibri, 1996, p. 43. Ulf Hannerz: Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Arjun Appadurai: Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

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ined communities”4 within specific borders – is still an ongoing project for those in power nowadays. In fact, by imposing their perspective on a population and a territory in accordance with the strategy of promoting recurring distinctions – ‘us’ as rational, right, modern, good, true and ‘the others’ as irrational, wrong, traditional, bad, fake etc. – they seek to reinforce representations of and identifications with previous historical processes in order to control potential lines of flight which harbour the risk of a reinterpretation of the past, and could lead to those clearly defined communities, of which they are adamant, opening up to a different future. If this is something that is happening all over the world then the discourses about European identity and Italian identity are excellent case-studies. With this general frame in mind, I consider the Italian situation over the last 30 years – a country which is increasingly becoming a multi- and intercultural society, but is doing so by experimenting while at the same time being caught up in a battle for collective imagination fought by a host protagonists, each of whom represent different perspectives with different goals.

Media and Political Discourse on Multi- and Intercultural Society in Italy As Arjun Appadurai remarked, nowadays the individual acquires knowledge from media communication.5 Therefore it is no longer connected to the direct experience of face-to-face interactions. However, media representation selects and elaborates portions of the reality and builds its own narrative in order to promote a specific vision and interpretation of a phenomenon. The media in Italy are beginning to cover the discourses about multi- and interculturalism in conjunction with the first meaningful waves of immigration into the country – a fact that has led the citizens to demand more information and that is accompanied by reflection on future Italian multi- and intercultural society.6 However, what we are witnessing is, in general, a cacophony generated by two contrasting perspectives. The first perspective is that of a stereotypical representation that insists on the promotion of alarmism about the number of immigrants, about their illegal entry, and about the links between immigrants and crime. The second perspective presents the deepening of problems such as 4 5 6

Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983. Appadurai: Modernity at Large (note 3). See Cristina Balma Tivola: Colori della realtà. Immagini dell’immigrazione nei ‘programmi di servizio’ RAI. Il Nuovo Spettatore 5, Torino: Lindau, 2001; Vittorio Cotesta: Mass media, conflitti etnici e immigrazione, in: Studi emigrazione 36, 135, 1999, pp. 443-470; Mass media e società multietnica, edited by Marinella Belluati, Giorgio Grossi and Eleonora Viglongo, Milano: Anabasi, 1995; Carlo Marletti: Extracomunitari. Dall’immaginario collettivo al vissuto quotidiano del razzismo, Roma: Rai-Nuova Eri, 1991.

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ethnic conflicts, the debts of southern hemisphere countries, the global economy, the interconnect world media, the condition of refugees, etc. – developed in television programmes such as documentaries, news reports, and talk shows. However, here the representation is often that of bleeding hearted activists, and is mostly based on the rhetoric of the ‘exotic travel in our own towns’, the reference to ‘colours’, the idea of the ‘excellent stories’. This inability to develop an articulated and coherent overview reflects the attitude of the political and state institutions – over the last 30 years – which have continued to look at the situation in a way dictated by the (actual or alleged) dimension of the ‘emergency’, so that the entire history of both discourses – that of the media and that of the socio-political activity – can be interpreted as a sequence of collective alarm, exceptional operations and long oblivions.7 Moreover, as the ERICArts report 2013 highlighted, those who should be in charge of the matter – at the Ministry for Cultural Heritage, Cultural Activities and Tourism – do not offer cultural policies aimed at cultural integration of new immigrant minorities, and immigrants continue to be perceived as a social problem.8 If this is the general situation at the national level, the management of the matter at the level of community relationships and face-to-face interaction is quite different. Here, in fact, although implemented with very little resources and passed off as social or interdisciplinary activities, there have been several significant initiatives and experiments which have resulted in, for example, the creation of intercultural centres to foster dialogue and mutual understanding between the cultures. Staging plays in which roles are also played by migrants belongs to this type of action and support in Italy. Such theatre has emerged at the very same time as migrants are becoming increasingly visible within the national borders, and is clearly a reply to the lack of information on (or to the misrepresentation of) the phenomenon and its consequences for Italian society. Moreover, it speaks from the point of view of those who otherwise would be condemned to subalternity and silence. They can present on stage and make fully visible other narratives and also promote discussion on the narratives fostered by the media and politicians.

Multi- and Intercultural Theatre in Italy Recent reflections on the relationship between theatre activities and multi- and intercultural contemporary societies have recognised the emergence on stage of realities and experiences formed by individuals of different cultural or na7 8

See Roberta Altin: L’identità mediata. Etnografia delle comunicazioni di diaspora, Udine: Forum, 2004. ERICArts: Cultural Politics in Europe: Italy, Council of Europe, 2013, [accessed April 24, 2015].

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tional origins.9 Labelling such works ‘multi/inter-cultural theatre’, is ambiguous and misleading if it is meant to signify a genre: in fact, depending on the context it could refer to the different backgrounds of actors, directors, playwrights, audience; to differences in performing traditions in human cultures, methods and production processes, in themes and contents developed in the shows; to reports and interventions in relation to national culture in which the activity takes place, etc. Nevertheless it is possible to identify at least two features. The first is the presence, in all these practices, of the encounter and of negotiation between different cultural sensitivities over time – e.g. when a pre-existing dramaturgy (which could be a classic) is reworked to fit the needs of these – or in space – when different formal elements or contents are gathered from different cultures. The negotiation then reveals the second occurrence: the fact that the encounter and the discussion of forms and meanings are located specifically in a particular time and in a particular historical, political, and social context – so that they always maintain a strong relationship with the territory in which they take place, and are contextual to the specific multiculturalism in which they were born and from which they developed. Here I speak of multi- and intercultural theatre in Italy as that theatre of which performers are of different cultural origins, so that its composition is multicultural, and which presents works – deriving from this cultural diversity – on multicultural and intercultural issues. Under this definition we can gather many realities born and/or developed in Italy in recent decades. To recall a few, we have companies (such as Teatro delle Albe, Koron Tlé, Cooperativa Teatro Laboratorio, Teatro di Nascosto, AlmaTeatro etc.), projects (I Porti del Mediterraneo, Proskenion, Rom Stalker, Teatro Clandestino etc.), and various and innumerable experiences of social and community theatre.

9

See Helen Gilbert: Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-cultural Transactions in Australasia, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007; idem: Sightlines: Race, Gender, and Nation in Contemporary Australian Theatre, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998; idem: Post Colonial Drama, London: Routledge, 1996; The Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre, edited by Martin Banham, Errol Hill and George Woodyard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; Jude Bloomfield: Crossing the Rainbow. National Differences and International Convergences in Multicultural Performing Arts in Europe, Brussels: IETM, 2003; Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo: Toward a Topography of CrossCultural Theatre Praxis, in: The Drama Review 46, 3, 2002, pp.31-53; eadem: Perfoming Hybridity in Post-Colonial Monodrama, in: Journal of Commonwealth Literature 31, 1, 1997, pp.5-19; The Intercultural Performance Reader, edited by Patrice Pavis, London, Routledge, 1996; Rustom Bharucha: Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture, London: Routledge, 1993; Interculturalism and Performance: Writings from PAJ, edited by Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta, New York: PAJ Publications, 1991.

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Subaltern Characters in AlmaTeatro Plays AlmaTeatro, the case-study I specifically analysed, was born in the fall of 1993 as an expressive laboratory for migrant and Italian women –not all of whom were theatre professionals – at the Alma Mater Intercultural Centre of Women in Turin. It still exists 20 years on – as one of the most enduring realities of multi- and intercultural theatre in Italy. Led by two Italian directors, the group originally counted 18 actresses (from 12 different countries: Chile, Colombia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, the Philippines, Italy, Morocco, Nigeria, Peru, Russia, Somalia and Zaire). However, with the exception of the two directors – who have always been present throughout the life of the company – the composition has varied considerably over the years: at the beginning of my fieldwork (1997) there were 11 (representing 8 countries: Argentina, Colombia, Italy, Kenya, Morocco, Montenegro, Peru and Somalia), at time of concluding my PhD (2004) there were seven (from Brazil, Colombia, Italy, Montenegro, Nigeria, Peru and Somalia), and finally, at the moment of writing this paper, there were seven (but from Brazil, Colombia, Italy, Montenegro, Peru and Somalia). Some features have remained constant throughout: the dramaturgy is always original and characterised by heterogeneous materials that draw from the real lives and memories of the actresses, as well as from content proposals of their interest; the verbal dimension of each play, that acknowledges the use of Italian as well as foreign actresses languages, is not the most important form of communication, but is accompanied by gestures, music, songs, scenic space, costumes; there is always a relation of continuity (in space, in time, or metaphorically) between the body of the performer and the body of the character. Among the various performances, Righibé (1994), Storie sommerse (1998), Scarti (2004) and more recently Il sogno del baccalà (2013) partially place characters and discourses in relation to the Mediterranean area, although this is not always said openly. However, when it is, the fact that it is unique in terms of identities, routes, travel encounters and mergings is made explicit, as well as the fact that it is frequently the point of intersection between different trajectories that cross it in order to go somewhere else. The first play, Righibé (1994), is about migrations from the southern to the northern countries of the world. The play is entirely built from the individual biographies of the actresses, which become interchangeable, as the discourse is choral: the main issue, in fact, is a discussion of the various reasons why people migrate – not always related to needing work – and to dismantle stereotypes by which locals perceive migrants. Besides this, another clear message of the play is that to change and to adapt to the new situation is the only way to survive in another world. This imperative is well-known by the main character – that of a woman who escaped from her country in war and is now working in an Italian family who have made no effort to memorise her name, Righibé, and have given her an

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Italian name, Anna, thus imposing on her a change of identity. She is portrayed by an Italo-Ethiopian actress who shares with the character the national origin, probably part of the somatic characteristics, but not the life story: “Righibé is a woman I had written an article about: she had come to Italy to work as a maid at a family, who decided to even change her name and call her Anna because Righibé was likely to be too difficult for them to memorise.”10 A further scene refers specifically to the Mediterranean sea: here another African female character – positioned above the actresses and wearing a huge white and golden dress covering the pedestal on which she stands – embodies a blurred figure between a goddess, a shaman, and the mother-hearth, and gives a solemn speech to another woman (whom she refers to as a daughter) who is going to cross the sea and emigrate. In Storie sommerse (1998) the reference to the Mediterranean area is not only explicit, but is inscribed into a clear intention to rewrite the history of mankind in a way we now refer as a post-colonial perspective. The play draws on previous research into migrations and hybridisation in different parts of the world and at different times in the history of mankind since 1492 – the date of the discovery of the Americas as well as of the edict expelling Muslims and Jews from Spain – with a special attention to the history of women. Here again we have narrations of migrations from Africa to Italy: in particular, an immigrant actress tells her own story, common to many girls who leave Africa to come to Europe. She has a goal in mind, has already developed strategies to implement it and has the determination needed to reach it: she wants to establish herself as an actress and a singer, and become rich and famous. However, she will soon notice that her resources are not inexhaustible. However the last female figure on stage in the performance is the most interesting one for us – as she is the “woman with many names” (from the dramaturgy of Storie Sommerse). Played by a native actress, Esther (this is her original name) a Jewish woman flees from a burning Granada, and in a kaleidoscope of loneliness and movement, becomes Zeida, then Luna, Maria, Menica, Aquilina, inventing a different ‘herself’ everywhere she goes: “I celebrate the Purím Festival and the fast of Yom Kippur and Christmas and the Ramadan” (from the dramaturgy of Storie Sommerse). Without absolute certainties and with the memory of her many identities, she runs from one end of the Mediterranean to the other realising that purity is not the condition for one’s identity and existence, and that she has become “nomad inside her head”, able to find her land everywhere. The main themes of Scarti (2004) are the criticism of consumption and the rejection of the other (the migrant, the different, the insane that the First World has produced). The disparities of the global village are found in the recurrence, in the southern countries of the world, of slums on the edges of major cities – Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Manila, New Delhi – populated by millions 10 Interview with actress M.A.V., 1999.

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of people who survive on the waste from other’s consumption. In the performance, we meet three women living in a slum: the first one is Sirma, who refers to postcards showing the sea, lost shoes, fruit-peels as signs of the passage, dreams, actions of migrants. It tells how migrants in the Mediterranean area are coming to Europe from Eastern Europe, the Far East and North Africa in small old ships, and that they represent a “dangerous cargo” (from the dramaturgy of Scarti). If they reach their destination, they will start wandering from city to city, but – if it goes wrong – the cargo will sink, and this means that we must “prepare the black bags” (from the dramaturgy of Scarti), in reference to the fact that the Mediterranean sea has become a cemetery for thousands of people, a truth continuously hidden by the media but which cannot be ignored when the numbers are so huge. Another subaltern figure is that of the “trash queen” (from the dramaturgy of Scarti) Gemma, who describes what brought her to the slum: having had to work double shifts to avoid losing job at a factory she was plagued by constant headaches, various illnesses and hallucinations which eventually led to her dismissal. Finally, we meet a third subaltern character, an African woman who was previously married to an Italian and taught by her mother-in-law to be a good Italian wife. The first imperative was to buy things and keep them in order, but, despite her commitment, she was constantly denigrated by her husband’s acquaintances. Here eliminating the superfluous (husband included) becomes the only way to remain faithful to her memory and to herself, and, ultimately, for her to survive.

Cultural Identity, Collective Memory, and the Other All those who participate in AlmaTeatro activities emphasise the fact that cultural pluralism experienced by the company makes it a practical example of intercultural practice, a micro-community in which the issues of cultural identity and diversity are not only theoretical problems to be addressed in relation to the objectives of the theatrical work, but also important and actual variables that affect real life – both in relation to the theatrical process, and as a relatively autonomous and self-organized group.11 Cultural diversity is a factor that enters the process as the content of workshops aimed at developing the performance. At first – the birth of the laboratory and the first performances of AlmaTeatro – one can speak of cultural diversity as a centripetal force according to which the participants talk and listen to each other. Then the focus moves smoothly from the comparison of these personal tales to a more theoretical level. Finally, over time, behaviours, attitudes, 11 See Pilar Yenque and Rosanna Rabezzana: AlmaTeatro, in: L’impresa di essere donna. Origini di storie: l’esperienza del Centro Alma Mater di Torino, edited by Claudia Piccardo, unpubl. manuscript, Bologna: COSPE, 1998.

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values, ideas, motivations, objectives of participation, needs, priorities and desires tend to lead more and more frequently to conflicts. Mediating in all this is demanding and tiring, but imperative, and to accomplish this one must be both flexible and resistant, and not frightened by contrasts and disputes: “Learn to stay together” becomes the imperative for using the space and time of the work productively.12 While working on and among cultural diversities, the first issue developed by the company was that of a re-discussion of the notion of cultural identity, now treated in terms opposed to those fostered by media and political discourse. In the case of AlmaTeatro, cultural identity can be identified only in contrast to something different, changes in time and space, and is hybrid and porous. First of all it is constructed in relation to cultural otherness – as it is discovered/built in relation to someone other-than-me – and this awareness emerges by direct experience for the protagonists of AlmaTeatro who, in their everyday life in- and outside the theatrical situation verify similarities and differences with people they come in contact with. Secondly, cultural identity is marked by the continuous change in human subjects during their lives – change due to the infinite number of choices that are continuously made by them in the course of their existence: in this way, the individual variation is a variation of the broader system (culture, society) in which the identity of the individual is located. If individual and put into effect as a result of the choices of the individual in the course of his existence, it is therefore also hybrid – because of the synthesis of selected cultural elements adopted by individuals from other cultures they come into contact with. For all these reasons, then, its boundaries are not clear and stable, but permeable – in a continuous process of exchange and negotiation so that “everyone is the result of a mixture, even those that believe they have well-defined borders. We are everything and the opposite of everything” (from the dramaturgy of Storie Sommerse). Therefore, the idea of pureness tied to cultural identity is dismantled by showing that creolisation already occurred a long time ago, through the nomadic movement of human beings on the planet: what is remarked here is that migrations do not only follow the formation of modern states, but are features of the history of mankind. This leads to the interpretation of collective memories as partial inventions based on the “rhetoric of the blood, property and borders” – projects by which one or more interest groups channel citizenship towards a specific “future of distinctions” to benefit from.13 In AlmaTeatro discourse, the other – the subaltern – is potentially dangerous as part of our identity: “the stranger is in us”, as Iain Chambers writes.14 12 Interview with actress G.P., 1999. 13 Paul Carter: Living in a New Country: History, Travelling and Language, London: Faber & Faber, 1992; Ugo Fabietti, L’identità etnica, Roma: Carocci, 1998. 14 Iain Chambers: Migrancy, Culture, Identity, London/New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 38.

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This is particularly true in the Mediterranean area, where the “the contingency of all definitions of self and other self” is made clear by hundreds of years of migrations and exchanges.15 In these terms – and here I refer to a subtle difference we have in the Italian words used to express these concepts – the Mediterranean Sea is a frontier, a place of hybridisation, rather than a border, a place of distinction.16 This means that such a context is a “third space”17 – a frame within which everything from the outside arrives, is mixed and reinvented by human creativity to go somewhere else.

A Post-Colonial Discourse Within the Mediterranean frame, multicultural theatre in Italy – and specifically the case-study I followed – can be said to promote a peculiar post-colonial discourse. Here, in fact, personal biographies of actresses and audience meet and merge with euro-centric, colonial, hegemonic perspectives about history and memory (those we have seen fostered by media and politics), with stereotypes about otherness that follow them, and finally with Italian identity – fairly often described (in line with collective identities formation and status in the Mediterranean area)18 as weak19, fragmented, pluralistic, and moreover deeply locally-oriented. However, these new narratives are not intended to replace previous ones with a counter-cultural, but specular discourse: they are interested rather in their re-reading and enlightening their partiality, but then in enriching them with previously ignored or hidden information – in this way reaching the goal of merging and then substituting previous discourses. In pursuing this, the theatrical strategy seems particularly effective. In fact, theatre is characterised by taking place in the context of people face-to-face in flesh and blood, but its contents are elaborated and expressed in forms which first reach the senses and then the intellect. The goal of this theatre is not just to stimulate reflection on cultural issues, nor solely to promote social change towards a multi- and intercultural dialogue and society, but to nourish the audience’s empathy and therefore willingness to listen to others perspectives. Moreover, although any research about the history of mankind can make visible hidden submerged stories which show that mankind has always experienced migration and encounters between people, information, goods of different origins, the speed and dimensions of these in recent decades cannot be de-

15 Carter: Living in a New Country (note 13), p. 8. 16 See Fabietti: L’identità etnica (note 13). 17 Iain Chambers: Mediterranean Crossings. The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008, p. 146. 18 See Chambers: Mediterranean Crossings (note 17). 19 See Ernesto Galli Della Loggia: L’identità italiana, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998.

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nied.20 This provokes, as a consequence, a further erosion of the previously existing collective configurations intended to satisfy the individual’s needs for support and belonging in his life, but such a loss of security can now be addressed with the search for new relationships, chosen by social actors in relation to other criteria. For this reason, the expression and sharing of these contents in a theatrical form can still be powerful, even though it takes place among small numbers: what happens in/during/through the performance is the reconciliation between the participants on and off stage,21 and this reconciliation represents that emotional and intellectual turning-point that multi- and intercultural theatre aims to provoke so as to contribute to the building up of a “culture of relation” that means “the possibility of being together, exist together, build together, live together”.22 Multi- and intercultural theatre in Italy did/does this, in contrast to the blurred and confused media discourse on cultural diversity, the blindness of a political system that still does not want to recognise migration as a structural phenomenon, and the absence of ongoing policies that take the multi- and intercultural dimension of Italian society as a fact requiring specific measures in order to ensure all citizens – old and new – equal dignity of existence, recognition and expression.

20 See Hannerz: Cultural Complexity (note 2); Joana Breidenbach and Ina Zukrigl: Tanz der Kulturen. Kulturelle Identität in einer globalisierten Welt, München: Kunstmann, 1998; Appadurai: Modernity at Large (note 3). 21 See Giulia Innocenti Malini: Essere uno, essere molti: il teatro sociale tra identità di pluralità, in: Pensieri meticci. Due giornate di studio, spettacoli, incontri su teatro e intercultura in Italia, edited by Cristina Balma-Tivola and Barbara Costamagna, unpubl. manuscript, 2002. 22 Innocenti Malini: Essere uno, essere molti (note 21).

JULIA BLANDFORT

Moving Stories – Roma and the Oral Tradition of a Transnational People Kdežto te šune lačhi paramisi, ta mek aver dives izdras, sunende tuke džal! But if you listen to a good tale you will still be shivering the next day and you will dream of it.1

“Roma and their fairy tales are somehow placed at the crossroad of the fairy tale problematic” conclude Heinz Mode and Milena Hübschmannovà in the introduction to their comprehensive collection of Romani tales from around the world.2 Either Roma are said to have no own tradition of storytelling whatsoever or are supposed to be the original carriers of tales from the Indian subcontinent to the whole world. These opposing argumentations are emblematic for Europe’s largest transnational minority. Somehow Roma seem never to belong, their lives appear in constant transition and to be ranging between extremes. In their 600 year long presence in Europe, their position at the margins of society has rarely changed, as past and current discussions of their social situation show. However, these debates tend to focus on social problems and – even if they are undoubtedly a pressing problem for a large part of the Roma communities – disregard aspects of cultural exchange, that show lively interactions between literary spheres. In fact, a closer look at Roma oral tradition reveals that far from being a sign of total exclusion, Romani fairy tales are a cultural “Contact Zone”3, while maintaining distinct features as well. This is especially obvious when we look at the ways the tales are transmitted. Strikingly, Romani tales are still mainly oral, in sharp contrast to their predominantly script-based surroundings. However, in recent decades Roma have developed an independent literary tradition. The transition between orality and script is still palpable in these texts and can be viewed as a sign of diasporic borders and their constant adjustment. Hence, the influence of orality and its position in the recently de-

1 2 3

Milena Hübschmannovà and Heinz Mode: Drei Lilien, in: Zigeunermärchen aus aller Welt. Sammlung 1, Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1983, pp. 49-66, here p. 51 (my translation). Ibid., p. 11 (my translation). Mary Louis Pratt: Arts of the Contact Zone, in: Profession 91, 1991, pp. 33-40.

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veloped Romani literature shall shed some light on the way diasporic borders are infringed but also established and maintained by the way of literary texts. A theoretical reflection on diaspora and the valuable (metaphorical) use of the notion of movement is introduced in the first part. The aim of the second part is to give an overview of Romani storytelling and align it with diaspora theories. Transcripts of stories and anecdotes as published by Mode and Hübschmannovà, in the Vienna archives of phonogram and by the Drava-Edition on oral Romani tales provide us with a unique insight into the Romani world view and their ways of passing on common norms and values.4 By means of exemplary analyses of these as well as of expression in film the third part of the study will pursue a diasporic perspective of the oral Romani tradition.

Reflections on Motion The stereotypical perception of Roma is very much dominated by the idea of a people in motion. Moreover, the predominance of orality in Romani culture seems to reinforce the volatile and ephemeral perception, as Walter Ong pins down when he writes about this aspect of oral cultures where words “have no focus and no trace […], not even a trajectory. They are occurrences, events. […] [They are] not simply perishable but essentially evanescent, and […] sensed as evanescent”.5 This apparent spatiotemporal detached state accounts to some extent for the fascination of the majority societies with the Roma and finds its way into literary figures like Carmen. The persistence of these figures and allied themes however points to an equally important feature of (oral) tales: Their macrostructure is extremely long lasting and remains unchanged throughout the ages. Within a fixed frame, characters and storyline rarely alter. In the case of Roma narrators, it is not only interesting to look at the small changes but also at the structures that are congruent with the majority’s repertoire. The result is a constant movement of adaptation and rejection that is typical of the diasporic situation. The use that is made of stereotypes is an intriguing example for this process. As mentioned before, the female figure similar to Carmen is a widely spread image transmitted through literature that greatly

4

5

We have to highlight here that even if the published tales and stories in the said sources remain faithful to the spoken word, some difference is certainly remarkable. The four books edited by Milena Hübschmanovà and Heinz Mode (Zigeunermärchen aus aller Welt. Sammlung 1-4, Leipzig, Insel-Verlag, 1983-1985), for example, transcribe the main stories told by the narrator but leave out the interaction before the main narration when the link between the storyteller and the public is forged. This interaction is of importance for the procedure as the public is usually engaged in the process of storytelling by showing emotion and emphasis (see e.g. Walter J. Ong: Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word, London u.a.: Methuen, 1982, pp. 45f.). Ibid., pp. 31f.

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influences people’s view of the Roma.6 With regard to this, the (researcher’s) perspective is often led by recurrent conceptions. When it comes to Roma and their literary tradition however, the field of study remains stunningly blank. Moreover, the reductive and common concept of Roma as not being geographically fixed nor having a specific literary culture is rarely aligned with theoretical developments when in fact current debates in cultural studies put a lot of emphasis on the positive notion of movement and its metaphorical value as well as on migration literature in general.7 This view of the subject as a result of a “moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion”8, is often neglected when it comes to Roma. There is an abundance of these cultural crossings to be studied in literary texts.9 In this regard, I would like to emphasize the double perspective of “inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion” that is of great importance for the interpretation of diasporic identities, where “[t]he simultaneous strategies of community maintenance and interaction combine the discourses”.10 This constant oscillation of the diasporic process can be traced here in two literary dimensions. First of all, we can look at the macrostructure of the tales as mentioned before: Themes, motives and figures may belong to the cultural heritage of a wider cultural circle and thus build common ground between the surrounding society and Roma or else they can be presented as distinct from surrounding societies and thus specific for Romani storytelling. Secondly, a combination of discourse may be traced in the entanglement of scriptural and oral tradition. 6

This field has been widely studied but two recent publications highlight the persistent importance of research. See E.g. Hans Richard Brittnacher: Leben auf der Grenze. Klischee und Faszination des Zigeunerbildes in Literatur und Kunst, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012; Klaus-Michael Bodgal: Europa erfindet die Zigeuner. Eine Geschichte von Faszination und Verachtung, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011. For the notion of migration literature see e.g. Julia Blandfort, Magdalena Silvia Mancas and Evelyn Wiesinger: Minderheiten: Fremd? Anders? Gleich? Einleitung, in: Minderheiten: Fremd? Anders? Gleich? Beiträge zum XVII. Forum Junge Romanistik 15.-18. Juni 2011, edited by Julia Blandfort, Magdalena Silvia Mancas and Evelyn Wiesinger, Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 2013, pp. 9-34, here 19-23. 7 Some research does however pursue this view, see e.g. Paola Toninato: The Rise of Written Literature among the Roma: A Study of the Role of Writing in the Current Re-definition of Romani Identity with Specific Reference to the Italian Case, PhD diss., University of Warwick, 2004, [accessed March 8, 2015]; Cécile Kovacshazy: Roma-Literaturen und Kreolisierung, in: Kreolisierung revisited. Debatten um ein weltweites Kulturkonzept, edited by Gesine Müller and Natascha Ueckmann, Bielefeld: transcript, 2013, pp. 239-251; Deike Wilhelm: Wir wollen sprechen: Selbstdarstellungen in der Literatur von Sinti und Roma, Saarbrücken: VDM, 2008. 8 Homi K. Bhabha: The Location of Culture, New York: Routledge, 1994, [accessed March 8, 2015]. 9 In this context a broad definition of ‘literary’ applies embracing oral and script-based transmission – and as such also film. 10 James Clifford: Diasporas, in: Cultural Anthropology 9, 3, 1994, pp. 302-338, here p. 308 (my emphasis).

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The recently developed script-based Romani Literature is in most cases infused with Romani oral tradition. This applies to other cultural expressions as well and is examined here using film as the example.

Transpositions – Oral Romani Tradition as Transcripts The fact that Romani cultural life is to this day predominantly oral is a consequence of the unsteady diasporic life on the margins of societies that Roma have led during the past centuries.11 In contrast to Jewish culture, Roma culture does not have a unifying religious orientation or a tradition as a scriptural culture whatsoever. Nevertheless, the cultural life of Roma communities is very rich. Not only are they rightly known as apt musicians, but Roma also have a vivid tradition of storytelling. Narratives professed in oral cultures can be divided into subgenres. For the Romani context, the distinction between the more informal get-together called vakeriben and the more formalized pro paramisha as determined by Milena Hübschmannovà is useful.12 Vakeriben is part of the traditional Romani community life. Autobiographical experiences as well as stories about relatives, friends or acquaintances are told. This non-formalised communication “act[s] as a kind of social control”13. The behaviour of the person involved is judged upon the general social principles of Romanipè, the Romani worldview. This also highlights the fact that we always have to think about oral culture as “a collective oral tradition”14 whereas the script is an individual form both with respect to production and reception. Oral stories and tales are thus dependent on the acceptance of the whole community and forcefully regularised if the society does not approve of them.15 In the terms of Jan Assmann, vakeriben belongs to the communicative memory of a people as it refers mostly to the experiences of the last three gen-

11 For a discussion of Roma as a diaspora see e.g. Paola Toninato: The Making of Gypsy Diasporas, in: Translocations: Migrations and Social Change 5, 1 2009, pp. 1-19, [accessed March 8, 2015] and with a special focus on literature and cultural production Julia Blandfort: Die Literatur der Roma Frankreichs, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015. It is important to retain a distinction of three dimensions of diaspora: Diasporic history, diaspora theory and diasporic consciousness. Whereas the distinction is mainly analytical as the three dimensions often intermingle, it is nevertheless important to keep their distinct aims in mind, see Clifford: Diasporas (note 10), p. 302. 12 E.g. Milena Hübschmannovà: Vakeriben, in: Rombase. Didactically edited information on Roma, ; idem: Pro Paramisa, in: Rombase. Didactically edited information on Roma, [both accessed March 8, 2015]. 13 Hübschmannovà: Vakeriben (note 12). 14 Kathrin Pöge Adler: Märchenforschung, Tübingen: Narr, 2011, p. 149 (my translation). 15 Ibid.

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erations and the time frame of 80 years.16 Accordingly, the content is usually based on reality and its perception. However, sometimes fictional parts are combined with local characteristics and historical or current happenings. In Romani oral stories, historical or daily accounts very often include the popular stories of mulé, the undead or revenant. Thus, the boundary between the narration of authentic events and fiction as a more artistic production is not tightly closed but permeable. This is typical for oral narration as it is formed “close to the human lifeworld […] assimilating the alien, objective world to the more immediate, familiar interaction of human beings”17. Instead of using the common introductory formula of fairy tales in order to convey the fictional character of the story, the text is introduced by claims of authenticity. Characters that appear in the text are presented as known to the narrator or the stories are altogether based on a personal experience of the storyteller. This procedure is seen in the story of the two mulé told by Ljubisa Mitrović a Kalderash Rom from Serbia. He frames the sighting of two undead with the account of a visit of his son’s father-in-law. The better part of his story highlights the importance of family ties and norms of hospitality but it also deals with the daily lives of the family who work as tinkers and their trouble in finding a campground for their caravans. Most of the villagers they encounter not only treat them with open hostility but also threaten their lives.18 In a condensed way the account thus tells the “collective histories of displacement and violent loss”19 known to diasporic peoples. “The status of difference”20 however is also expressed by the fearsome story of the undead that is only a short episode given the length of the account. Only towards the end does the story take the turn to the night, when near two graves, the family spots two revenants clad in military uniform that only the Roma – and even among them not all – perceive and fear. The Non-Roma peasants remain undisturbed by the ghosts. Thus, the ability to ‘see’ remains a trait of the Romani figures whereby the diasporic border is maintained. Through the whole tale, the documentary style is prevalent and the storyteller reinforces the truthfulness of his story in the end when he says: “I am now 56 years old and if I had not seen it with my own eyes I would not believe it, but it is true. You should not think that it is not true. Some people are 16 See Jan Assmann: Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität, in: Kultur und Gedächtnis, edited by Jan Assmann and Tonio Tölscher, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1983, pp. 9-19, here pp. 10f. 17 Ong, Orality and Literacy (note 4), p. 42. 18 E.g. Ljubiša Mitrović: Die zwei Totengeister. Le duj mule, in: Die schlaue Romni. E Bengali Romni. Märchen und Lieder der Roma. So Roma phenen taj gilaben, edited by Petra Cech, Christiane Fennesz-Juhasz, Dieter W. Halwachs and Mozes F. Heinschink, Klagenfurt: Drava, 2003, pp. 122-139. 19 Clifford: Diasporas (note 10), p. 307. 20 Mihran Dabag: Diaspora als gelebtes Wissen, in: Diaspora und Kulturwissenschaften, edited by Karl Christoph Epting et al., Leipzig: Verlag des Gustav-Adolf-Werks, 2011, pp. 617, here p. 7 (my translation).

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able to see ghosts and some others aren’t […]”.21 The interlaced structure of the eerie ghost story as an individual experience related to general customs that form a part of (historical) Romani life is classical for vakeriben pal o mulé (tales about the revenants). Lev Tcherenkow and Stephane Laederich, linguists specialized in Romani language and culture, emphasize this characteristic when they write that the “line between this world and the nether land is surprisingly thin among Roma. The belief in ghosts and the living dead is still extremely common nowadays among almost all Rroma”.22 In the narrator’s view however, not everybody is able to perceive mulé. He presents the experience as a special, horrific and personal happening that he wants to share with his public. This shows a feature of tales where an intimate link between the narrator and the audience is created by revealing experiences and allowing listeners to make them part of their own.23 As such, the story told fits the genre of vakeriben perfectly and its reflection of daily Romani life spiced with the terrifying encounter with the two revenants. Even if we have to distinguish between the informal meetings, vakeriben, where the relationship between story and human lifeworld is much closer and the formalised pro paramischa, where a wider audience assembles to listen to the oral storytelling, authenticity markers are common. Sometimes they express the exchange with Non-Roma. Appropriation or defiance are the result and show how diasporic boundaries are flexed or preserved. An orally transmitted tale of Ilona Lackovà who was a Slovak Romnì and writer of drama and stories in Romanès, shows this knowledge transfer. She introduces her “Indian tale” with the following words: I wrote many tales as if ‘from India’, do you know why? My friend Milena [Hübschmannová] studied these languages from India and she told me, that the Roma had come from there. So it came to my mind to write a story about a king in India. He was happy and a good king to the Roma, but he had no children. He believed in magic, you know, every single Rom here among us believes in that, even more so in India.24

Her reflections on the origin of Roma slide just as Ljubisa Mitrovic’s narration directly from factual into the fictional style when the story of the king starts. In this case it highlights the knowledge transfer from the majority. Non-Roma researchers and their findings on Romani history are included in the narrative repertoire and show the diasporic adaptation to the surroundings. However, this is not a one-way street. The explanatory part and the didactical implications that result from it show that the writer experiences a state of transition. 21 Mitrović: Die zwei Totengeister (note 18), p. 137 (my translation). 22 Lev Tcherenkov: The Rroma. Vol. 2. Traditions and Texts, Basel: Schwabe, 2004, p. 583. 23 E.g. Walter Benjamin: Der Erzähler, in: Erzählen. Schriften zur Theorie der Narration und zur literarischen Prosa, edited by Alexander Honold, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2007, p. 107. 24 Ilona Lackova: A made-up ‘Indian legend’, Wiener Phonogrammarchiv, [accessed March 8, 2015].

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She is in fact a knowledge carrier between minority and majority and vice versa. Moreover, in this case, the reference to India as the country of origin reveals the upcoming establishment of a diasporic consciousness. The link between India and the Roma, by the belief in magic, is reinforced and reaches over time. The lost country of origin is thus re-introduced in the narrative memory and takes the place as reference for an emerging (political) diasporic discourse, in which the audience is directly included thus once more revealing the collective aspect. The position of cultural transfer through storytelling is also important in the written version of Little Red Riding Hood by the Argentinian Rom Jorge Bernal. He introduces his tale with the words: “So, people, Roma, I want to tell a tale as I heard it from my grandfather in order to let us get to know the Gadsche25 but also their tales”.26 This foreword highlights the importance of contact with the surrounding society as well as its literary tradition. We cannot speak of an exchange so far, as the author makes it absolutely clear that the following story does not belong to the Roma’s world but to the majority’s. However, the following story is not entirely deprived of Romani influence. As the story is written down in Romanès, the author clarifies with the first appearance of the wolf that the evil animal speaks in the language of Non-Roma and thus not in Romanès.27 In a simplified judgement, the black-and-white logic of fairy tales is transposed here to the Non-Roma-Roma relationship. However, this interpretation is not applicable for the further development of the story. Up to the point where the hunter appears Bernal’s story follows the traditional storyline as transmitted by the brothers Grimm. At this point however the hero of the tale is altered: “At this moment a Rom passed by, a pedlar not a hunter like the Gadsche tell, but a poor Rom, a tinker who sold what he produced.”28 Even if the common constellation of characters remains intact, the pedlar saves Little Red Riding Hood from the monstrous wolf; the story is clearly marked as different from the non-Roma version and altered in order to convey a Romani perspective on the subject. The disjunction between Roma world and Non-Roma existence is put into focus. This is true for the microstructural level as well. At the point of alteration of the storyline, the story – even in the written form –becomes more orally dominated. Interjections and spontaneity are introduced into the text which was previously characterised by

25 Gadjé or Gadsche is the term Roma use to mark the border between ingroup and outgroup. Gadjé are therefore all Non-Roma. 26 Jorge Bernal: Die Geschichte vom Rotkäppchen. E paramiči la Skuficaki la Loliaki aj le Ruveski, in: Lang ist der Tag, kurz die Nacht. Märchen und Erzählungen der Kalderaš. Baro o djes, eîni e rjat Paramiča le Kalerašengê, edited by Petra Cech, Christiane Fennesz-Juhasz, Mozes F. Heinschink and Dieter W. Halwachs, Klagenfurt: Drava, 2012, pp. 190-195, here p. 191 (my translation). 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., p. 193 (my translation).

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a scriptural style.29 This demarcation also reveals the existence of the ‘other’ storyline and thus the perspective of “liv[ing] inside with a difference”30. This typical feature of diasporic life and its destabilizing effect is, especially for the Non-Roma reader, somewhat balanced by the story’s double happy ending. The tale finishes not only with the rescue of Little Red Riding Hood but with the grateful family buying all the cauldrons and pots of the Rom and also befriending him. The exchange that is expressed in the story finds its equal in the stylistic composition of the text: scriptural when it comes to the Non-Roma storyline and oral when it comes to the Romani conception. Thus the story shows how diasporic boundaries are configured but also infringed through adaptation and alteration of the traditional majority’s narrative. Attributes, characters, storyline and style are means of expression Roma narrators use in order to create a sound picture of Romani identity. Often however the transitional character and cultural exchange are equally perceptible. They show that it is not so much the “process of absolute othering, but rather of entangled tension”31 that is produced here and requires from the listeners – be they Roma or Non-Roma – a constant relational positioning.

Transitions – Oral Influence as a Cultural Distinction Marker In recent decades Roma communities have experienced a profound social change. Oral transmission is dependent on the presence of the audience. Due to economic changes the direct interaction of the communities has dwindled and thus the storytelling also. However this in no way means that there has been a simultaneous decline in cultural production. On the contrary, the example of Margita Reizernovà shows that even if the social change is perceived negatively it leads to a new literary form. The Czech Romnì phrases her emotions with the words, “I feel so lonely, imprisoned in the modern town quarter, with no Roms to talk with, that I have to write to avoid becoming mad.”32 Interestingly, the oral tradition lives on in the fixed forms of written literature and film. The tradition of storytelling is introduced as an identity marker for Roma as a united people with a common culture and history. The French director Tony Gatlif propagates this idea in his 1993 road movie Latcho drom. In eight episodes the emigration route of Roma from India through Persia, Turkey, Romania, France and Spain is told by the way of music and song. The

29 E.g. Petra Cech, Christiane Fennesz-Juhasz, Dieter W. Halwachs and Mozes F. Heinschink (ed.): Lang ist der Tag, kurz die Nacht. Baro o djes cîni e rjat. Märchen und Erzählungen der Kalderaš. Paramiča le Kaldêrašengê, Klagenfurt: Drava, 2012, p. 550. 30 Clifford: Diasporas (note 10), p. 308. 31 Ibid., p. 307. 32 Milena Hübschmannovà: The Birth of Romani literature in Czecheslovakia, in: Oralité tzigane, 1991, pp. 91-97, here p. 95.

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importance of oral storytelling is underlined when at the beginning of the movie the voice of a Rom intones in Romanès: Listen Roma, who live in all directions of the world. We should not neglect our language for we came from India nearly a thousand years ago. Think about it friends, everywhere our elders were beaten and tortured for the last five hundred years. But here we want to keep our tradition secret, however we should not lose our language even a bit, for it is our greatest strength.33

The language, Romanès, is used as an instrument of exclusion. Roma and Non-Roma are separated through the linguistic barrier as the text has no subtitles. This fact is by no means countered by the introduction of a text on screen. Even if the text on screen suggests concordance with the spoken words this is an illusion as in fact spoken word and written text differ profoundly. The spoken text in fact pursues the construction of two different identity spheres. It integrates the idea of secrecy and exclusion content wise by indicating the violence that Roma have suffered and still suffer from the majority and the fact of keeping the tradition secret. It is therefore used as a means of maintaining the diasporic border to the outside world. The example of film shows the value that not only the director but also Romani writers in general attribute to their cultural belonging. As such it advocates the will to maintain cultural independence in a diasporic situation.

Conclusion – Dwindling Oral Traditions Newborn Literary Forms Stability and dynamism are integral parts not only of Romani daily diasporic life but also of the oral tradition. As the oral tradition inevitably dwindles new literary forms are discovered by Romani storytellers. Thus the narrator in Tony Gatlif’s movie was the very first French Romani author Matéo Maximoff. His nine novels and stories are inspired by the oral Romani tradition: Heroes and villains, ghosts and beasts populate his stories. But his writing is also influenced by the spontaneity that derives from the close relation between audience and storyteller. Oral tradition is therefore a pool that Roma authors draw inspiration from. Comparable to other oral based cultures like those of the Caribbean, the acceptance of oral tradition as an integral part of the own identity leads to the transposition of oral structures into written form and thus opens “a space of mysterious creativity”.34

33 Tony Gatlif: Latcho drom Bonne route, France: K.G. Production, 1993, 00:00:34-00:01:10, (my translation). 34 Patrick Chamoiseau: Que faire de la parole? Dans la tracée mystérieuse de l’oral à l’écrit, in: Écrire la ‚parole de nuit‘. La nouvelle littérature antillaise, edited by Ralph Ludwig, Paris: Gallimard, 1994, pp. 151-158, here pp. 157f.

PAOLO GIACCARIA

Cosmopolitanism: The Mediterranean Archives There can be no doubt that ‘cosmopolitanism’ is now a key concept, which crosses not only the disciplinary boundaries of the social sciences but also those between academic knowledge and popular imagination. As Craig Calhoun claims, [c]osmopolitanism is in fashion. The trend started in the 1990s, after the end of the cold war and amid intensifying globalization. Cosmopolitan is now a compliment for the suave in a way it had not been since the 1920s or at least the 1960s, when in cold war spirit spies epitomized the cosmopolitan.1

Cosmopolitanism today sits firmly on the agenda of the social sciences,2 emancipatory politics,3 the United Nations,4 and the European Union.5 Despite being fiercely contested,6 a “cosmopolitanism turn”7 is central to many of the key issues and debates concerning contemporary modernity.8 Present-day cosmopolitanism is particularly associated with globalization9 and its different

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A similar version of this paper has been published in: The Geographical Review, 102, 3, 2012, pp. 293-315. Craig Calhoun: Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Social Imaginary, in: Dædalus 137, 3, 2008, pp. 104-114, here p. 106. Ulrich Beck: Cosmopolitan Vision, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. Jan Nederveen Pieterse: Emancipatory Cosmopolitanism: Towards an Agenda, in: Development and Change 37, 6, 2006, pp. 1247-1257. Paul Taylor: The United Nations in the 1990s: Proactive Cosmopolitanism and the Issue of Sovereignty, in: Political Studies 47, 3, 1999, pp. 538-565. Chris Rumford: Cosmopolitanism and Europe, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. Ulrich Beck: Cosmopolitanism and its Enemies, in: Theory, Culture and Society 19, 1-2, 2002, pp. 17-44. Gerard Delanty: The Cosmopolitan Imagination. The Renewal of Critical Social Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 3. Stephen Edelston Toulmin: Cosmopolis. The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992. Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider: The Literature on Cosmopolitanism: An Overview, in: British Journal of Sociology 57, 1, 2006, pp. 153-164; Gerard Delanty: The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory, in: British Journal of Sociology, 57, 1, 2006, pp. 25-47; David Held: Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010.

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themes and interpretations: human rights and democratization,10 multiculturalism,11 diasporas and migration,12 elite mobility,13 ethics14 and citizenship15. Within this broad and growing literature, the purpose of this article is to discuss cosmopolitanism from a geographical perspective – and more specifically from a Mediterranean perspective. As David Harvey claims, geographical knowledge should be assumed as a “condition of possibility” for any foundation of cosmopolitanism, from Kant to Nussbaum and beyond.16 He is even more justified in asking what kind of geographical knowledge is adequate to what kind of cosmopolitan ethic? Failure to answer that deeper question condemns cosmopolitanism of any sort to remain an abstracted discourse with no tangible meaning other than the ad hoc, pragmatic, and often opportunistic application of universal principles to particular geographical instances.17

From this perspective the rather marginal interest that cosmopolitanism – in particular in its philosophical and political declination – has aroused amid geographers is quite surprising, as Sam Schueth and John O’Loughlin acknowledge.18 Even David Harvey’s seminal article in Public Culture in 2000 did not succeed in sparking debate on cosmopolitanism among geographers.19 To my knowledge, only Denis Cosgrove and Vinay Gidwani – and, to some extent, Katharyne Mitchell – directly engage with Harvey’s claim that “disruptive spatiality worms its way into critical examination of cosmopolitanism”.20 Similarly, in David Harvey: A Critical Reader, edited in 2006 by Noel Castree and Derek Gregory, little or no attention is paid to Harvey’s reflection 10 Daniele Archibugi: Cosmopolitan Democracy and its Critics: A Review, in: European Journal of International Relations 10, 3, 2004, pp. 437-473; Pheng Cheah: Inhuman Conditions, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. 11 John Rundell: Strangers, Citizens and Outsiders: Otherness, Multiculturalism and the Cosmopolitan Imaginary in Mobile Societies, in: Thesis Eleven 78, 1, 2004, pp. 85-101; Bhikhu Parekh: Rethinking Multiculturalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 12 Pnina Werbner: Global Pathways: Working Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds, in: Social Anthropology 7, 1, 1999, pp. 17-35. 13 Craig Calhoun: The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers, in: South Atlantic Quarterly 101, 4, 2002, pp. 869-897. 14 Kwame Anthony Appiah: Cosmopolitanism, New York: Norton, 2006. 15 Seyla Benhabib: Another Cosmopolitanism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 16 David Harvey: Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009, pp. 11, 29-31. 17 David Harvey: Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils, in: Public Culture 12, 2, 2000, pp. 529-564, here p. 547. 18 Sam Schueth and John O’Loughlin: Belonging to the World: Cosmopolitanism in Geographic Contexts, in: Geoforum 39, 2, 2008, pp. 926-941, here p. 926. 19 Harvey: Cosmopolitanism and the Banality (note 17). 20 Ibid., p. 540; Denis Cosgrove: Globalism and Tolerance in Early Modern Geography, in: Annals of the Association of American Geographers 93, 4, 2003, pp. 852-870; Vinay K. Gidwani: Subaltern Cosmopolitanism as Politics, in: Antipode 38, 1, 2006, pp. 1-17; Katharyne Mitchell: Geographies of Identity: The Intimate Cosmopolitan, in: Progress in Human Geography 31, 5, 2007, pp. 706-720.

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on Kant and cosmopolitanism.21 On the contrary, most of the recent, yet occasional, geographical reflection on philosophical and political cosmopolitanism22 seems more at ease with Doreen Massey’s idea of “a global sense of place”23 than with Harvey’s all-encompassing structuralist space/time framework.24 I believe that ‘geographic knowledge’ can contribute to address two fundamental issues which lie unresolved at the very heart of the cosmopolitan debate. The first one is the almost exclusive focus on present-day cosmopolitanism and/or on the Eurocentric tradition directly linking Greek and Latin Stoicism to contemporary liberal cosmopolitanism à la Nussbaum via the Enlightenment and Kant’s “perpetual peace”.25 As a consequence, little or no attention is paid to alternative genealogies of cosmopolitanism, rooted in different traditions, situated in a variety of spaces and times, that only the reading of the “new archives, geographies, and practices of different historical Cosmopolitanisms”26 can unveil. The second issue is that most of the cosmopolitanism literature privileges either the cosmos (the universal) or the polis (the particular), missing the oxymoronic link that connects them in a “field of tensions”27 and falling into a sort of a dichotomous trap. In this context, I believe that geography can contribute to grasp the Janus ambiguity and Protean complexity of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is not simply about either being a ‘citizen of the world’ or bringing the world into the city. In my understanding, the essence of cosmopolitanism cannot be grasped without also understanding this inherent tension between the universal and the particular “constituting the basic animus of cosmopolitanism”28.

21 David Harvey: A Critical Reader, edited by Noel Castree and Derek Gregory, Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006. 22 Alan Latham: Re-Theorizing the Scale of Globalization: Topologies, Actor-Networks and Cosmopolitanism, in: Geographies of Power, edited by Andrew Herod and Melissa Wright, London: Blackwell, 2002, pp. 115-143; Jeff Popke: Geography and Ethics: Spaces of Cosmopolitan Responsibility, in: Progress in Human Geography 31, 4, 2007, pp. 509-518; Schueth and O’Loughlin: Belonging to the World (note 18). 23 Doreen Massey: Space, Place and Gender, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, pp. 146-156. 24 Harvey: Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (note 16), pp. 145-148. Of course this is not the context in which to discuss the genealogy of the ‘place versus space’ debate in contemporary Anglo-American geography. To the extent that such a controversy is relevant for our understanding of the cosmopolitanism debate see, among others, Tim Cresswell: Place: A Short Introduction, London: Blackwell, 2004, in particular chapter 3 comparing Harvey’s and Massey’s understanding of place/space. 25 Immanuel Kant: Perpetual Place. A Philosophical Sketch, in: Kant. Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss, transl. by H. B. Nisbet, 2nd, enlarged ed., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991, [1795], pp. 93-130, here p. 107f. 26 Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty: Cosmopolitanisms, in: Public Culture 12, 3, 2000, pp. 577-589, here p. 587. 27 Delanty: The Cosmopolitan Imagination (note 9). 28 Ibid., p. 35.

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In this paper, I address how this tension (between Eurocentric cosmopolitanism and other cosmopolitan traditions, as well as between cosmos and polis) may be made sensible from a post-colonial and Mediterranean perspective. Why the Mediterranean? Because the Mediterranean can be interpreted as a space where something relevant happened in relation to the making of cosmopolitan ideals and practices, a space where, at different times, differently nuanced cosmopolitanisms confronted, overlapped, and merged into each other, and where cosmos and polis express an oxymoronic tension between universalism and particularism. The Mediterranean itself is trapped in the tension between opposite interpretations.29 On the one hand, it is marginalized as a residual space, isolated from the great processes of modernity and modernization. Such a marginalization, as we shall see, is evident even in the postcolonial understanding of the North-South imperial and colonial relationship. On the other hand, it is sometimes assumed as a ‘paradigm’ for searching for and investigating alternative modernities, as a space where different genealogies of modernity can be traced and reinterpreted.30 This tension is particularly evident in allegedly cosmopolitan cities, where the cosmopolitan past is reworked in the search for new forms of hospitality, conviviality, and resistance,31 but also in order to brand a neo-liberal understanding of the city, translating memory and nostalgia into “easy faces of cosmopolitanism”32 in order to attract frequent-flier elites and international investors.33 In order to elaborate on these concerns the paper will be broken down in to four sections. In the first one, the focus is on postcolonial critical cosmopolitanism, in particular on Walter Mignolo’s reflections linking his “border thinking” theory34 to the understanding of the complex relationship between cosmopolitanism and coloniality.35 In the second part I claim that a Mediterrane29 Paolo Giaccaria and Claudio Minca: The Mediterranean Alternative, in: Progress in Human Geography 35, 3, 2011, pp. 345-365. 30 Iain Chambers: Mediterranean Crossings, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008; Predrag Matvejevic, Mediterranean. A Cultural Landscape, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. 31 Lila Leontidou: Urban Social Movements in ‘Weak’ Civil Societies: The Right to the City and Cosmopolitan Activism in Southern Europe, in: Urban Studies 47, 10, 2010, pp. 11791203; Ola Söderström: Urban Cosmographies. Indagine sul Cambiamento Urbano a Palermo, Rome: Meltemi, 2009. 32 Calhoun: The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers (note 13), p. 889. 33 Veronica Della Dora: The Rhetoric of Nostalgia: Postcolonial Alexandria between Uncanny Memories and Global Geographies, in: Cultural Geographies 13, 2, 2006, pp. 207-238; Amy Mills: Streets of Memory: Landscape, Tolerance, and National Identity in Istanbul, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. 34 Walter D. Mignolo: Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 35 Walter D. Mignolo: The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism, in: Public Culture 12, 3, 2000, pp. 721-748; idem, Cosmopolitanism and the Decolonial Option, in: Studies in Philosophy and Education 29, 2, 2010, pp. 111-127. See also Olivier Kramsch: Querying Cosmopolis at the Borders of Europe, in: Environmental and Planning A 39, 7, 2007, pp. 1582-1600, and Mitchell: Geographies of Identity (note 20).

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an perspective can help to highlight some key features of the postcolonial critical reading of cosmopolitanism. In the third section, drawing on Engin Isin,36 I attempt to outline a cosmopolitan reading of the tension between empire and city which connotes Mediterranean imperial and colonial cosmopolitanism. Finally, the fourth section will deal with the Ottoman millet system, considered as a peculiar dispositif influencing both the making and the unmaking of cosmopolitanism in Mediterranean port cities. I will conclude by posing the question: “What can we learn from cosmopolitanism(s) in the Mediterranean?”

Postcolonial Archives and Geographies: Relocating Cosmopolitanism According to Sheldon Pollock and his fellow editors of the special issue on cosmopolitanism published in Public Culture in 2000, a postcolonial approach to cosmopolitanism is interested to see what new archives might be brought to bear on the analysis of cosmopolitanism; to discover whether the historical and, what is equally important, the geocultural perspective on the problem could be extended beyond the singular, privileged location of European thought and history; and to determine whether disciplinary approaches could be varied so as to move the discussion beyond the stultifying preoccupations of Western philosophy and to allow the possibility of capturing the wider range of cosmopolitan practices that have actually existed in history. For it is only through such procedures – adducing new empirical data on the variety of cosmopolitanisms and the new problematics that accompany them, decentering the conventional locus, and investigating from a wide range of scholarly perspectives – that new and post-universalist cosmopolitanisms […] have the potential to come into being. […] What the new archives, geographies, and practices of different historical cosmopolitanisms might reveal is precisely a cultural illogic for modernity that makes perfectly good nonmodern sense. They might help us see that cosmopolitanism is not a circle created by culture diffused from a center, but instead, that centers are everywhere and circumferences nowhere.37

In particular, within postcolonial narratives of cosmopolitanism, I believe that Mignolo’s application of what he calls the “colonial difference” and “border thinking”38 to cosmopolitanism39 is particularly useful for the task of the present article. If the colonial difference “is the space in which global design [has] to be adapted, adopted, rejected, integrated, or ignored” then border thinking “is more than a hybrid enunciation. It is a fractured enunciation in di36 Engin F. Isin: Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2002. 37 Pollock et al.: Cosmopolitanisms (note 26), pp. 585, 587f. (emphasis added). 38 Mignolo: Local Histories (note 34). 39 Mignolo: The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis (note 35), idem: Cosmopolitanism (note 35).

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alogic situations with the territorial and hegemonic cosmology”40. In particular, Mignolo’s work relates cosmopolitanism, modernity, and coloniality, and outlines a historical genealogy that connects different moments in the making of modernity/coloniality. Fundamental to my argument here is that Mignolo challenges the mainstream ‘family tree’ of contemporary philosophical cosmopolitanism, which directly links Kant to Zeno, Cicero and the ancient Stoics, highlighting a spatial and temporal ‘void’ in-between.41 Mignolo fills this void with historical and spatial content: a specific time (the sixteenth century) and a specific space (Mediterranean Spain) become a fundamental “locus of enunciation” of the cosmopolitan/modern/colonial discourse.42 Moreover, he traces the marginalization of the Mediterranean/Spanish genealogy of cosmopolitanism back to the Enlightenment thinkers and signally to Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, where the German philosopher describes a hierarchy of six European nations, classified according to the ‘character of the nation’ and to the ‘character of the blood’ in two groups: the first one comprises the growing colonial powers of France, England and Germany; the second encompasses a decaying Portugal, Spain and Italy. A sort of a ‘spatial garbage-can’ finally includes Russia, Poland, Turkey and Greece, the margins of modern enlightened Europe.43 [Through] the invention of the South of Europe […] Kant’s cosmopolitanism was cast under the implicit assumptions that beyond the heart of Europe was the land of those who had to be brought into civilization and, in the South of Europe, the Latin and Catholic countries, some of them – like Spain and Portugal – too close to the Moors and with mixed blood.44

What Mignolo points out here is that the ‘scientific’ – and colonial – invention of the Mediterranean,45 its simultaneous description and colonization as a 40 Mignolo: Local Histories (note 34), pp. ix, x. 41 Martha C. Nussbaum: Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism, in: Journal of Political Philosophy 5, 1, 1997, pp. 1-25; Delanty: The Cosmopolitan Imagination (note 7), pp. 20-41; for a critique, see: Anthony Pagden: Stoicism, Cosmopolitanism and the Legacy of European Imperialism, in: Constellations 7, 1, 2000, pp. 3-22. 42 Mignolo: The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis (note 35), pp. 728-730. 43 Immanuel Kant: Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, translated and edited by Robert Louden, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006 [1798]. For a thorough account of the relationship between Kant’s racist anthropology and geography and his account of cosmopolitanism, see Robert Bernasconi: Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in the Enlightenment Construction of Race, in: Race, edited by Robert Bernasconi, London: Blackwell, 2001, pp. 11-36; Todd Hedrick: Race, Difference, and Anthropology in Kant’s Cosmopolitanism, in: Journal of the History of Philosophy 46, 2, 2008, pp. 245-268; Harvey: Cosmopolitanism and the Banality (note 17), and idem: Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom (note 16). 44 Mignolo: Cosmopolitanism (note 35), p. 123. 45 Marie-Noëll Bourguet, Bernard Lepetit, Daniel Nordmann, and Marcula Sinarellis: L’Invention Scientifique de la Méditerranée: Égypte, Morée, Algérie, Paris: École des Hauts Études en Sciences Sociales, 1998.

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space of (subaltern) alterity with respect to the core of European modernity. Challenging this Kantian and Hegelian geographical imagination, he brings the sixteenth and seventeenth-century Mediterranean back to the foreground of the cosmopolitanism/modernity/colonialism trilogy, as a fundamental space where both global designs and cosmopolitan projects are considered, disputed and shaped.46

Rethinking Cosmopolitan Spatiality from the Mediterranean Despite its relevance to our argument, Mignolo’s account shows some blind spots that should be addressed here. While drawing on Janet Abu-Lughod’s largely Mediterranean-centric reading of the world order between 1250 and 1350 A.D. and recognizing the Mediterranean’s central role in the making of cosmopolitanism/modernity/colonialism, Mignolo de facto abandons the Mediterranean to its own decline, almost sympathetically with Braudel’s classic vulgate on the waning of Mediterranean centrality after the death of Philip II (1972).47 But there is a ‘but’. History did not cease in the Mediterranean after its marginalization and it was extraneous neither to cosmopolitanism nor to modernity. Maintaining the centrality that Mignolo ascribes to 1492 as a turningpoint, the fact that the Moors and the Jews evicted from Spain and subsequently from Portugal did not melt into air cannot be ignored. Some Jews and conversos moved to the New World, where they suffered further persecution, but others traveled to Europe, where they made a fundamental contribution to the making of modernity48 and others moved to the large domains of the Ottoman Empire, where they enjoyed protection and tolerance under the rule of the millet system.49 As Iain Chambers claims, at the one hand of the Mediterranean, the Arabs, the Jews, and the Rom were expelled from Europe; at the other, with the conquest of Constantinople and the Balkans by the Ottoman Turks, both Muslims and Jews returned to become once again internal, integral, to its history.50

46 Mignolo: The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis (note 35), p. 731. 47 Janet L. Abu-Lughod: Before European Hegemony. The World System A. D. 1250-1350, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991; Mignolo: Local Histories (note 34), pp. 26-29. 48 Yirmiyahu Yovel: The Other Within. The Marranos, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. 49 Avigdor Levy: Jews, Turks, Ottomans. A Shared History, Fifteenth through the Twentieth Century, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002; Yaron Ben-Na’eh: Jews in the Realm of the Sultans. Ottoman Jewish Society in the Seventeenth Century, Tübingen: Siebeck, 2008. On the peculiarity of the Judeo-Spanish culture in the Balkans see Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue: Sephardi Jews, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 50 Chambers: Mediterranean Crossings (note 30), p. 9.

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Judeo-Spanish magazines and newspapers flourished in Ottoman cities until the end of the Empire and beyond, blurring and melting European, Jewish and Ottoman culture in an original fashion.51 Moreover, the Jewish presence played a specific role in the making of a Mediterranean urban cosmopolitanism which is still alive in the poetics and politics of memory and nostalgia. Salonica, Smyrna, Istanbul, Alexandria, Sarajevo, and Trieste are sites in a constellation of cities, where some of the features now commonly attributed to cultural cosmopolitanism (multiculturalism, transculturation, conviviality, diasporic mobility, hybridity, etc.) have been forged in the interplay between different communities and culture. Moreover, in theorizing the relationship between coloniality, subaltern knowledge and border thinking, Mignolo describes the need to understand the making of the modern/colonial world-system in terms of both his interior and exterior borders,52 where the interior borders are related to the conflicts between empires and the exterior ones make reference to the conflicts between (hegemonic and subaltern, colonizer, and colonized) cosmologies. In my view, Mignolo’s framework can be usefully applied to understanding the tension between cosmos and polis in the Mediterranean, albeit with some caveats. In many ways, in fact, the Mediterranean case seems more complex than the exemplary Latin-American evidence which Mignolo draws on. Interior borders, in the Mediterranean, were continuously reworked from the sixteenth until the twentieth century, mainly because of the permanence of ‘local’ imperial powers within the Mediterranean space, most significantly the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire, but also, indirectly, the Spanish monarchy with the Bourbons’ Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Despite rivalry over the centuries, their coexistence actually worked as a ‘conditions of possibility’ for cosmopolitanism in the Mediterranean, nurturing some degree of multiculturalism and multinationalism, which transcended the political and military clash between the two principle empires, Habsburg and Ottoman.53 The situation further changed in the early nineteenth century, when the French, British, and Russian imperial powers entered the Mediterranean game, multiplying the conflict and making the interior borders more and more complex: from Napoleon’s military and scientific expedition to Egypt in 1798 to the fall of both the Habsburg and the Ottoman empires, in 1918 and 1922 respectively, five empires confronted each other in the Mediterranean.54 This was not without consequences for the fortune of cosmopolitanism. On the one hand, the French and British colonial domination of vast areas enhanced a new age of trade and commercial diasporas in the area, mainly in the cities, reinforcing the making 51 Sarah Stein: Creating a Taste for News: Historicizing Judeo-Spanish Periodicals of the Ottoman Empire, in: Jewish History 14, 1, 2000, pp. 9-28. 52 Mignolo: The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis (note 35), p. 11. 53 Jean-François Solnon: Le Turban et la Stambouline, Paris: Perrin, 2009. 54 See, among other, classic William Miller: The Ottoman Empire and its Successors, 18011927, London: Routledge, 1966.

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of an Orientalist cosmopolitan imagination about Mediterranean cities, finding its zenith in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet.55 On the other hand, the intervention of French, British and Russian empires and the slow decline of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires opened up to the emergence of vernacularism and nationalism in the Mediterranean, which established a further field of tensions in its urban cosmopolitanism. Here it is important to address the second question that Mignolo raises, that of the exterior borders, that is, the issue of coloniality and colonialism, a question which is of course strictly related to the interior borders shaped by French and British imperialism in the Mediterranean. There is no doubt that the Mediterranean must be read as a “postcolonial sea”56 and that its colonial experience is strictly immanent to the making of a Mediterranean cosmopolitan imagination. Setting boundaries between a ‘European Self’ and a ‘Mediterranean Other’ was of course a key task in the making of the Mediterranean as a colonial space. It is also true that Orientalism played a key role from Napoleon’s expedition onward and that cosmopolitan imagination about the Mediterranean was part of a broader Mediterraneanist discourse.57 In this discourse Mediterranean cosmopolitanism is “elitist in formulation and content, it is laced with grief, and it privileges formal labels over content”.58 The relationship between colonized and colonizers, between subaltern and hegemonic cultures, is nevertheless much more complex than it might appear from a classic postcolonial standpoint.59 European colonialism in the Mediterranean cannot be imagined without making reference to the search for modern Europe’s roots in ancient Greece and to the fact that this quest actually took place as both a cause and a consequence of modernity/colonialism.60 The production of the European South envisaged by Mignolo was always trapped between the establishment of a civilized distance between Northern Europeans and ‘corrupted’ Mediterraneans61 and the recognition of a cultural continuity between European modernity/coloniality and its Mediterranean past. This pro55 Lawrence Durrell: Alexandria Quartet, 4 vols., New York: Dutton, 1957-1960. 56 Chambers: Mediterranean Crossings (note 30), pp. 23-49. 57 Michael Herzfeld: The Horns of the Mediterraneanist Dilemma, in: American Ethnologist 11, 3, 1984, pp. 439-454, idem: Practical Mediterraneanism. Excuses for Everything, from Epistemology to Eating, in: Rethinking the Mediterranean, edited by William Harris, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 45-63. 58 Will Hanley: Grieving Cosmopolitanism in Middle East Studies, in: History Compass 6, 5, 2008, pp. 1346-1367, here 1348; see also Henk Driessen: Mediterranean Port Cities: Cosmopolitanism Reconsidered, in: History and Anthropology 16, 1, 2005, pp. 129-141. 59 Giaccaria and Minca: The Mediterranean Alternative (note 29). 60 Suzanne Saïd: The Mirage of Greek Continuity. On the Uses and Abuses of Analogy in Some Travel Narratives from the Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Century, in: Rethinking the Mediterranean, edited by William Harris, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 268293; Constanze Guthenke: Placing Modern Greece. The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism, 1770-1840, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 61 Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell: The Corrupting Sea. A Study of Mediterranean History, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.

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cess was of course Orientalist and colonial, in that it aimed to establish a cultural alterity and consequently political, economic and social dominion, but it was also constantly disturbed by the need to make sense of European modernity’s Mediterranean roots. Of course, I am not claiming either that the Habsburg and Ottoman empires were empires ‘with a human face’ – Mediterranean cosmopolitan port cities were not exempt from ethnic violence and they were important centers in the slave trade62 – nor that French and British colonialism was ‘less colonial’ in the Mediterranean than elsewhere. My point is rather that Mediterranean cosmopolitanism cannot be reduced to an Orientalist discourse aimed at celebrating European-born cosmopolitan colonialists, as Will Hanley and Henk Driessen seem to suggest.63 Its roots are not only in colonial cosmopolitanism but also, and more importantly, in a constellation of cosmopolitan moments which span Greek and Latin cosmopolitanism and Medieval cosmographies64 to modern/colonial cosmopolitanism, passing through the resilience of the cosmopolitan institutions and practices of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Moreover, as Roger Owen has argued in his ground-breaking The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800-1914, inter-imperial economic relationships were far from being a unidirectional, flat, colonial, and Orientalist domination.65 In order to make sense of this Mediterranean complexity and ambiguity, I suggest that at least two cosmopolitan moments in the Mediterranean can be identified: an imperial cosmopolitanism and a colonial cosmopolitanism.66 Such a distinction is central here, as most of the literature on Mediterranean cosmopolitanism, from both of its advocates67 and critics68, focuses almost exclusively on the colonial moment. Cosmopolitanism is interpreted in this view as the outcome of the encounter with the West and of colonial domination, 62 Barrington Moore: Ethnic and Religious Hostilities in Early Modern Port Cities, in: International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 4, 4, 2001, pp. 687-727; Madeline Zilfi: Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 63 Hanley: Grieving Cosmopolitanism (note 58); Driessen: Mediterranean Port Cities (note 58). 64 On the importance of pre-modern cosmographies in shaping an alternative understanding of cosmopolitanism, see Cosgrove: Globalism and Tolerance (note 20) and Keith Lilley: Mapping Cosmopolis: Moral Topographies of the Medieval City, in: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, 2004, pp. 681-698. See also, for a more normative account of the relationship between cosmographies and cosmopolitanism, Jens Bartelson: Visions of World Community, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 65 Roger Owen has argued in his ground-breaking: The Middle East in the World Economy, 1800-1914, rev. ed., London: Taurus, 1993. 66 See also Robert Escallier: Le Cosmopolitisme Méditerranéen: Réflexions et Interrogations, in: Cahiers de la Méditerranée 67, 2003, pp. 1-13. 67 Sami Zubaida: Middle Eastern Experiences of Cosmopolitanism, in: Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, edited by Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 32-41. 68 Driessen: Mediterranean Port Cities (note 58); Hanley: Grieving Cosmopolitanism (note 58).

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consequently downplaying the role of previous cosmopolitan moments. Furthermore, Paul Waley, albeit from a different perspective, praises the multiplicity of cosmopolitanisms in the Mediterranean, claiming that Trieste was a space where two different cosmopolitanisms, Oriental and European, met and combined.69 Yet, I prefer to speak diachronically about two moments, rather than synchronically about two spaces of cosmopolitanism (Oriental and European). I will argue that East and West are inadequate categories for grasping cosmopolitanism(s) in the Mediterranean. At the same time, following Driessen, I prefer to refer to Mediterranean rather than to Middle Eastern cosmopolitan cities,70 to the extent to which both the imperial and the colonial cosmopolitan ideals and practices cut across rigid geographical boundaries. Are eighteenth century Sarajevo and Salonika European? Are early twentieth century Alexandria and Istanbul Oriental/Middle Eastern? Does a model of the Islamic city exist and how is it differentiated in its Ottoman, Arab, European, and Anatolian versions? Such questions are unanswerable and, from the present paper’s perspective, quite marginal. Of course not all of the allegedly cosmopolitan Mediterranean cities have passed through these two moments in the same way and with the same intensity. Trieste, of course, has never been a colonial city in a proper sense and was established as a major imperial port-city only from the end of eighteenth century,71 yet it established some sort of continuity with the Venetian dominion of the Adriatic, for instance through the adoption of ‘colonial Venetian’ as a lingua franca.72 Salonika already had its cosmopolitan ‘aura’ in the sixteenth century, a few decades after its Ottoman conquest, hosting thousands of Sephardic Jews evicted from Spain and Portugal and maintained its cosmopolitan character even after Greek independence, till the Nazi deportations to Auschwitz in the 1940s.73 Sarajevo has passed through an even longer history of cosmopolitanism, belonging to two empires, firstly Ottoman and then from 1878 onward Habsburg, until the last dramatic siege in the 1990s.74 If it is true that Alexandria at the beginning of the nineteenth century was just “a small fishing settlement with around 5.000 inhabitants”75, it is also true that Alexandria’s cos69 Paul Waley: Introducing Trieste: A Cosmopolitan City?, in: Social and Cultural Geography 10, 3, 2009, pp. 243-256, here p. 253. 70 Driessen: Mediterranean Port Cities (note 58); Zubaida: Middle Eastern Experiences (note 67); Hanley: Grieving Cosmopolitanism (note 58). 71 Martin Purvis: Between Late-Lasting Empire and Late-Developing Nation-State. A Triestine Perspective on City-State Relations, in: Social and Cultural Geography 10, 3, 2009, pp. 299-317, here p. 302. 72 Claudio Minca: Speaking Triestino: Language, Practice and Social Capital in Trieste, in: Social Capital and Urban Networks of Trust, edited by Jouni Häkli and Claudio Minca, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009, pp. 173-203. 73 Mark Mazower: Salonica. City of Ghosts, New York: Knopf, 2004. 74 Robert J. Donia: Sarajevo: A Biography, London: Hurst, 2006. 75 Khaled Fahmy: For Cavafy, with Love and Squalor. Some Critical Notes on the History and Historiography of Modern Alexandria, in: Alexandria. Real and Imagined, edited by Antho-

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mopolitanism, with several breaks and interruptions, dates back to its Alexandrine foundation.76 Similar stories might be narrated of many other cities in the Mediterranean, from Cairo to Palermo, from Smyrna/Izmir to Aleppo, from Beirut to Constantinople/Istanbul. Despite their differences, all these cities share a common point: they are traditionally associated with cosmopolitanism – often in an elitist and nostalgic view, it must be acknowledged – but their history cannot be reduced to a tale of colonial dominion and Orientalist representation. The interior and exterior borders of Mediterranean cosmopolitanism(s) are hence more complex and ambiguous than both cosmopolitan revival and postcolonial critique suggest. What Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Masters notice about Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul can be applied to other Mediterranean imperial cities as well: “Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul each in its own way constituted a borderland, whether between ethnicities […] between civilizations […] or between periods”.77 Hence, Mediterranean cosmopolitanism is neither about a golden age of imperial peace, tolerance and conviviality nor simply about the exciting lifestyle of bon vivant colonizers. It is rather to be read as an attempt to sustain a field of tensions between cosmos and polis, between general and particular, that took place during the five-century period which has been largely ignored by both Euro-centric and postcolonial cosmopolitans. Here I use the term ‘sustain’ in the multifaceted sense of enduring, maintaining and nourishing. Such a tension must be endured to the extent that it can produce contradictions and conflicts, even urbicide as I will later show, maintained so that neither the cosmos nor the polis prevails over the other, and nourished as it is the very condition of possibility for Mediterranean cosmopolitanism.

Being Cosmopolitical in the Mediterranean: Cities beyond Fissiparousness Commenting on pre-modern cosmopolitan, Craig Calhoun argues the key issue in the very notion of cosmopolitanism, as he acknowledges that “[c]osmopolitanism has been a project of empires, of long distance trade and of cities”, claiming at the same time that “[t]he tolerance of diversity in great imperial and trading cities has always reflected, among other things, precisely

ny Hirst and Michael Silk, Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2006, pp. 263-280, here p. 263. 76 Alexandria. Real and Imagined, edited by Anthony Hirst and Michael Silk, Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2006. 77 Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman and Bruce Masters: The Ottoman City between East and West. Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 14 (emphasis added).

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the absence of need or opportunity to organize political self-rule”78. In his synthetic, and to some extent reductive, description of the essence of cosmopolitanism – which brings together Stoicism, Christianity, and various pre-modern imperialisms – Calhoun engages explicitly with the spatial oxymoron which is constitutive of the very notion of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism bridges the cosmos and the polis, which in our Mediterranean context can be understood to stand for the empire and the city. More precisely he interprets this immanent tension in terms of how the political and hence citizenship is constructed in a cosmopolitan context. Cosmopolitanism embodies, in fact, the tension between the empire and the city in negotiating and making decisions about citizenship, as it is already clear in its Stoic foundation.79 Reading cosmopolitanism as a field of tension between universal and particular, cosmos and polis, empire and city brings to the forefront the issue of power and citizenship, yet in a controversial fashion. On the one hand, Calhoun claims that “cosmopolitanism needs an account of how social solidarity and public discourse might develop enough in these wider networks to become the basis for active citizenship”80, bringing together different genealogies of loyalty, belonging and solidarity and overcoming the universal versus particular divide. On the other hand, he suggests that “the absence of need or opportunity to organize political self-rule” acts as a sort condition of possibility for pre-modern, pre-colonial imperial, cosmopolitanism. He suggests that urban elites could afford to be cosmopolitan because they did not have to struggle for self-rule, as it was left to the imperial or colonial bureaucracy to make decisions for them. In this way, he seems to deny any relevance of “ancient” cosmopolitanisms for the current debate on cosmopolitanism. In his words: The current pursuit of cosmopolitan democracy flies in the face of a long history in which cosmopolitan sensibilities thrived in market cities, imperial capitals, and court society while democracy was tied to the nation state. Cosmopolitanism flourished in Ottoman Istanbul and old-regime Paris partly because in neither were members of different cultures and communities invited to organize government together.81

Weber’s Fissiparousness Reconsidered When applied to the case of the Mediterranean, Calhoun’s perspective sounds largely tributary to Orientalism, particularly to Max Weber’s synoecistic ac78 Calhoun: The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers (note 13), pp. 871f. 79 Pagden: Stoicism (note 41), p. 6. Interestingly the Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari establishes a comparison between the metic condition in the Greek polis and the dhimmī status of Greeks and Jews under Ottoman rule, (Massimo Cacciari: La Città Porosa. Conversazioni su Napoli, Rimini: Pazzini, 2004, p. 11). 80 Calhoun: The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travellers (note 13), p. 878. 81 Ibid., p. 892.

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count of the difference between Occidental and Oriental cities. As Engin Isin reminds us, Weber saw the Western cities as the locus where citizenship was established as the outcome of a process of unification and homogenization of city dwellers in terms of brotherhood, corporatism and self-rule.82 In Weber’s account, the European bourgeoisie invented citizenship by first equipping itself for war and subsequently for self-rule whilst Oriental city dwellers remain trapped in sectarism and self-segregation, with little or no interest in self-rule. Weber’s Orientalism fails to offer us a proper framework for understanding cosmopolitanism in the Mediterranean as it maintains that unity and homogeneity are fundamental features in defining clear boundaries of identity, belonging and hence citizenship. In Weber’s synoecistic Orientalism, in fact, Islamic (and by extension Mediterranean) cities have been described as eminently fissiparous in that “these cities were divided into quarters or districts and each district had its homogeneous community and markets”83. Fissiparousness is hence assumed to be the main force acting against the formulation of a modern account of citizenship as self-rule. Such an emphasis on the fissiparousness of Islamic/Mediterranean cities is not only exaggerated and inaccurate,84 but it would also undermine the very possibility of a Mediterranean cosmopolitanism outside the colonial framework of Western influence and domination. Only the acceptance of the ‘fissiparousness prejudice’ can justify Sami Zubaida’s claim that it is not proper to speak about cosmopolitanism in the Middle East before the ‘European impact’: The Ottoman Empire included many people and lands, for the most part organized in self-regulating communities, guilds, military units […] and groupings of scholars, scribes and functionaries. While there was a fair degree of social mobility, these were occupational rather than across communal lines […] This mobility, however, was into well-defined and bonded groupings […] with their distinctive discourses, practices and loyalties […] Until the nineteenth century, any small pocket of what might be seen as cosmopolitan milieux must have been confined to the higher echelons of Istanbul society (and maybe to some other centres in the Empire, such as Salonika). It was the ‘European impact’ (a euphemism for conquest and military-economic dominance) that made its effect felt in particular corners of Ottoman societies in the Nineteenth century.85

In other words, by accepting the ‘fissiparousness prejudice’, Zubaida misses the complex bonds and interrelations that tie what, in the previous section, I have called ‘imperial cosmopolitanism’ and ‘colonial cosmopolitanism’. In a way, Weber, Zubaida and Calhoun all misjudge Mediterranean cosmopolitan

82 Isin: Being Political (note 36), pp. 7-22; see also Eldem et al.: The Ottoman City (note 77), pp. 1-16. 83 Isin: Being Political (note 36), p. 14. 84 Eldem et al.: The Ottoman City (note 77). 85 Zubaida: Middle Eastern Experiences (note 67), p. 33.

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cities: cosmopolitanism occurred not despite but because of the strict bonds linking fissiparousness and self-rule.

The Cosmopolitan City as a Difference Machine Mediterranean cosmopolitanism can be grasped only by abandoning the mythology of synoecism, of the urban unity and homogeneity producing citizenship. In doing so the city can be more fruitfully interpreted as a “difference machine” as in Isin’s account: The city is a difference machine insofar as it is understood as the configuration that is constituted by the dialogical encounter of groups formed and generated immanently in the process of taking up positions, orienting themselves for and against each other, inventing and assembling strategies and technologies, mobilizing various forms of capital, and making claims to that space that is objectified as ‘the city’. Neither groups nor their identities exist before the encounter with the city.86

Consistent with Isin’s account, cosmopolitanism can be understood as a way to master the city as a difference machine, where ‘cosmopolitan citizenship’ emerges as the competence of sustaining the tension between the cosmos and the polis, between imperial citizenship and communitarian (and later national) citizenship, without producing any transcendental synthesis, characterized by unity and homogeneity. From this standpoint, Mediterranean cosmopolitanism is dramatic rather than dialectical. As Dževad Karahasan writes about Sarajevo during the 1990s siege, the Bosnian cultural system – established in its purest possible form exactly in Sarajevo- could be quite precisely defined as ‘dramatic’, as opposed to systems that could be described as ‘dialectical’. […] Namely, the fundamental relationship between elements of the system is the oppositional tension, which means that its elements are posed against one another, and mutually bound by that opposition, wherein they define each other. […] The fundamental property of this kind of cultural system is pluralism, which is what makes it directly contrary to monistic cultural systems, which can be defined as dialectical.87

From this perspective it becomes possible to address a question that is essential for my understanding of Mediterranean cosmopolitanism and of its relationship with modernity; that is the link between self-rule, fissiparousness and cosmopolitanism. Khaled Fahmy has offered an exemplary outline of this complex and ambiguous, aporia-like, relationship with reference to Alexandria, claiming that the explanatory power of the discourse of cosmopolitanism is undermined by its simultaneous adoption of two incompatible assumptions: first, that Alexandria 86 Isin: Being Political (note 36), p. 49. 87 Dževad Karahasan: Sarajevo. Exodus of a City, New York: Kodansha, 1994, pp. 5f.

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was an open, tolerant city where different ethnic groups were allowed to flourish and to coexist peacefully; and, secondly, that these ethnic groups were separate from each other, with little or no interaction between them.88

As a consequence, Fahmy contrasts two different varieties of cosmopolitanism in Alexandria, the ‘dynamic contiguity’ and the ‘melting pot’. Such a distinction echoes McPherson’s useful differentiation between two meanings of cosmopolitanism, described either as “the presence of a variety of confessional, cultural, and racial groups within a single urban setting” or as the adoption and adaption of “cultural forms drawn from other confessional and national groups”.89 From my standpoint, these two cosmopolitanisms do not exclude each other, but they are strictly related: the former can work as a condition of possibility for the latter or they can co-exist in certain moments in specific locations.90 What in Fahmy’s account appears to be an aporia of the Mediterranean cosmopolitan city is, from my standpoint, its secret, deep cipher, its very condition of possibility. It is impossible to draw a clear boundary between the ‘dynamic contiguity’ and the ‘melting pot’ models, just as there is not a clear cut between ‘imperial’ and ‘colonial’ cosmopolitanism.91 The ‘theoretical’ tension between cosmos and polis is hence mirrored in more ‘empirical’ tensions between different cosmopolitanisms in different times and spaces. As a consequence there is not one recipe for cosmopolitanism: we know it is about conviviality, hospitality, and multiple loyalties but the way these are crystallized into a cosmopolitan moment and place cannot be taken for granted. Cosmopolitanism here is not to be interpreted as a status, as a character that one person or community either possesses entirely and integrally or does not at all. It is rather a process, “a mundane administrative practice rather than a sublime ideal”92. It works precisely as a “difference machine” à la Isin, as an assemblage of different understandings and practices of loyalty and belonging, making it possible to sustain the tension between cosmos and polis. Cosmopolitan identity is always defined “with respect to some far-off reference point, some future, unreachable, historical and geographical horizon, an endlessly deferred, never-accomplished destiny”93. 88 Fahmy: For Cavafy, with Love and Squalor (note 75), p. 272. 89 Kenneth McPherson: Port Cities as Nodal Points of Change: The Indian Ocean, 1890s1920s, in: Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, edited by Leila Fawaz and C. A. Bayly, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, 75-95, here p. 83, quoted in Hanley: Grieving Cosmopolitanism (note 58), p. 1351. 90 Yvan Gastaut: Le Cosmopolitisme, un Univers de Situations. Cahiers de l’Urmis, 8, 2002, pp. 2-4, here p. 1, [accessed 26 March, 2015]. 91 Empires themselves should not be interpreted as homogenous, consistent, smooth territories but rather as contradictory, striated spaces, where different orders and architectures coexisted (see, for instance, Lauren A. Benton: A Search for Sovereignty. Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 92 Hanley: Grieving Cosmopolitanism (note 58), p. 1360. 93 Claudio Minca: ‘Trieste Nazione’ and its Geographies of Absence, in: Social and Cultural Geography 10, 3, 2009, pp. 257-277, here p. 258; see also Robert Mabro: Alexandria 1860-

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The Millet as a Cosmopolitan Dispositif In this section I argue this point by considering the case for the millet system,94 which “may be defined as a political organization which granted to the non-Muslims the right to organize into communities possessing certain delegated powers, under their own ecclesiastical heads. In time such ‘communities’ or millets developed their own peculiar characteristics and traditions, in this way becoming identified with the various nationalities”.95 The notion of millet is relevant here as it is often interpreted as the key dispositif expressing fissiparousness in the Ottoman Empire. In reality the millet entailed some civic autonomy for the different non-Muslim communities under the condition that they give up political claims to national sovereignty. Hence, at a first glance the millet system seems to enforce Weber’s claims examined in the previous section. My point is that the millet was a far more complex dispositif and should be understood strictly in relation to the governmentality of the tension between cosmos and polis. In particular, it establishes a diachronic continuity between the two moments – imperial and colonial – of Mediterranean cosmopolitanism. As Kamel Abu Jaber points out the millet was not a creation of Ottoman rulers but it pre-existed their conquest of Constantinople in 1453, it was maintained over the centuries and reformed in the mid-nineteenth century during the Tanzimat period between 1839 and 1876.96 Furthermore, in Egypt, the millet system survived the British occupation and it was only after the war of 1954 between Israel and Egypt that it was definitively cancelled by Gamal Abdel Nasser.97 From this standpoint the millet can be interpreted as a key constitutive element of the Ottoman urban “difference machine”. Of course, we should not search in the millet for the same features of self-rule and citizenship that emerged in the making of the Westphalian modern state order.98 We must bear in mind that the millet, as an expression of ‘imperial cos-

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1960. The Cosmopolitan Identity, in: Alexandria. Real and Imagined, edited by Anthony Hirst and Michael Silk, Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2006, pp. 247-262, here p. 261. Of course, this is not the place to discuss the complexity and the ambiguity of a notion such as that of millet. See, among other, Will Kymlicka: Two Models of Pluralism and Tolerance, in: Analyse & Kritik 14, 1, 1992, pp. 33-56; Engin F. Isin: Citizenship after Orientalism: Ottoman Citizenship, in: Citizenship in a Global World: European Questions and Turkish Experiences, edited by Fuat Keyman and Ahmet Icduygu, London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 31-51, here p. 44; and Paul S. Rowe: Neo-millet Systems and Transnational Religious Movements: The Humayun Decrees and Church Construction in Egypt, in: Journal of Church and State 49, 2, 2007, pp. 329-350. Kamel S. Abu Jaber: The Millet System in the Nineteenth‐Century Ottoman Empire, in: The Muslim World 57, 3, 1967, pp. 212-223, here p. 212. Ibid., pp. 212-223. Joel Beinin: The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, pp. 36-44 and 72-76. Hendrik Spruyt: The End of Empire and the Extension of the Westphalian System, in: International Studies Review 2, 2, 2000, pp. 65-92.

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mopolitanism’, is rather related to the ‘dynamic contiguity’ model of cosmopolitanism than to the ‘melting pot’.99 At the same time, it can be read as a “condition of possibility” for the emergence of further cosmopolitan moments in the Mediterranean.100 In particular, focusing on the relationship between the millet system and the making and unmaking of colonial cosmopolitanism in Ottoman cities can highlight two key issues in my discussion of Mediterranean cosmopolitanism. The first concerns the way fissiparousness and cosmopolitanism were actually made compatible with each other in order to sustain the tension between the cosmos and the polis. The second relates to the progressive erosion and final destruction of colonial cosmopolitanism in Mediterranean cities.

(Self-)Segregation and Cosmopolitanism Those holding the colonial cosmopolitanism point of view are often – and rightly – accused of elitism and nostalgia,101 if not explicitly of racism.102 For instance, in Zubaida’s account, Mediterranean cosmopolitanism is seen as the product of an urban elite of Ottoman modernizers, colonial flaneurs, hedonistic libertines, Muslim alcoholics, and heretic frequent travellers, challenging and disaggregating the inherited Oriental fissiparousness.103 Hence Fahmy is perfectly right to argue for an understanding of the cosmopolitan milieux which takes into account the behaviour of the poorest groups within the city.104 In so far as they were in the first instance port cities, Mediterranean cosmopolitan cities hosted not only writers, libertines and bon vivant, but also a variegated population of prostitutes, dockers, gangsters, and adventurers.105 Consideration of the millet system can thus actually help in reconsidering the dominant elitist and nostalgic narration of colonial cosmopolitanism by taking into account a more nuanced vision of intra-community relations. Millet belonging and loyalty were in fact transversal to class commonality: even when European colonialism and the related diasporas made Mediterranean cosmopolitanism a bourgeois elite’s ideal and practice à la Durrell, the resilience of the millet system was still tracking links of inter-class solidarity and social mobility,106 such as in nineteenth and early twentieth century Alexandria107 or 99 100 101 102 103 104

Fahmy: For Cavafy, with Love and Squalor (note 75), p. 272. Driessen: Mediterranean Port Cities (note 58), p. 138. See, for instance, Hanley: Grieving Cosmopolitanism (note 58). Fahmy: For Cavafy, with Love and Squalor (note 75), pp. 274-276. Zubaida: Middle Eastern Experiences (note 67). Khaled Fahmy: Towards a Social History of Modern Alexandria, in: Alexandria. Real and Imagined, edited by Anthony Hirst and Michael Silk, Cairo: American University of Cairo Press, 2006, pp. 281-306. 105 David Cesarani: Port Jews. Jewish Communities in Cosmopolitan Maritime Trading Centres, 1550-1950, London: Cass, 2002. 106 Hanley: Grieving Cosmopolitanism (note 58), p. 1351.

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in Salonika.108 Different generations of immigrants with different social and economic backgrounds were overlapping, meeting and interacting in both bourgeois and poorer neighbourhoods. As Julia Clancy-Smith observes in her recent book on European migration in Tunisia,109 the European diaspora in Mediterranean port cities began earlier than the colonial occupation and it was something more than the avant-garde of imminent colonisation, creating the condition for establishing a cosmopolitan milieux. Moreover, as Robert Mabro as argued about Alexandria, diasporic communities were not a monolithic entity but highly differentiated groups, with different aspirations and selfrepresentations.110 This aspect leads me to consider another key feature of the relationship between self-rule, fissiparousness and cosmopolitanism, that is, spatial selfsegregation. Most of the Mediterranean cosmopolitan cities, mainly those whose cosmopolitan history cuts across the two distinct moments of imperial and colonial cosmopolitanism, have been characterized by the spatial juxtaposition of semi-segregated neighbourhoods on the basis of the ethnic and/or religious affiliation of their inhabitants. This feature does not contradict their supposed cosmopolitanism: cosmopolitanism should not to be interpreted here as a seven-days-a-week and twenty-four-hours-a-day status, but rather a way to secure the governmentality of the “difference machine” and in particular of the tension between cosmos and polis in defining citizenship, belonging and loyalties. Spatial self-segregation was in a sense even reinforced by cosmopolitan practices. On the one hand, as noted above, self-segregation enforced trans-class solidarity: “Jewish dock-workers belong to the same category as Jewish bankers”111. On the other hand, in order to sustain the tension between cosmos and polis, such a residential zoning had to be compensated by the existence of other place, such as marketplaces112, which actually worked as thresholds where the topography of the city made it possible to meet and interact with ‘other’ groupings, millet, and citizens. Karahasan offers an exemplary description of the dramatic tension between closeness and openness, particular and universal, polis and cosmos which made Sarajevo one of the archetypes of cosmopolitanism in the Mediterranean: The interplay of that which is open and that which is closed, of the external and internal – which mutually comment upon, confront, and reflect each other – is made perfectly clear in the organization of the city. […] The mahalas [ethnic 107 Robert Ilbert: Alexandrie, 1830–1930. Histoire d’une Communauté Citadine, Cairo: Inst. Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1996. 108 Mazower: Salonica, (note 73). 109 Julia A. Clancy-Smith: Mediterraneans. North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800-1900, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. 110 Mabro: Alexandria 1860-1960 (note 93), pp. 250-261. 111 Hanley: Grieving Cosmopolitanism (note 58), p. 1351. 112 Matvejevic: Mediterranean (note 30), pp. 51, 185-191.

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neighbourhoods] are like rays spread around a focal point. […] The center of the city, which is also the geometric center of the space outlined by the mahalas, is Charshiya, where people do not live because it is reserved for workshops, stores and other forms of business. […] This is the foundation of the interplay of opposition and mutual reflection, of openness and closedness, of external and internal that is the most prominent characteristic of Sarajevo. This is also the source of the tension between external and internal, upon which the very foundation of Sarajevo’s existence is based. Charshiya is technically closed and semantically open, while each mahala is technically open and semantically closed. Charshiya is universality; mahala is particularity and concreteness.113

As Jason Goodwin stresses such a dramatic tension between the openness of the city center and the jealous closeness of the ethnic neighbourhoods was not exclusive to Sarajevo but was common to all of the great Ottoman cities.114 In my view, such millet self-segregation should be read as part of the broader dispositif sustaining the tension between cosmos and polis. When this centuries-old morphological balance is altered by catastrophic changes in the urban built environment, cosmopolitanism itself is endangered. This was the case in Salonika where a great fire destroyed large parts of the Jewish neighbourhoods in 1917, a few years after it came under Greek rule. The subsequent reconstruction was the occasion to modernize and to Hellenize the morphology of the city itself. As a consequence the Jewish presence spread across eight different and separated neighbourhoods, designed according to class belonging rather than to the former bounded community. This normalization and assimilation of the Jewish population under the twin demands of modernity and capitalism ended up in determining a quick decline, both quantitative and qualitative, of both the Jewish community and of the cosmopolitan settings of the city.115

From Fissiparousness to Urbicide: Unmaking Cosmopolitanism in the Mediterranean This relationship between self-rule, fissiparousness, and cosmopolitanism highlights some features of the relationship between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, and contributes to explaining the decline of both imperial and colonial cosmopolitanisms in the Mediterranean.116 The demise of Mediterranean cosmopolitan cities is not simply the uprising of the colonial subalterns, bring113 Karahasan: Sarajewo (note 87), pp. 8-10. 114 Jason Goodwin: Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, London: Picador, 2003. 115 Vilma Hastaoglou-Martinidis: A Mediterranean City in Transition: Thessaloniki Between the Two World Wars, in: Facta Universitas 1, 4, 1997, pp. 493-507. It is worth noting that in Smyrna/Izmir a fire, set by Turkish nationalist in 1922, also marked the end of the cosmopolitan aura of the city according to Eldem et al.: The Ottoman City (note 77), pp. 132f. 116 Driessen: Mediterranean Port Cities (note 58), p. 139.

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ing to an end imperial and/or colonial domination. Salonica, Trieste, Izmir, Alexandria – and I would add also Jerusalem and Sarajevo – have not been simply liberated from oppressive external rule, but they have been systematically destroyed, in what could be considered a true urbicide.117 The reverse also applies: Mediterranean cosmopolitan cities were not an Eden on earth, the embodiment of a perfect communitas imbedded into the wall and the street of an urbs, destroyed by the dark forces of nationalism and parochialism, of ethnic and religious hate. The relationship between cosmopolitanism and urbicide is much more complex and it deserves much more scholarly research than can be offered here. Urban cosmopolitans have been both the victims of fanatical modern nationalisms and the advocates who spread national feelings in the imperial and colonial Mediterranean. The making of nation-statehood – what Mignolo refers to as “internal colonialism”118 – was not superimposed onto the cosmopolitan milieux but was worked and reworked from within. In Trieste “cosmopolitan and irredentist ideologies were jointly forged and mutually reinforcing”119. In Istanbul the Young Ottomans’ modernization movement was at the same time revitalizing Ottoman cosmopolitanism120 and flaming nationalistic feelings among the local intellectuals:121 nationalist Young Ottomans forged cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan Young Turks realized nationalism.122 Between Salonika and Istanbul, the Dönme (descendants of Sephardic Jews who converted to Islam in the seventeenth century) progressively abandoned their cosmopolitan lifestyle and ideals to embrace Turkish nationalism.123 In Aleppo, it was among the Western-educated ‘reading class’ that Turkish nationalism spread and diffused, “cleansing the cosmopolitan city”.124 The millet system, while facilitating the emergence of a cosmopolitan milieu had at the same time an ambiguous impact on cosmopolitanism. When the European impact spread over the Mediterranean, modern nationalism found its

117 Cities, War and Terrorism. Towards an Urban Geopolitics, edited by Stephen Graham, Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004. 118 Mignolo: Local Histories (note 34). 119 Pamela Ballinger: Imperial Nostalgia: Mythologizing Habsburg Trieste, in: Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8, 1, 2003, pp. 84-101, here p. 93; see also Minca: ‘Trieste Nazione’ (note 93). 120 Zubaida: Middle Eastern Experiences (note 67), p. 34. 121 Şerif Mardin: The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought. A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962. 122 Fatma Muge Göçek: Ethnic Segmentation, Western Education, and Political Outcomes: Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Society, in: Poetics Today 14, 3, 1993, pp. 507-538. 123 Marc David Baer: The Dönme. Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. 124 Keith David Watenpaugh: Cleansing the Cosmopolitan City: Historicism, Journalism and the Arab Nation in the Post-Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean, in: Social History 30, 1, 2005, pp. 1-24; idem: Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle Class, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

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locus in the long-lasting intertwining of self-rule and fissiparousness.125 Greek nationalism in the Ottoman Empire was enhanced and facilitated by the millet system and by the growing self-rule granted to national groupings and communities in the Tanzimat period.126 Challenging the mainstream narrative that sees Zionism as a mainly Ashkenazi project and despite the anti-Zionist feelings of the influential Alliance Israélite Universelle,127 nationalism also emerged in the Jewish millet. This was particularly true in the Ottoman Balkans,128 but also, albeit in a more nuanced manner, in Egypt,129 while the Jewish millet in Salonika130 and Istanbul131 maintained a more critical attitude towards Zionism. Moreover, not only nationalism but also capitalism was introduced into the millet system, accelerating the demise of the cosmopolitan experience in the Mediterranean. According to Robert Tignor, for instance, the shift from a millet-based identity to an haute bourgeoisie class consciousness, although never fully accomplished, contributed to the rise of Greek and Zionist nationalism among the millet elite in Egypt.132 This tension between cosmos and polis, between universal and particular, embodied in the millet system, became evident in the Tanzimat period when a series of reforms aimed at abolishing the millet were introduced. These reforms, intended to facilitate “the transformation of hitherto Muslim, Christian and Jewish subjects into Ottomans”133 and to establish “a common Ottoman citizenship”134, met the resistance not only of Muslim religious authorities but also of the millet representatives135. Once again, cosmopolitan Mediterranean cities were facing an aporia. On the one hand, by accepting Western universalism and secular political, social and cultural customs, Tanzimat modernisation, was setting the 125 Göçek: Ethnic Segmentation (note 122). 126 Victor Roudometof: From Rum Millet to Greek Nation: Enlightenment, Secularization, and National Identity in Ottoman Balkan Society, 1453-1821, in: Journal of Modern Greek Studies 16, 1, 1998, pp. 11-48; idem: From Greek-Orthodox Diaspora to Transnational Hellenism: Greek Nationalism and the Identities of the Diaspora, in: The Call of the Homeland. Diaspora Nationalisms, Past and Present, edited by Allon Gal, Athena S. Leoussi and Anthony D. Smith, Leiden: Brill, 2010, pp 139-166. 127 Aron Rodrigue: Jews and Muslims. Images of Sephardi and Eastern Jewries in Modern Times, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. 128 Benbassa and Rodrigue: Sephardi Jews (note 49), pp. 116-157. 129 Robert Tignor: The Economic Activities of Foreigners in Egypt, 1920-1950: From Millet to Haute Bourgeoisie, in: Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, 3, pp. 416-449, here pp. 445f.; Beinin: The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry (note 97). 130 Neville J. Mandel: The Arabs and Zionism before World War I, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, p. 95. 131 Sarah Abrevaya Stein: Making Jews Modern. The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 132 Tignor: The Economic Activities (note 129). 133 M. Şükrü Hanioğlu: A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008, p. 74; see also Karen Barkey: Empire of Differences. The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 134 Ibid., p. 208. 135 Ibid., pp. 75-76.

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conditions for colonial cosmopolitanism to emerge. On the other hand, in order to counter-act the growing nationalist feeling among the ethnic and religious minorities and to encourage Ottoman belonging and loyalty, it undermined the millet dispositif which worked as a condition of possibility for cosmopolitanism itself. As Malte Fuhrmann claims, [t]he dividing line between social practices inspired by nationalism and those inspired by cosmopolitanism does not reveal two neatly separated camps. Instead, the actions of individuals often followed both of these seemingly contradictory modes of social intercourse. Decisions on which of these modes should be followed were often made on a day to day basis.136

As a consequence, the relationship between fissiparousness, self-rule, and cosmopolitanism in the millet dispositif is much more complex as I envisage it than in Weber’s and Zubaida’s accounts. Colonial cosmopolitanism emerged when Ottoman imperial cosmopolitanism, immanent in the millet system, encountered the European impact. It was therefore the overlapping and the blurring of lines between what Waley calls Oriental and European cosmopolitanism.137 This encounter produced the condition of possibility for Mediterranean cosmopolitanism, but also for its demise and for subsequent urbicide. From this standpoint, ‘colonial cosmopolitanism’ should be read as something more complex than an elitist project, nowadays read through the lenses of memory and nostalgia. The question now remains as to what might be learned from the Mediterranean experience of cosmopolitanism.

Anything Left? Anything to be Learned? Through the spatial oxymoron inherent to it, the concept of cosmopolitanism establishes a tension between the cosmos and the polis. Thinking in-between these dichotomies entails a critical and radical rethinking of both the conceptions of cosmopolitanisms and the spatial categories adopted to make sense of them. Cosmopolitanism is neither simply about “the concern for the world as it were one polis”138 nor simply about being a citizen of the world, and its spatiality can not be reduced to a global sense of place à la Massey.139 Cosmopolitanism is rather a matter of being in-between the cosmos and the polis, dwelling in a field of tensions where both are simultaneously present, enabling each other but continuously negotiating each other’s borders. Cosmopolitanism has to be read here as specific spatio-temporal dispositif securing the governmen136 Malte Fuhrmann: Cosmopolitan Imperialists and the Ottoman Port Cities. Conflicting Logics in the Urban Social Fabric, in: Cahiers de la Méditerranée 67, 2003, pp. 1-50, here 46f., [accessed 22 January 2016]. 137 Waley: Introducing Trieste (note 69). 138 Benhabib: Another Cosmopolitanism (note 15), p. 174. 139 Massey: Space, Place and Gender (note 23), pp. 146-156.

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tality of the city as a ‘difference machine’ and the co-existence of multiple and complex accounts of citizenship. The crucial point here is that this is not a mere substitution: cosmo-imperial citizenship replacing poli-urban citizenship. Cosmopolitanism is not even about another kind of citizenship, a cosmopolitan one, as in much of the contemporary literature.140 Cosmopolitanism is about sustaining a dramatic tension between these two sources (cosmos and polis, imperial and urban) of citizenship rather than deciding which one prevails over the other. In Trieste as in many other Mediterranean cosmopolitan cities, cosmopolitanism is about reconciling the irreconcilable.141 A third is not given: cosmopolitanism is not a space outside this tension, but it is the inbetween of such a tension. This tension simultaneously sustains and undermines cosmopolitanism, which at any point can turn into vernacularism and nationalism and even lead to the extreme outcome of urbicide. Just as in Karahasan’s account of Sarajevo’s siege, the stones, the houses, the walls, the streets themselves of the cosmopolis can both evoke conviviality and encounter and provoke rage and violence. So what can be learned from such a precarious cosmopolitanism? It is certain that it cannot supply us with a normative and universal agenda for governing contemporary cosmopolitanization. It cannot offer the European Union’s techno-bureaucracy a cosmopolitan model to address its citizenship dilemmas as many ‘new cosmopolitans’ would like.142 It plays neither the trumpet of human rights nor the drums of humanitarian war but rather the ambiguous variations of the Arab music that cosmopolitan Bela Bartok defended against Ottoman modernists at the 1932 Congress of Arab Music in Cairo.143 In Chambers’ words, “it is full of discontinuous histories, the sounds of the voices that evade conclusions, accents that do not seek to domesticate the world but, rather, bear interrogations that promote a sense of the unhomely, full of memories that […] draw blood”144. Despite the impotence of Mediterranean cosmopolitanisms in providing a universal, ‘positive’, normative synthesis, cosmopolitanism is back again in the Mediterranean. It sustains both neo-liberal projects for urban regeneration, such as in Trieste, Alexandria and Istanbul and the building of national identity in places such as Israel, where the ‘melting pot’ ideal goes hand in hand with the (ab)use of Ottoman legislation to seize land and evict Arab farmers.145 At the same time, neo-Ottomanism nostalgia has emerged in the Medi140 Andrew Linklater: Critical Theory and World Politics. Citizenship, Sovereignty and Humanity, London: Routledge, 2007; Delanty: The Cosmopolitan Imagination (note 7). 141 Roberto Bazlen: Scritti, Milano: Adelphi, 1984, p. 251, quoted in Luiza Bialasiewicz and Claudio Minca: The ‘Border Within’: Inhabiting the Border in Trieste, in: Environment and Planning D 28, 2010, pp. 1084-1105, here p. 1089. 142 Benhabib: Another Cosmopolitanism (note 15); Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande: Cosmopolitan Europe, London: Polity Press, 2006; Rumford: Cosmopolitanism and Europe (note 5). 143 Zubaida: Middle Eastern Experiences (note 67), p. 38. 144 Chambers: Mediterranean Crossings (note 30), p. 55. 145 Annalisa Colombino: Multiculturalism and Time in Trieste: Place-marketing Images and Residents’ Perceptions of a Multicultural City, in: Social and Cultural Geography 10, 3,

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terranean, for example in Turkey where understanding Ottoman citizenship is a key moment in further elaborating its position in a globalized world.146 Finally, while I am writing these conclusive remarks, the Southern shores of the Mediterranean are flamed by the popular quest for change and democratization: soon ‘new cosmopolitans’ (Nobel Prize winners, famous scientists, intelligence service chiefs, international civil servants) will have to negotiate power with Islamist activists and their alternative universalism of the Umma. In all these cases some lesson must be learned from the historical experiences of imperial and colonial cosmopolitanisms, from these fragile attempts to sustain the tension between the cosmos and the polis.

2009, pp. 279-297; Della Dora: The Rhetoric of Nostalgia (note 33); Mills: Streets of Memory (note 33). 146 Engin F. Isin: The Soul of a City: Hüzün, Keyif, Longing, in: Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe?, edited by Deniz Göktürk, Levent Soysal and Ipek Tureli, London: Routledge, 2010, pp. 35-47; idem: Citizenship after Orientalism (note 94).

SHLOMO LOTAN

The ‘Other’ in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Crusaders and their Varying Images of the Muslims in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin One of the most interesting and familiar singularities in the medieval era was the Crusader social and religious movement which began in the late 11th century and declined in the early 14th century. During this period many Christians from Europe – peasants, merchants, bourgeois and nobles – left their houses, abandoned their possessions and traveled to the eastern Mediterranean shores in the hope of acquiring wealth or positions, and beginning a new life in a new land conquered from Muslims. The Crusade idea was born in a period of religious visions and of pilgrimages. The social movement occurred as a regular series of large expeditions punctuated by long periods. Thousands of western Christians became Crusaders by taking a public vow and receiving plenary indulgences from the Church authorities for freeing the Holy Land of the infidels.1 The Crusades were acts of mass migration from Europe to the conquered territories in the Mediterranean basin. The Crusaders were the first European population groups to leave Medieval Europe. They were called Franci in Latin, from Francia in Western Europe.2 In the 19th and 20th centuries Crusade studies became an important historical research field in Europe. Many scholars approached the subject as a form of colonialism, involving the conquest of new territories from the Muslim provinces in the East.3 An example reinforcing this view can be found in the writings of the prominent Israeli historian Joshua Prawer. The idea of the re1

2 3

Harald Kleinschmidt: People on the Move: Attitudes toward and Perceptions of Migration in Medieval and Modern Europe, Westpoint: Praeger Publishers, 2003, pp. 80-84; Olivia R. Constable: Clothing, Iron and Timber: The Growth of Christian Anxiety about Islam in the long Twelfth Century, in: European Transformations, the Long Twelfth Century, edited by Thomas F.X. Noble and John H. Van Engen, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012, pp. 279-313, here pp. 298-306. Joshua Prawer: The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem: European Colonialism in the Middle Ages, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972, pp. 60-85; Christopher Tyerman: The Debate on the Crusades, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011, pp. 7-15. Steven Runciman: A History of the Crusades. The First Crusade and the Foundation of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, vol. I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951, pp. 106-118, 121-133; Prawer: The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (note 2), pp. 503-533; Ronnie Ellenblum: Crusader Castles and Modern Histories, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 43-61; Nikolas Jaspert: Die Kreuzzüge, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2013, pp. 67-70.

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demption of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the liberation of the Christian holy places from Muslim occupation followed, over the years, with military activities for the survival of the newly established Latin Kingdom against the increasing threat of Muslim armies.4 These activities happened in the period following the end of the First Crusade in 1099, and the establishment of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Yet the complications and the basic problems remained – what were the social and spiritual foundations on which the Latin Kingdom had been established? Also of significance was the Crusader attitude to the local population in the Latin Kingdom territories. These and other issues are examined in this article. It seems that after the end of the First Crusade the Frankish nobility and the Church leaders who remained in the East faced a number of issues, including how to continue expanding their estates and how to maintain their hold on the territory, now mostly inhabited by hostile populations. At first, the Crusaders sought to increase the European portion of the population. However, immigration from Europe remained low. Thus, the Crusaders began to strengthen the local Christian element – the Eastern Orthodox Christians, and encouraged migration from remote areas, such as Transjordan, to the main occupied cities in the kingdom.5 The area in question was extensive, ranging from Beirut to Gaza and from the Jordan River and the Arab desert to the Mediterranean coast. These areas remained largely uninhabited and never attracted the anticipated immigrant populations.6 After the end of the first Crusade, the local population was subjugated. The populations of some of the cities in the Frankish Kingdom were very diverse, but most of the countryside remained dominated by Muslims and it was on them that the Crusaders relied for supplies of food and agricultural products.7 This interpretation of the Crusaders’ strategy was challenged in the early 1990s by the work of Israeli scholars Ronnie Ellenblum and Adrian Boas, who surveyed the majority of Crusader sites in Israel. In his study of Frankish settlements, Ellenblum concluded that the Christian settlers had not only gathered in walled cities but also moved into rural and agricultural regions close to the urban centers of Jerusalem, Acre and Nazareth. This led Ellenblum to draw 4 5 6 7

Joshua Prawer: Histoire du Royaume Latin de Jérusalem, tome premier, Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1975. Joshua Prawer: Crusader Cities, in: The Medieval City. Studies in Honor of Robert S. Lopez, edited by Harry A Miskimin, David Herlihy, Abraham L. Udovitch and Robert S. Lopez, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977, pp. 179-199, here pp. 182-185. Jean Richard: The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, vol. A, Amsterdam: North-Holland Pub., 1979, pp. 15-17. Norman Housley: The Crusades and Islam, in: Medieval Encounters 13, 2007, pp. 189-208, here pp. 191-192; Nicholas E. Morton: William of Tyre’s Attitude toward Islam: Some Historiographical Reflections, in: Deeds Done Beyond the Sea: Essays on William of Tyre’ Cyprus and the Military Orders presented to Peter Edbury, edited by Susan B. Edgington and Helen J. Nicholson, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, pp. 13-23, here p. 18.

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new conclusions about the spread of the Frankish population in the countryside of the Crusader Kingdom.8 These were strengthened by Boas’ archeological studies on the expansion of the Crusader settlements in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.9 This theory of rural expansion was supported by historical examination. In the second half of the 12th century, a period of stability and settlement building began in the Latin kingdom. Relationships developed between the new Frankish settlements and the neighboring Muslim villages. In 1153 King Baldwin III established the Crusader village Casale Imbert (A-ziv, Achziv) along the Mediterranean road between Acre and Tyre. He established a village settled by, among others, a group of French peasants.10 In the southern part of the Latin Kingdom, King Fulk of Anjou built the Crusader fortress of Bethgibelin (Beit Guvrin) in 1136 and gave it to the Hospitallers, one of the kingdom’s military orders. The Hospitallers allowed the construction of a civilian settlement (Faubourg) with 32 Frankish families whose names were mentioned in the fortress charter.11 This village received a charter approved by the Hospitaller Grand Master Gilbert d'Assailly in the year 1168. The villagers were known by their Western European names – Petrus Alvernensis, Stephanus Lombardus, Brun Burgundie, Adalardus de Ramis and Petrus Catalanus.12 They settled to the east of Ascalon on the kingdom’s southern frontier with Egypt and also helped to reinforce the kingdom in an area populated mainly by Muslims.13 It seems that the local Muslim population and the Frankish population began to develop a special relationship in the second half of the 12th century. The reality was that the governing power and the population under its rule coexist8 9 10

11

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Ronnie Ellenblum: Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 3-11, 277-287. Adrian J. Boas: Crusader Archaeology: The Material Culture of the Latin East, London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 60-90. “Notum sit omnibus … quod ego Balduwinus … dona sive conventiones, quas Girardus de Valentia Latinis in casali Huberti de Paci ab eodem locatis iussu meo habuit, laudo et concedo. Que dona sive conventiones hee sunt: predictus namque Girardus memorati casalis incolis, quos ibidem posuit, domos dedit, ipsis etiam et eorum heredibus quiete, libere et sine omni calumpnia vel impedimento habendas et iure perpetuo possidendas.” (Tabulae Ordinis Theutonici ex tabularii regii Berolinensis codice potissimum, edited by Ernst Strehlke, Berlin: Weidmann, 1869, no. 1, Feb. 26, 1153, p. 1). Amos Kloner and Michael Cohen: The Crusader Fortress of Beth Guvrin, (Hebrew), in: Qadmoniot. A Journal for the Antiquities of Eretz-Israel and Bible Land 33, 1, 119, 2000, pp. 32-39, here pp. 32f.; Piers D. Mitchell: Approaches to the Study of Migration during the Crusades, in: Crusades 12, 2013, pp. 1-12, here p. 4. Cart. Hosp., 1, pp. 272-273, no. 399, cf. Joseph Delaville Le Roulx: Cartulaire general de l’Ordre des Hospitaliers de Saint-Jean de Jerusalem (1100-1310), vol. I, Paris: Leroux, 1894. Nikolas Jaspert: Grenzen und Grenzräume im Mittelalter: Forschungen, Konzepte und Begriffe, in: Grenzräume und Grenzüberschreitungen im Vergleich – Der Osten und der Westen des Mittelalterlichen Lateineuropa, edited by Klaus Herbers and Nikolas Jaspert, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2007, pp. 9-18, here pp. 15-17.

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ed and formed a partnership which contributed to the kingdom’s survival and development. The Crusaders’ sense of alienation from, fear of and hostility towards the Muslim population gradually gave way to awareness of the culture of their neighbors. There is some evidence of this development in sources from that period. The Crusader chronicler Fulcher of Chartres described the first half of the 12th century in the Latin Kingdom and the integration of the Frankish settlers thus: Consider, I pray, and reveal how in our time God has distorted the Occident into the Orient. For we who were Occidents have now become Orientals. He who was a Roman or French in this land has been made into a Galilean or a Palestinian. He who was one of Reims or Charters has now become a citizen of Tyre or Antioch. We have already forgotten the places of our birth, these are already unknown to many of us or not stated any more […] some have taken wives not only of their own people but Syrians or Armenians or even Saracens who have gained the grace of baptism […].14

It was mainly the rural population and the Crusader bourgeois adapted to the local customs, but not the ranks of the Church authorities who still feared the Muslims and the impact of their religion. The Church leaders’ efforts to convert the Muslim population to Christianity became difficult, especially during periods in which the Muslim power was increasing, such as in the reign of Saladin in the second half of the 12th century.15 Muslim slaves’ requests to convert to Christianity were rejected. Neither their masters nor the Crusaders had any interest in releasing them from slavery and making them free citizens.16 One of the Church leaders in the Latin Kingdom, the Bishop of Acre (1216–1225), Jacques de Vitry, complained bitterly that the Christian population was not interested in converting the Muslims that were living peacefully in the region. They were prepared to fight and die for their religion, but were unwilling to convert to Christianity those wishing to convert in order to belong

14 “Considera, quaeso, et mente cogita, quomodo tempore in nostro transvertit Deus Occidentem in Orientem. Nam qui fuimus Occidentales, nunc facti sumus Orientales, qui fuit Romanus aut Francus, hac in terra factus est Galilaeus aut Palestinus. Qui fuit Remensis aut Carnotensis, nunc efficitur Tyrius vel Antiochenus. Iam obliti sumus nativitatis nostrae loca, iam nobis pluribus vel sunt ignota vel etiam inaudita.. ille vero iam duxit uxorem non tantum compatriotam, sed et Syram aut Armenam et interdum Saracenam, baptismi autem gratiam adeptam..lingua diversa iam communis facta utrique nationi fit nota et iungit fides quibus est ignota progenies”. (Fulcher of Chartres, Fulcheri Carnotensis Historia Hierosolymitana (1095-1127), edited by Heinrich Hagenmeyer, Heidelberg: Winter, 1913, III, ch. 37). 15 The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for the Crusading Period from al-Kamil fil-tarike. The Years 541-589/1146-1193. The Age of Nur al-Din and Saladin, part 2, translated by Donald S. Richards, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, pp. 229-324. 16 Benjamin Z. Kedar: The Subjected Muslims of the Frankish Levant, in: Muslims under Latin Rule 1100-1300, edited by James M. Powell, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 135-174, here pp. 152-154.

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to their society.17 In the directions issued by the papal legate Odo de Châteauroux in Jaffa in 1253 and in Acre in 1254, the church leader addressed the issue. He complained that the Crusader nobility hindered the conversion of Muslim slaves, and even prevented them from participating in Christian services. These instructions remained largely unheeded and the Crusader nobility continued to object to the conversion-based legalization of the Muslims.18 Another example of the Crusader social attitudes to the Muslim population in the Latin Kingdom was offered by Ibn Jubayr, an Andalusian Muslim, in 1184. He traveled from Syria to the Mediterranean coast through the northern area of the kingdom visiting Galilee and the main Crusader cities of Tyre and Acre.19 It appears that Ibn Jubayr was curious to learn about Muslims in the Latin Kingdom. He noted that they were afforded general religious freedom. He also saw several mosques in the Crusader cities of Acre and Tyre, but he observed that these were located on the outskirts of the city, away from the Crusader churches. On his journey he also saw several convoys of Muslims slaves being transported towards the Crusader positions. He describes how trade was managed in Acre and how tax was collected close to the port gate. Despite this, Ibn Jubayr was critical of the Crusaders’ character and habits, including their raising of pigs which had spread all over the city and the filthy conditions in which they lived.20 This would seem to support the view that to a certain extent the Crusaders chose commercial and economic relations with the local population rather than religious based rivalry or conflict. Crusaders and the Muslims coexisted peacefully in cities such as Acre and Tyre. There is documentary evidence showing that Muslims owned property in several streets and districts in the main Crusaders cities, even having their own courts of law such as the Cour des Bourgeois and the Cour de la Fonde.21 It is apparent that the need to create a modus vivendi and to prevent friction and conflict led over time to finding ways of creating a relative peace between the separate populations. The authorities sought to minimize the religious fric17 Robert B.C. Huygens: Lettres de Jacques de Vitry (1160/1170-1240), éveque de Saint Jean d’Acre, Leiden: Brill, 1960, II, lines 206-210, p. 88. 18 Benjamin Z. Kedar: Crusade and Mission, European Approaches toward the Muslims, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. 151, 226; idem, Ecclesiastical Legislation in the Kingdom of Jerusalem: the Statutes of Jaffa (1253) and Acre (1254), in: Crusade and Settlement. Papers read at the First Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East and presented to R.C. Smail, edited by. P.W. Edbury, Cardiff: University College Cardiff Press, 1985, pp. 225-230, here 225-228; Alex Mallett: Popular Muslim Reaction to the Franks in the Levant, 1097-1291, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, pp. 105-119. 19 Ibn Jubayr: The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, translated by Ronald J.C. Broadhurst, London: Cape, 1952. 20 Ibid., pp. 316-322; Christine Chism: Memory, Wonder and Desire in the Travels of Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battuta, in: Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image and Identity, edited by Nicholas Paul and Suzanne Yeager, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012, pp. 29-49, here pp. 33-38. 21 Jonathan Riley-Smith: Some Lesser officials in Latin Syria, in: English Historical Review 87, 342, 1972, pp. 1-26, here p. 7.

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tion caused by Church authorities and the leaders of the Military Orders, in order to maintain and develop civil coexistence and foster mutual trust among the different populations. The German Crusader Freidank, a participant in the Sixth Crusade in 1228, observed these close social relations between Crusader and Muslim populations during his visit to Acre. The German poet, who accompanied the Holy Roman Emperor Fredrick II on his journey, lamented the fact that there was no difference between Christians and ‘pagans’. The poet noted that both young and elderly Christians speak the alien languages, and appreciate the infidels more than people of their own race.22 The peaceful coexistence of the different populations in the Crusader Kingdom began to wane as Muslim power grew and conflict intensified from in the 1170s onwards. The heavy defeat inflicted on the Crusaders in the Battle of Hattin near Tiberias in July 1187 brought a change in attitude towards the Crusaders and their power among the Muslim population.23 The Crusaders became isolated in a number of small communities and holdings. From the late 12th century until the fall of the Crusader Kingdom in 1291, the Crusaders did not achieve any real military gains. The Third Crusade (1189–1192) had not brought much hope. Despite the achievements of Richard I (Lionheart), who returned the shore line area up to Jaffa to Crusader rule, the mountain regions within the Holy Land were lost and Jerusalem remained under Muslim control.24 The beginning of the Fifth Crusade in 1217 also failed to bring any areas of the Holy Land back under Crusader control25, as was the case with the Seventh Crusade (1250–1254), led by the French king Saint Louis.26 Apart from a few pilgrimages in the area of Nazareth and Galilee, the Crusaders were unable to penetrate eastward into Muslim territories from the coast.27 A combination of diplomatic activity and efforts to become close to the other gave the Crusaders a foothold within the area occupied by the Muslims. This is known from Emperor Frederick II’s Crusade of in 1228–1229.28 The campaign, preceded by diplomatic overtures to the Egyptian Sultan al-Kamil, 22 Freidank: Freidanks Bescheidenheit. Leipzig: Philipp Reclam 1878, pp. 125-131. 23 Malcolm Barber: The Crusader States, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012, pp. 270312. 24 John Gillingham: Richard I, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, pp. 155-221. 25 James M. Powell: Anatomy of a Crusade 1213-1221, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986, pp. 123-135. 26 Jean Richard: Saint Louis, Roi d’une France Féodale, Soutien de la Terre Sainte, Paris: Fayard, 1983, pp. 246-149; Peter Jackson: The Seventh Crusade, 1244-1254. Sources and Documents, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, pp. 63-74. 27 Shlomo Lotan: St. Louis’ Pilgrimage to Nazareth: A Reflection of Nazareth and Lower Galilee in the Mid-Thirteenth Century, in: Nazareth, History and Cultural Heritage, edited by Maḥmūd Yazbak and Sharīf Sharīf, Nazareth: Nazareth Municipality, 2013, pp. 9-18, here pp. 14-16. 28 Thomas C. van Cleve: The Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen immutator Mundi, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972, pp. 224-226; David Abulafia: Frederick II, A Medieval Emperor, London: Lane, 1988, pp. 185-188.

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ended without any fighting on the battlefield. The Crusade culminated in the signing of a peace agreement, hudna in Arabic, between the Crusaders and the Ayyubid armies, in Jaffa on 18 February 1229.29 In Jaffa Frederick II managed to regain substantial territories for the Crusader kingdom in Galilee and in the Jerusalem area without military conflict. The Muslims agreed to negotiations, realizing that their power would not be compromised if the outlying areas were ruled by the Crusaders.30 This political settlement was severely criticized by church leaders and the leading Military Orders, particularly the Templers. Pope Gregory IX (1227–1241) even excommunicated the Emperor and called him the enemy of Christianity.31 The Templars went even further, hindering his crusade, and according to Matthew Paris’s chronicle, even trying to expose his plans to the Egyptian Sultan and causing the Emperor impairment.32 The most meaningful political change occurred in the second half of the 13th century, with the decline in the number of European immigrants to the Latin Kingdom. The Crusaders were isolated in an area surrounded by powerful Muslim forces. This was particularly true after the rise of the Mamluks in the early 1260s. The Crusader cities and fortresses were conquered one by one, beginning in 1263: Nazareth, Caesarea and Arsuf, Safed, Jaffa and Antioch, and finally in 1271 the main fortresses of the Military Orders: Crac des Chevaliers of the Hospitallers and Montfort (Starkenberg) of the Teutonic Order. Apart from some attempts to recover the occupied territories, such as raiding expeditions to Galilee in 1266 and the military campaign led by Prince Edward in the Latin Kingdom from Acre to the Galilee and the coastal area near Caesarea in 1271, the Crusaders offered no resistance.33 The peace agreements signed with the Mamluks in 1272 and 1283 fixed the status quo in the Latin East. The Crusaders kept their possessions in the 29 L’Estoire de Eracles Empereur et la Conqueste de la Terre d’Outremer, RHC Occ., vol. II, Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1859, p. 374; Jean L.A. Huillard-Bréholles: Historia Diplomatica Frederici Secundi, vol. 3, Torino: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1963, pp. 85-90, 93-99; Tomaz Mastnak: Crusading Peace, Christendom, the Muslim World and Western Political Order, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, pp. 148-152; Yvonne Friedman: Peacemaking: Perceptions and Practices in the medieval Latin East, in: The Crusades in the Near East, edited by Conor Kostick, London: Routledge, 2011, pp. 229-257, here pp. 238-239. 30 Louis Pouzet: De la paix armée à la négociation et à ses ambiguitiés. L’accord de Jaffa (1229/ 626) entre Frédéric II et al-Malik al-Kamil, in: Chretiens et Musulmans au Temps des Croisades, edited by Louis Pouzet and Louis Boisset, Beyrouth: Presses de l’Universite Saint-Joseph, 2007, pp. 91-116, here pp. 96-98; Hiroshi Takayama: Frederick II’s Crusade: An example of Christian- Muslim diplomacy, in: Mediterranean Historical Review 25, 2, 2010, pp. 169-185, here pp. 174f. 31 James M. Powell: Patriarch Gerold and Frederick II: The Matthew Paris Letter, in: Journal of Medieval History 25, 1, 1999, pp. 19-26. 32 Matthew Paris: De superbia et invidia Templariorum et Hospitalariorum, in: Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, edited by Henry Richards Luard, vol. III, London: Longman, 1874, pp. 177-178. 33 Cronaca del Templare di Tiro (1243-1314), la caduta degli stati crociati nel racconto di un testimone ocular, edited by Laura Minervini, Napoli: Liguori, 2000, no. 113 (349); L’Estoire de Eracles (note 29), p. 461.

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coastal region between 'Atlit, Tyre and Sidon and in the major Crusader cities and in several villages. This marked the beginning of an era of social stabilization and relative military calm along the Mediterranean coast. The Crusaders’ strengthening of ties between East and West, and encouragement of trade with the Muslim society, led to various types of social relationships.34 In general, the Crusaders made contact with the Muslim village leader (Ra'is or Rayses), who mediated between them and the civilian population, preventing unnecessary friction and making sure that taxes on crops were paid.35 During this period the significance of developing agriculture and industry was recognized by the Crusaders, as was the ability of the local population to foster such developments, as was the case in sugar production. The Galilee region became a major agricultural and commercial center. Many villages, including Muslim villages, began to concentrate on growing sugar cane and producing sugar. The combination of a warm climate and ample water sources led to the intensification sugar production. Peled’s research into the sugar industry and its place in the Crusader period indicates that many dams were built in order to facilitate the cultivation of sugar cane in places such as Manot (Manueth) and Cabri (Le Quiebre) in Western Galilee. Sugar crystals were transported to Acre and Tyre, for the local population and the Crusader nobility, who also shipped it to Europe.36 There is no doubt that the necessities of economic survival in the Latin Kingdom replaced military tension and fighting. The Military Orders, those powerful and influential armed Christian institutions which dominated the Latin Kingdom and were growing stronger throughout Europe, sought closer ties with local Muslims, despite the ongoing conflict with the Muslim enemy and the religious mission which was the reason for their existence and defined their dealings with Muslims.37 There were a number of interpreters serving in the Military Orders headquarters. For instance, Simon, a Hospitaller scribe, seems to have been the interpreter between the Military Order and the Muslims in the region of Homs in northern Syria in 1229.38 Other brethren conducted a dialogue and negotiations with 34 Jonathan Riley-Smith: The Survival in Latin Palestine of Muslim Administration, in: The Eastern Mediterranean Lands in the Period of the Crusades, edited by Peter Malcolm Holt, Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1977, pp. 9-22, here pp. 14-18. 35 Riley-Smith: Some Lesser officials in Latin Syria (note 21), pp. 9-15. 36 Anat Peled: Sugar in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. A Crusader Technology between East and West, (Hebrew), Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 2009, pp. 97-144. 37 Helen J. Nicholson: ‘Martyrum collegio sociandus haberet’: Depictions of the Military Orders’ Martyrs in the Holy Land, 1187-1291, in: Crusading and Warfare in the Middle Ages: Realities and Representations. Essays in Honour of John France, edited by Simon John and Nicholas E. Morton, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, pp. 101-118, here pp. 105-110; Joachim Rother: Embracing Death, Celebrating Life: Reflections on the Concept of Martyrdom in the Order of the Knights Templar, in: Ordines Militares, Yearbook for the Study of the Military Orders 19, 2014, pp. 169-192, here pp. 169-171. 38 Hussein M. Attiya: Knowledge of Arabic in the Crusader States in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in: Journal of Medieval History 25, 3, 1999, pp. 203-213, here p. 206.

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Muslims and try to take control of areas where they gained control and power. The Teutonic charters recalled Arabic interpreters, such as Simon from Castro Regis and George of Maron, Eastern Orthodox Christians who mediated the purchase of land between the local population in Galilee and the leadership of the Teutonic Order, at the headquarters of the Order in Acre.39 In 1291, two decades after the truce and following years of carefully managed contact, relations between the Mamluks and the Crusaders deteriorated.40 At that time, a group of Italian merchants appeared in the port of Acre. As they passed through Acre’s crowded narrow streets, they came across a group of local Muslims crossing the city markets. The Italians objected to the presence of Muslims in a Christian city and killed them.41 The Mamluks saw this massacre as a violation of the peace agreements. The efforts of the Kingdom’s nobility to appease the Mamluks were fruitless. The Mamluks invaded the Kingdom and laid siege to the city of Acre. They succeeded in breaking into the city in May 1291 and attacked its population.42 Most of the Crusaders fled to the port with the intention of escaping to Cyprus, but only a few were successful.43 The Templars were the last to leave, abandoning the city on May 28th 1291. They went to 'Atlit which remained the last outpost of the Crusader 39 RRH, no. 1399 (1274), no. 1435 (1280), cf. Reinhold Röhricht: Regesta Regni Hierosolymitani 1097-1291, Innsbruck: Libraria Academica Wagneriana, 1893; Shlomo Lotan: Governing the Teutonic Order from ‘Outremer’ – The Teutonic Headquarters Competing in the Last Era of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, in: Herrschaft, Netzwerke, Brüder des Deutschen Ordens in Mittelalter und Neuzeit. Vorträge der Tagung der Internationalen Historischen Kommission zur Erforschung des Deutschen Ordens in Marburg 2010, edited by Klaus Militzer, Weimar: VDG, 2012, pp. 25-38, here p. 34. 40 Peter Thorau: The Lion of Egypt, Sultan Baybars I and the Near East in the Thirteenth Century, London: Longman, 1987, pp. 177f.; Peter M. Holt: Early Mamluk Diplomacy (12601290), Leiden: Brill, 1995, pp. 69-88; Jörg-Dieter Brandes: Die Mameluken, Aufstieg und Fall einer Sklavendespotie, Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1996, pp. 78-102. 41 “Si avint .i. jour, par l’euvre de l’ennemy d’infer, que volentiers porchasse males heuvres entre bones gens, [et] fist enssy que ses cruyssés, qui estoient venus pour bien faire et pour l’arme d’yaus au secours de la sité d’Acre, si vindrent a ssa destrussion, car il coururent .i. jor par la terre d’Acre et mirent a l’espee tous les povres vilains qui porteent les biens a Acre a vendre et forment et autres choses, guy estoient sarazins des cazaus dou pourpris d’Acre, et ausi meimes tuerent pluissors suriens qui porteent barbes et estoient de la ley de Gresse, que pour lor barbes les tuerent en change de sarazins, la quele chose fu trop mau faite, et ce fu la chose pour coy Acre fu frise de sarazins, con vos entenderés”. (Cronaca del Templare di Tiro (1243-1314) (33), no. 224 (480)). 42 Excidii Aconis Gestorum Collectio. Magister Thadeus Civis Neapolitanus, Ystoria de Desolatione et Concvlcatione Civitatis Acconensis et Tocivs Terre Sancte, edited by Robert B.C. Huygens, with contributions by Alan Forey and David Nicolle, Turnhout: Brepols, 2004, pp. 13-17, 119-120; Erwin Stickel: Der Fall von Akkon. Untersuchunggen zum Abklingen des Kreuzzugsgedankens am Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts, Bern: Lang, 1975; Donald P. Little: The Fall of 'Akkā in 690/1291: The Muslim Version, in: Studies in Islamic History and Civilization, in Honor of Professor David Ayalon, edited by Mose Sharon, Leiden: Brill, 1986, pp. 159-181. 43 Marie-Louise Favreau-Lilie: The Military Orders and the Escape of the Christian Population from the Holy Land in 1291, in: Journal of Medieval History 19, 3, 1993, pp. 201-227, here 209-218.

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Kingdom until August 1291, when two centuries of Crusader rule in the Holy Land finally ended. Finally, it is important to point out that the Crusaders had a significant impact on the other – the local Muslim population which remained in the Frankish Kingdom. The Crusaders successfully harnessed the local Muslims’ energies and managed their economy, agriculture and trade. The other, the Muslims, remained a separate social class in the Kingdom, but an integral part of its landscape. Apart from a number of battles and Crusader campaigns against the Muslim enemy, mainly those from the surrounding areas of Egypt, Transjordan and Syria, there were no confrontations with the local population. This is a subject that should be examined more closely in further studies on the role of social affairs and religion in the struggle between Christians and Muslims in the Latin East, an issue that has also had a great impact on events in the region in the modern era.

ANNA G. PIOTROWSKA

Zingarella or how Mediterranean and Gypsy Merged. The Story of a Certain Musical Genre Mediterranean professional music has traditionally been linked with what can be labelled as the mainstream of European music, developed in parallel to the narrative of Italy as ‘the cradle of civilisation’. The Mediterranean contribution to the history of European music usually refers to Italian attempts to ‘resurrect’ ancient Greek tragedy1 which, in consequence led to the creation of a new musical genre – i.e. opera, the much celebrated “baroque art-form par excellence”2. The idea of reviving an Aristotelian concept of the total work was initially cherished by an association of bookish men called Florentine Camerata 3, but operas soon developed in many centres4 deriving their topics from the ancient mythology or history of Greece and Rome. Accordingly Italians became famous for their singing abilities and their love of beautiful voices5: the Italian term ‘bel canto’ entered the vocabulary of many European languages as a term for a predilection for delightful singing practices. Thus Italy’s key position in the world of opera was asserted within the history of music in the 19th century when the new academic discipline known as Musikwissenschaft emerged. This perspective was confirmed in such influential publications as Geschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich von der ersten christlichen Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (1852) by Franz Brendel, who recognised the importance of Italy in the development of professional European music.

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Indeed the world of ancient culture fascinated Italian intellectuals of the 16th century: between 1502 and 1518 Aldo Manuzio published the entire corpus of tragedies, whose translations into Latin and Italian became available. Giovanni Trissino (1478–1550) attempted to produce an original Italian classical tragedy Sofonisba (1515). Michael F. Robinson: Opera Before Mozart, London: Hutchinson, 1966, p. 13. The composer Jacopo Peri (1561–1633) – appreciating ‘deep sighs and weeping’ – wrote the first opera Dafne with Ottavio Rinuccini’s libretto in 1597. However, the first opera which survived in its entirety is his Euridice (1600) – still, rarely if ever performed nowadays, treated rather as a kind of musicological curio. For example, Venetia with Benedetto Ferrari (1597–1681), Francesco Manelli (1595–1670) or Marco Marazzoli (1619–62), Naples with Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725), etc. This took a rather unexpected direction when in the 17th century the castrating of boys became popular as a way of obtaining angelic voices. Cf. Angus Heriot: The Castrati in Opera, London: Secker & Warburg, 1956; Patrick Barbier: The World of Castrati. The History of an Extraordinary Operatic Phenomenon, London: Souvenir Press, 1996.

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The Mediterranean and the Gypsies Spain – considered representative of (to use Gilbert Chase’s designation) “semi-oriental exoticism”6 – enjoyed a remarkable reputation among aristocrats and various gentlemen of leisure, be it French (Prosper Mérimée), English (George Borrow) or Russian in the 19th century. Some of them were talented painters like Evgraf Semenovich Sorokin (1821–1892) who in 1853 presented his Spanish Gypsies (Испанские цыгане), or gifted composers like Mikhail Glinka (1804–1857) who resided in Spain from 1845 to 1847. He visited Madrid, Granada and Seville, studying Spanish music and was inspired by the country to the extent that he composed works heavily drawing from its folklore. Succumbing to the fashion Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) composed his Spanish Caprice (Каприччио на испанские темы) in 1887 in five parts: Alborada, Variazioni, Alborada, Scena e canto gitano and Fandango asturian. The first and the third parts are both entitled Alborada, based on the Spanish folk dance with its characteristic melody and accompaniment with clear rhythm and simple harmony. Spanishness was associated unequivocally with Gypsyness by Rimsky-Korsakov: after the lyrical Variazioni and the second Alborada, utilising the material of the first part, the Scene and Gypsy Song follows based on two dance melodies. Cadences use the Gypsy subject matter which also appears in the final part, Fandango, introducing three additional dance melodies (one of these recalls a waltz) as well as material drawn from all of the previous parts. Although the American musicologist Richard Taruskin claims that Russian composers were more interested in the sounds and musical effects they evoked rather than in the actual meanings or possible interpretations induced by employing such tunes in their compositions,7 the enthusiasm for Spanish folk material and Spanish themes as attested by Glinka or Rimsky-Korsakov suggests that for those composers Mediterranean associations were of special importance. This enthusiasm drew attention to the inhabitants of Mediterranean countries, among others the Gypsies. And yet as if forgotten, or at least neglected in the realm of musicology is the fact that in the 19th century Italian and Spanish themes were strongly related by contemporary intellectuals to the mysterious aura connected with Gypsies encountered in southern Europe and considered European ‘others’. Even their looks, though the result of their Indian heritage, encouraged such immediate association of Gypsies with other Mediterranean inhabitants. Hence in numerous letters, literary sketches, pictures and compositions artists of the epoch were more than willing to portray Gypsies living in the Mediterranean countries in an exoticising and eroticising manner, ‘sexoticising’ Gypsies. Gypsies living in Spain, in particular, were often described and immortalized, 6 7

Gilbert Chase: The Music of Spain, New York: Dover Publications, 1959, p. 291. Richard Taruskin: Defining Russia Musically, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 116.

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for example by an English man of letters, George Borrow (1803–1881). He mentioned Spanish Gypsies in his The Zincali – An account of the Gypsies of Spain (1841) and The Bible in Spain (1843). As for many foreigners, also for him, people of Spanish or Gypsy origin were more or less the same. In his writings he recalled an instance when he encountered a Spanish girl but “thought at first that she was a gipsy, and addressing myself to her inquired in Gitano if she were of that race”8.

The New Gypsy/ Mediterranean Musical Genre – Zingarella In the early 19th century professional composers began to compose simple songs often called ‘zingarellas’, stylized after – popularized by then – ideas of Gypsy culture and their singing practices. Initially the zingarella was associated with Spain. Consequently the description ‘espagnole’ frequently appeared as a subtitle. Sometimes Spanish composers themselves directly suggested Gypsy connotations to their songs by not mentioning the author of the lyrics and thus implying traditional origins of the song. For example in order to authenticate one of his works Mariano García added a glossary with Gypsy words („Nota. Esplicacion de algunas expresiones Jitanas”) to his 1852 song El Jitano (for voice and piano) explaining the meaning of the words appearing in the text, e.g. brajani is the guitar, erachi – night, miliyo – heart, etc. Nevertheless, zingarellas were conceived as a form of artistic song modelled upon a fictional, non-existent Gypsy song. In fact no particular original song of any Romany group served as a point of reference for zingarellas. Mediterranean connotations – Spanish or Italian – were of importance during the early formative years and found their immediate reflection in the title the genre acquired – ‘zingarella’, or alternatively ‘zingara’ or ‘zingaresca’.9 Soon these fake Gypsy songs were popularized in song anthologies alongside other vocal compositions, often of Italian origin (e.g. Neapolitan). For example, in France they were included in collections designed for domestic use and predominantly for intermediate amateurs, and were to be found in 1844 Romancero espagnol. Recueil de chants populaires de l’Espagne or 1878 Petit romancero, choix de vieux chants espagnols and 1882 Chants populaires espagnols. Zingerella can serve as an example of how European intellectuals constructed and preserved the image of the Mediterranean other based on their own presumptions and projections while utilizing traditional musical measures 8 9

George Borrow: The Bible in Spain, or the Journeys, Adventures, and Imprisonment of an Englishman, London: Boots Publishers, 1905: 311. The very term ‘zingarella’ (of an obviously Italian origin) can also mean an idiophone instrument known in Calambria as zingara (more customary called, however, scacciapensieri. Cf. Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e dei musicisti, edited by Alberto Basso, vol. 4, Torino: Utet, 1984, p. 780.

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at their disposal. They felt no need to investigate the reality behind prejudices, convictions and simplifications since – as already mentioned – zingarellas never aspired to substitute or replace any authentic songs by Romany to be approximated to European listeners. Consequently typical zingarellas resembled other early 19th century songs, like romances: they were meant for the solo voice (sometimes more vocal lines were introduced) with the piano accompaniment. Usually written in a minor key (seldom if ever – at least in the initial stage – in major), preferably D minor, sometimes C minor they possessed an internal plan following a fixed rule of changing the key from minor to major (either relative or parallel one) in the course of the song. Moreover, zingarellas were characterized by a triple meter (three quarters or three eighths, rarely compound six eighths), relatively fast tempo, frequent irregular rhythmic divisions (mainly triplets) and syncopations. The inner logic of these songs usually required a stanza-refrain scheme, although highly variable formal layouts could be observed (e.g. references to rondo or intersections between ternary and sonata allegro form). Most characteristically zingarellas, as songs alluding to the alleged naivety of Gypsies, were characterized by melodic simplicity and unsophisticated piano accompaniment, as well as by the clarity of structure and texture.10 The conditio sine qua non for zingarellas was the text directly relating to Gypsy topics, e.g. mentioning beautiful little Gypsy girls (preferably dancing and singing) or referring to the sound of instruments commonly attributed to Gypsies living in the Mediterranean (such as tambourines, guitars, etc.) Stereotypical texts abounded with references to skills frequently connected with Gypsies such as predicting the future. The genre was especially popular in the 1840s, i.e. at the time when the Borrow’s books describing Spanish Gypsies and their traditions gained international acclaim. Initially zingarellas were mainly composed by Italians. For example, around the year 1836 the popular composer Saverio Mercadante (1795–1870) produced several songs for voice and piano accompaniment with allusions to different nations or geographic areas (for example Tyrolienne or Polonaise) and among them he included a song (set in A minor key, then in D minor) dedicated to Mrs. Damoreau, called Zingarella espagnole (defined as a bolero) with the words by Crevel de Charlemange (1806–1882). The vocal line imitates improvisational character of ‘authentic’ Gypsy songs with its melismatic passages, willingly associated with the Spanish manner of singing. The introduction of trills and dotted rhythms sustains the impression of the irregularity of the vocal line. The composer exploited dynamic capabilities rapidly shifting from forte to piano. Rather monotonous piano accompaniment (mostly in sixteenths) is based on the triad chords (enriched with applied dom10 As mentioned in this respect zingarellas were similar to early 19th century romances characterized by certain banality. Cf. David Tunley: Solo Song (b) France, in: Romanticism (1830– 1890), edited by Gerald Abraham, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 684702, here p. 684.

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inant) and its texture alludes – especially in refrains – to the sound of the guitar. The text of the song conveys a stereotypical image of Gypsies prophesying the future as clearly highlighted in the chorus: “Allons vite! Que chacun vienne consulter la Bohemienne c’est l’oracle, c’est l’oracle du destin”. Other parameters, such as triple meter (three quarters), relying on periodical structure, transparency of texture and formal simplicity prove this song was conceived as a typical zingarella.11 In the year 1843 another Italian – the publisher, poet, lawyer and politician Guillaume Cottrau (1797–1847, father of the composer Teodoro [Theodore] Cottrau, 1827–1879) – presented 24 Nouvelles mèlodies nationales de Naples, a collection of songs for piano and voice with annotations explaining their provenance (e.g. from Capri, Sorrento, and so on). As number two he featured La Zingarella – described as “canzona di Soccavo”. Following the tradition of zingarella the work is set in A minor (and partly F minor) and sustains the triple meter (in its compound version as six eighths). The formal layout (with refrains) as well as the striking simplicity of the piano accompaniment (limited to the basic harmonic functions) and the short dimension of the song (24 measures) are typical for a zingarella. The name of the author of the words was omitted suggesting its folk, rustic character. The great Italian master of operas – Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) also composed a zingarella entitled simply La Zingara (1845) placing it in a collection along with 16 other songs. The composition adheres to all the typical features of the genre. Verdi’s zingarella maintains the triple meter (three quarters), with major scale (F major as a relative to the most typical for zingarellas’ D minor) introduced occasionally, the melody of the song makes use of notes derived predominantly from the triad while corresponding with the unsophisticated piano accompaniment based on basic harmonic functions. Formal structure refers to the ternary ABA (returning to the short opening phrase within the broader A BC A outline). Part B – between measures 19 and 35 (in the key of subdominant key, i.e. B-flat major with a characteristic accompaniment based on B-flat major chord and seventh F major acting as secondary dominant to subdominant) – and part C – between measures 36 and 52 (in minor parallel to F-major) – both use material so similar to that presented in part A (in terms of melodic motives) that they can be regarded as its subsequent variants (i.e. A’ and A’’). The coherency of musical structure, the transparent texture and the lightness once again predestine this song to serve as a typical representative of the early zingarella. Due to the introduction of – however infrequent – trills, acciaccaturas and syncopes Verdi managed to diversify the rhythmic side of the vocal line. In particular the accumulation of trills in measures 31-32 and 61-62 enables the singer to show off her vocal skills al11 The popularity of Mercadante’s zingarella was evidenced in the fact that one year after its publication, probably between 1837 and 1838, Franz Liszt presented a bolero entitled La Zingarella which was its paraphrase.

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luding at the same time to the stereotypical imagination of melismatic Spanish folk songs. The only unique feature of Verdi’s zingarella is its text: S. Manfredo Maggioni symbolically alluded to Italian political situation by highlighting the homelessness of the Romany people. The high esteem in which zingarellas were held was confirmed by their circulation in the form of arrangements: for example Chanson d’une Gitana. Romance bolero by François [Francesco] Bonoldi (1800–1873) was arranged in 1846 for piano by Wilhelm Kruger, who published it as Fantaisie sur la Gitana de Fr. Bonoldi op. 6. The song by Bonoldi is again a typical zingarella: set in the key A minor, meter three quarters, with the melody using predominantly notes of the triad and the lyrics mentioning wandering Gypsies with a song on their lips and the accompaniment of the tambourine. Furthermore, the popularity of zingarella was attested by its attractiveness to many European composers, who were often popular during their lifetime but have since been forgotten. For example a French composer Louis Yadin (1768–1853) wrote a very typical zingarella called simply La Zingarella of which the manuscript can be found in the music division of Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris (Ms. 5123). Although the work is undated it must have been composed before the year 1853, i.e. when zingarellas were growing in popularity. The song seems to be unfinished, still it retains all the hallmarks of a typical zingarella for voice and piano: set in C minor and triple meter, moderato tempo, with the characteristic simplicity in the melodic, harmonic (tonic-dominant relations) and formal structure. After the first stanza the refrain is introduced and repeated twice in the course of the song. It returns after a short piano passage, followed by another stanza bringing new melodic material which is, however, lacking fully developed accompaniment. The appearance of the refrain and the first stanza at the end of the work contributes to the coherency of the zingerella and suggests the ternary form of the song (Stanza 1 – Refrain – Piano solo – Refrain – Stanza 2 – Refrain – Stanza 1). The popularity of zingarellas peaked around the middle of the 19th century. This was followed by a period of changes that came when Mediterranean influences began to fade as a result of promoting Gypsy culture connected with other – in this case eastern European – countries. The 1859 book Des Bohemiens et de leur musique by Franz Liszt (1811–1886) shifted European interest in Gypsy music towards Hungarian associations clearly marking the new paradigm of linking Gypsy music with Hungarian music. The changes affected the terminology: the slowly disappearing words zingarella or zingara were replaced by the much more expansive terms Bohemiennes or tzigane after the publication of Liszt’s book, especially in the wake of the success of Viennese operettas hailing Gypsy culture. In the 1880s interest among composers in Gypsyness intensified following the reissue (in 1881) of the controversial yet influential book by Liszt, and the success of Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen (premiered in 1875).

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In the second half of the 19th century zingarella as a genre underwent major alterations leading to it becoming almost unrecognizable. Transformations affecting zingarella took the direction of further stylization – paradoxically taking into an account the fact that zingarella was conceived as straightforward stylization. Starting around the mid-19th century zingarellas – initially preserving the characteristics of simple folk song – oscillated towards refinement and were frequently featured as a part of song cycles. One of the sources of the most dramatic changes to vocal zingarella was instrumental miniature, the impact of which was already evident by 1860s. As a consequence some earlier, very characteristic features of the genre disappeared: most notably, composers abandoned minor keys or triple meters. The growing importance of instrumental miniature also caused the introduction of – increasingly longer and more virtuosic – independent fragments in the accompanying part of the piano. Zingarellas composed in the second half of the 19th century clearly departed from the canonical assumptions since the genre that originated as an imitation of allegedly real Mediterranean Romany song drifted away towards becoming a medium in which composers would express their own ideas on Gypsyness as such and present its interpretation in music. However, zingarellas never lost their appeal as ‘a song of Gypsies’ connected in the layer of lyrics with Mediterranean sun, Mediterranean freedom and thus embodying the idealized Mediterranean other. While compositions by a number of less popular composers such as Giovanni Bazzoni, Pierre Benoit, Ludovic Benza or Pompeo Belgiojoso exemplify the trajectory of musical modifications conferred on zingarella, they also clearly bear witness to the genre’s close links with its Mediterranean roots. For example when Giovanni Bazzoni (died in 1871) published his six duets for voice and piano entitled Soirees Italiennes in 1868, he included – among others – Serenata Spagnola – La pieta and, as number one, a song called La Zingare to words by Carlo Pepoli. Even the title emphasizes the fact that the piece belongs to the genre of zingarella.12 The composition for soprano and contralto is dedicated to Ms. Gaveaux Sabatier and follows an exceptionally simple formal organization – ABCA as well as uses unrefined harmonics. Voices are relatively independent or led in mixtures (parallel thirds or sixths). The zingarella is set in F major, which had been used in zingarellas previously but only as a key relative to the initial key of D minor. Additionally, the C meter and short, clearly virtuosic piano passages blur original features of the prototype zingarella. The use of two voices, rather than traditional one, also marks a departure from the norm suggesting a new direction of artistic development, heading towards increasing the apparatus, particularly the number of vocalists.

12 Probably due to the printing mistake on the title page the name La zingara appears whereas in the other place it is changed into La Zingare.

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Composed in 1869 the zingarella by Pierre Benoit (1834–1901) demonstrates even more emphatically the impact of instrumental miniatures: La Zingaresque op.11 (with words by J. Mallery) is in fact one of two “mazurkas chantees” by the composer.13 The key F major introduced here had become quite popular in songs with Gypsy themes by that time. La Zingaresque begins and ends with the refrain, while the three stanzas (in B flat major) bring a mysterious mood. Their internal, symmetrical design is based on two motives arranged in a repeated pattern dde dde. Midway through and at the end of each stanza (i.e. during the motif e) the composer suggested ritendando, alluding to the manner of rubato observed among many singing Gypsies. During the accompaniment of the refrain arpeggios are introduced referring to the sound of the guitar associated with Spanish Gypsies. Introducing arpeggios in the late stage of vocal zingarella’s development indicates the influence of instrumental miniatures, rich in a variety of instrumental effects, which penetrated the vocal zingerella with a lexicon of popular Romany music associations. The words of the song – rather stereotypically – present a beautiful, mysterious, black Gypsy woman (a Gypsy queen). The Gypsy heroine is called here alternatively either ‘zingaris’ or ‘Fille de Bohème’. Ludovic Benza (died in 1874) composed his zingarella La Bohemienne in a typical form: Refrain – Stanza 1 – Refrain – Stanza 2 – Refrain – Stanza 3 – Refrain, in the meter three quarters and in B-flat major (stanzas in E-flat major). Stereotypical words (starting with the phrase “je suis la fille de bohème”) by Ali Sabligny Vial refer to the Spanish associations. The refrain portrays carefree Gypsy girls leading a joyful life, singing blissfully tra – la – la. These asemantic words soon became characteristic for many songs with Gypsy connotations.14 In the second stanza the proper name Gitanos was introduced reinforcing Spanish allusions. Moreover, Spanish connotations of La Bohemienne were additionally supported by the fact that the composition was classified as a bolero. The song from 1869 for bass and baritone with piano accompaniment Au Bord de la Seine by Pompée Barbiano Belgiojoso (French words by M. Adolphe Baralle) was newly defined as Les Bohemiens, however in brackets the Italian-sounding version of the name – Gli Zingheri was preserved. The lyrics were also translated into Italian. Such features as simple harmony, transparent texture, meter in three, etc. resemble typical zingarella. The form of the song 13 The use of the meter three quarters in this piece can be interpreted as a link with the genre mazurka rather than the sign of returning to the old tradition of zingarellas in three. 14 In one of the songs by Jules Benedict (1804–1885) – La Gitane et l’oiseau for voice, piano and flute set to the words by Andre de Badeta with the structure Stanza – Refrain –quasirecitative section – Stanza – Refrain – Refrain ), meter six-eighths, in A-flat major, the refrain is also based on tra – la – la, while at the end of the repeated refrain ah – ah appears. The lack of words in the refrain focuses attention on a spectacular vocal part requiring the singer to reach high-pitched sounds: c”’, d flat’’’ and even e flat’’’ (vocal virtuosity equaling or even outdoing the flute part).

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with two different stanzas A and B (the latter even in two variants) alludes to the quasi-rondo form. The text also deals with stereotypical image of the romantic Gypsy life freed from any constrains, closely related to nature which provides Gypsies with palaces of blue sky. It talks about Gypsies’ carefree approach to everyday life, emphasized especially in the refrain containing the characteristic tra – la – la. The features radically differentiating the song from a typical zingarella are the major key (E-flat major) and the virtuosic character of intro, coda and short piano interludia. Another example of zingarella can be found in Commères joyeuses. Collection de chansonnettes avec parlé pour jeunes filles from 1887, namely the piece appropriately entitled La Bohemienne by Wulfran Moreau (music and lyrics). The simple structure of the piece (with stanzas) and meter in three quarters correspond to the typical features, despite the introduction of the key E-flat major, typically valse-like – pulse and the disposition for solo voices and three-part choir with piano accompaniment. In addition, in the refrain the triangle is introduced, however in case of its absence the sound of the mere table would be sufficient as asserted by the composer. Although the transformations brought an old zingarella closer to the composers from the German circle who preferred setting poetry alluding to Gypsy topics to music, zingarellas were still perceived as Gypsy songs with Mediterranean connotations. An example is the work of Eduard Lassen (1830–1904) who set poems by Emanuel Geibel (1815–1884) to music for piano and voice. With his music the poem Der Zigeunerbube in Norden appeared in French in an 1886 collection. Spanish connotations are evident in the subtitle Tempo di Bolero that also explains the use of typical rhythms for that dance. Optional castanets – ad libitum – as well as the introduction of arpeggios in an accompanying piano part (imitating the sound of guitar) suggest Spanish connotations alluding to the older traditions of zingarella. Direct references to another instrument associated with Spanish Gypsies – the tambourine, appeared in the song by Lassen entitled Au son du Tamburine (Die Musikantin) – and characteristically in La fille de Bohème (Die Zigeunerin) telling about the Gypsy dancing with a jingling tambourine. The author of the lyrics was another German romantic poet – Theodor Storm (1817–1888). However, the title of the song symptomatically marks the departure from the term zingarella, the Gypsy heroine is referred to here as la Gitana. Lassen often suggested Spanish dances in his songs – usually bolero and fandango (for example in La Dansens – Die Tänzerin). His Gypsy songs still retained the characteristics of zingarellas with all the typical features of the later variants of this song, their novelty hidden in the dancing character the composer undoubtedly adopted under the influence of salon instrumental dance miniatures. As mentioned the instrumental miniature exercised considerable influence on zingarellas, yet the impact was mutual for zingarellas also had some impact on instrumental miniatures alluding to Gypsy culture. In the 19th and early 20th century composers writing so called ‘Gypsy dances’ (or dances in the hongrois

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style) often entitled them zingarellas. For example in 1856 Charles Lecocq (1832–1918) composed La Zingara. Danse pour piano Bohemienne op. 9 which featured significant similarities with vocal zingarella of this period, visible in the shift from minor to major – A minor to A major and characteristic form ABACB with short repeated fragments. The suggested tempo Allegretto promoted the virtuosic character of a piece full of figurative passages of ethereal nature. Also Melchior Mocker entitled one of his waltzes from 1853 La Zingarella. Danse Boheme pour piano op. 10. Despite its simple melody, three quarters meter, key A-flat major, the waltz resembles a typical romantic instrumental miniature full of characteristic virtuosic figures such as parallel octaves in the part of the left hand, numerous triplets, and mosaic structure. Indeed more and more compositions entitled zingarellas drifted away towards incorporating virtuosic elements: in 1869 E. Simonnot authored La Zingara. Saltarelle pour piano op. 65 inspired by both zingarellas (typical structure ABCB, fragments in parallel keys) and – as the title indicates – by the old Italian folk dance salterella. Conversely, while Maurice Viot called his 1922 miniature for violin and piano a caprice he also kept the old term zingarella. The fusion of old and new associations resulted in a title Zingara. Hongroise Caprice. The remnants of the old zingarella here include an introduction of the refrain, which leads to the form ABCABA. Relatively newer, Hungarian sentiments are – on the other hand – reflected in rhythmic solutions (syncopation, bókazó rhythms, triplets). At the end of the 19th century Regina Beretta published her Zingara Faintasie for the piano – with the miniature oscillating between D minor and D major in a typical zingarella manner. However the choice of these two keys may also suggest the impact of csardas. Beretta based her piece on three ideas: a, b, and c, combined in such a way that each of them takes on the function of the refrain: firstly b, then c, and finally a, repeated many times as if to usurp the role of the proper refrain (the form is as follows: a b c b c a a’ a”). Overall this overlapping of stylistic features characteristic for zingarella and csardas became a standard for compositions alluding to Gypsy themes appearing in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

The Romantic Image of Idealized Mediterranean Gypsies As already said zingarellas served as ‘Gypsy songs’ conceived and anchored in the Mediterranean but never aspiring to take the place of real songs by Romany people. The origin of the genre shows how European intellectuals reproduced and cultivated their own image of the Mediterranean Gypsy, reflecting the literature and iconography of the time. Undoubtedly the romantic image of Gypsies – freed from any constrains of everyday life – appealed to the 19th century intellectuals. Gypsies became even more fashionable as literary heroes after the success of the 1831 novel Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Marie Hugo (1802–1885). The popularity of the book also resulted in an ava-

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lanche of operas and ballets based on the story of the beautiful Gypsy Esmeralda: it had inspired more than 30 musical stage works by the end of the 19th century. Composers were urged to depict Gypsies in their works, be it as the heroes of operas or ballets.15 Gypsies living in Mediterranean countries were surrounded with an exotic and erotic aura that encouraged such a frequent depiction. However, the emergence and cultivation of zingarellas can also be interpreted as a result of the popularity of the Grand Tour, and the songs can be treated as another form of souvenir of this experience. The argument is strengthened by observing analogies between zingarellas and other forms of the Grand Tour commemoration, such as paintings and writings. The Grand Tour – a traditional trip through Europe leading to Mediterranean countries, most commonly Italy – was a popular venture for European upper class men (and to a lesser degree for women) from the late 17th until early 19th century. It was seen as a must for educational reasons and, as Samuel Johnson observed in 1776, “A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see”16. Habitually many a travellers wrote books reflecting on their experience.17 Books appeared by such distinguished writers as Charles Dickens who prized Italy for its attractiveness, sensual pleasures, and stimulation of the natural and artistic senses as well as its visual beauty.18 For women, a journey to Italy was predominantly a cultural experience confined to visiting museums and galleries, studying Italian art and history. They were less interested in meeting locals. Such an attitude can be seen in Mary Shelley’s or Lucja Rautenstrauchowa’s accounts of their ‘cultural trips’, although Rautenstrauchowa could not resist commenting on the beauty of Italian girls.19 These travelling ladies were more interested in understanding the spirit of the Mediterranean countries and were obsessed with the appropriateness of their behaviour, thus accounts of their travels abounded with suggestions and tips for other travelling women.20 15 Gypsies were also portrayed in musical stage works much earlier, e.g. in 1621 The Gipsies metamorphosed by Ben Jonson or 1753 La Zingara by Rinaldo di Capua. 16 James Boswell: The life of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: comprehending an account of his studies and numerous works, in chronological order, vol. 1, London: Baldwin, 1791, p. 61. 17 In 1705 Joseph Addison set the standards for such accounts. Among many books on traveling there are books written by authors of different origin. See: Francois-Rene Chateaubriand Voyage en Amerique, en France et en Italie (1827); Jacques Marquet de Norvins Italie pittoresque (1836); Jules Janin Voyage en Italie (1839); Joseph Mery Scenes de la vie italienne (1837); Michał Wiszniewski Podróż do Włoch, Sycylii i Malty [A Tour of Italy, Sicily and Malta] (1848). 18 Dickens and Italy. Little Dorrit and Pictures from Italy, edited by Michael Hollington and Francesca Orestano, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 19 Magdalena Ożarska: Two Women Writers and their Italian Tours: Mary Shelley's Rambles in Germany and Italy 1840, 1842 and 1843, and Lucja Rautenstrauchowa’s in and beyond the Alps, Lewiston: Mellen, 2013, p. 111. 20 See for example: Hester Lynch Piozzi: Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy and Germany (1784–1786); Mary Wollstonecraft: Letters

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However, in the early 19th century especially there was a visible tension between the desire to understand, i.e. research and document the legacy of Mediterranean Europe and the wish to experience and idealise it. While works such as Charlotte Anne Waldie Eaton’s 1820 Rome in the Nineteenth Century or Archibald Alison’s 1833-1842 History of Europe from the Commencement of the French Revolution in 1789, to the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815 appeared, southern countries were perceived through the prism of the senses associated with the thrill of adventure and exoticism as attested as early as 1678 by Jean Gailhard saying in Compleat Gentleman (1678) “French courteous. Spanish lordly. Italian amorous”21. Indeed, the male dominated Grand Tour was treated almost as a rite of passage for young men of means who had a kind of unwritten social permission to indulge in amorous ventures. Hence Luigi Monga even referred to the Grand Tour as “the phallic voyage”22. Sexual permissiveness was part and parcel of the trip. Thus the Mediterranean environment and the inhabitants of Italy or Spain became associated with erotic atmosphere. A certain contribution to creating this attitude came from a man who “epitomised the spirit of Romanticism”23 – George Gordon Lord Byron (1788–1824) who – while living in Italy for seven years – had a romance with Countess Teresa Guiccioli. With an atmosphere heavily laden with sex Italy was pictured as a place to have an affair or a fling. This influenced various European female writers: for Eliza Haywood (1693–1756) the warmth of Italy served as a pretext to portray Italian women as sexually attractive and willing to embark on romantic adventures in her Love in Excess (1719–1720). And Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823) set her The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) in Naples. Picturesque landscapes, wonderment, exoticism and gloominess depicted in the novel produce the sense of mystery surrounding Italian culture. In a nutshell Italy tended to be depicted as a country of omnipresent eroticism, amorous loving and sexual promiscuousness offered by beautiful women. Such a portrayal of Italian women was reinforced in pictures, among others by Russian painters such as Orest Adamovich Kiprensky (1782–1836) who lived in Rome and Naples (1816–1822) even falling in love with an Italian girl, Anne Maria Falcucci (Mariucci). Karl Pavlovich Brullov (1799–1852), best known Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1795); Dorothy Wordsworth: Journal of a Visit to Hamburgh and of the Journey from Hamburgh to Goslar (1798); Mariana Starke: Letters from Italy, between the years 1792 and 1798 (2 vols., 1800), Travels on the Continent (1820), Information and Directions for Travellers on the Continent (1824) – expanded and republished as Travels in Europe for the use of Travellers on the Continent and likewise in the Island of Sicily, Remains of Ancient Italy (1832); Anna Potocka: Voyage d’Italie in the Years 1826–1827 (1899). 21 Laura Byrne Paquet: Wanderlust: A Social History of Travel, Fredericton, N.B.: Goose Lane Editions, 2007, p. 37. 22 Luigi Monga: Travel and Travel Writing: An Historical Overview, in: Annali d’italianistica: L’odeporica/Hodoeporics: On Travel Literature 14, 1996. pp. 6-54, here p. 29. 23 Ożarska: Two Women Writers (note 19), p. 4.

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for his historical paintings such as The Last Days of Pompeii (1830–1833), luministically portrayed Mediterranean women in idyllic situations in his Italian pictures.24 However, closer examination reveals that these women were presented in a way recalling, sometimes quite remote, associations with Gypsies. One such depiction entitled A Girl Picking Grapes in the Environs of Naples (1827) may serve as an example of visualizing Italian (or more broadly Mediterranean) women as Gypsy. Not only does the picture depict women surrounded by plants and animals25, but most typically the inclusion of the tambourine directly alludes to Gypsy associations.26 In the 19th century the instrument was frequently linked with Gypsies – those of Spanish and Italian origin. For example a French painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825– 1905) painted a number of pictures featuring women with tambourines – either referred to as portraits of Italian girls (e.g. Italian Woman with Tambourine, 1869) or as Gypsy girls (e.g. Gypsy Girl with a Basque Drum, 1867). The list of the 19th century painters who depicted young Gypsy girls with a tambourine in their hand is much longer and includes among others such names as Eugene Siberdt, Jean-François Portaels, Karl Gun, Benedict Masson, Ceasar Willich, Anton Brentano, Khariton Platonov, Thomas Couture, etc. The tambourine and darker complexion of the skin, black hair, sometimes a dancing pose – these features were widely reproduced in pictures as well as in the lyrics of zingarellas. These traits – at least in the Mediterranean context – constituted a sufficient pretext for a Gypsy sounding title to an artistic work originally conceived without any Gypsy’ allusions. An example of such an early transfer of a Gypsy sounding name to a work of art on the basis of, among other things, its Italian origin is the portrait of ‘Madonna with a Child’ by Tiziani painted around 1510/1512 and kept in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, commonly called ‘Gypsy Madonna’. Most probably it owes its popular name not so much to the dark hair and eyes of Mary, but to the tendency to capitalize the Italian art tradition by hinting at its exoticism as epitomized by ‘wild’ others such as Gypsies. Another example of this is the statue of the goddess Diana by Nicolas Cordier (sculpted between 1607 and 1612) which is reported to have been frequently nicknamed ‘the little gypsy” – i.e. zingarella.27 The reasons for naming the statue thus are never discussed in the literature, yet it seems striking that the sculpture itself is often 24 Dmitri Sarabianov: Artisti russi in Italia nel XIX secolo, in: I Russi e l’Italia, edited by Vittorio Strada, Milano: Banco Ambrosiano; Veneto: Libri Scheiwiller, 1995, pp. 142-155. 25 Actually a mule is depicted, which, by the way, was frequently mentioned in travel accounts as a means of transport during the Grand Tour experience. Although tourists usually travelled by carriage, and women were sometimes carried in a litter-type chair (portantina), occasionally, they also rode a mule (Ożarska: Two Women Writers (note 19), p. 88). 26 Xavier du Crest: Bohémiens, Gitans, Tsiganes et Romanichels dans la peinture française du XIXe siècle, in: Le Mythe des Bohémiens dans la littérature et les arts en Europe, edited by Sarga Moussa, Paris: l’Harmattan, 2008, pp. 251-261. 27 Paul Carole: Making a Prince’s Museum: Drawings for the late-eighteenth-century Redecoration of the Villa Borghese, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2000, p. 123.

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described as exotic, even “orientalizing”28. Subtitling a sculpture or a painting as ‘Gypsy’ is then a fine example how the cultural and educational aims of the Grand Tour (tinted with the fascination for the antique) merged with the mechanisms of ‘othering’ those Mediterranean features which were perceived as exotic and erotic. Lou Charnon-Deutsch claims that indeed for many travellers, especially in the 19th century, Italians were equated with exoticism and were looked upon by Northern Europeans as inferior.29 Hence it did not take much for the exoticism as associated with Italians or Spaniard to be confused with that of the Gypsies, perhaps on the basis of their comparatively foreign looks.30 And – as already mentioned – consequently in a number of European paintings, statues, etc. the boundaries between depictions of Italians and Gypsies blurred. Merged with Gypsy associations those Mediterranean ones either served to substitute the presence of real Romany in European art or, at least, marginalized them. In particular the Italian Gypsies became ‘invisible’ or – to use Peggy Phelan’s term – “unmarked”31 as in the course of the 19th century more painters would describe their pictures as depicting ‘Bohemines’ having in mind Spanish Gypsies, e.g. perhaps one of the best known depictions of a dancing Spanish Gypsy girl is by Alfred Dehodencq (Une Dance bohémienne dans les jardins de l'Alcázar, devant le pavillon Charles V, 1851). Although conceptions of Italian and Gypsy identities have diverged, their romantic overlapping in the realm of art history is still evident. Stewart Dearing recalls a story to exemplify the dominant narrative: While visiting the exhibition Van Gogh and Expressionism (22 March-2 July 2007) at the Neue Galerie in late March, I was struck by the comments of a fellow visitor, who, after noting the title of Vincent van Gogh’s L’Italienne [The Italian Woman] (1887/8) said to her companion, I always thought this was a painting of a Gypsy.32

Some light on this phenomenon of mixing Gypsy with Mediterranean is also shed by Mike Sell arguing that a Gypsy was perceived as a “complex character […] repeatedly associated with theatricality”33. Hence as he claims this theatricalized authenticity, exoticism is often more than just a thematic element in the representation of the bohemian; sometimes exoticism is a formal dimen28 Miranda Marvin: The Language of the Muses: The Dialogue Between Roman and Greek Sculpture, Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008, p. 95. 29 Lou Charnon-Deutsch: The Spanish Gypsy: The History of a European Obsession, State College University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004, p. io. 30 Stewart Dearing: Painting the Other Within: Gypsies According to the Bohemian Artist in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, in: Romani Studies 20, 2, 2010, pp. 161-201, here p. 161. 31 Peggy Phelan: Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London: Routledge, 1993. 32 Dearing: Painting the Other Within (note 30), p. 161 [my emphasis]. 33 Mike Sell: Bohemianism, the Cultural Turn of the Avantgarde, and Forgetting the Roma, in: TDR 51, 2, 2007, pp. 41-59, here p. 47.

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sion of the work itself, giving the entire production something of the uncanny quality of the characters themselves.34

Then the artefact with an image of the exoticisized ‘Other’ was treated as a souvenir of the Grand Tour. Conjuring up the memories was facilitated by looking at a picture, yet I would suggest it was even more accessible and produced instantly by humming a song known ‘appropriately’ as a ‘zingarella’. So even though the real Roma people of the Mediterranean countries were ‘invisible’ they were represented in abundance in the arts and music in the form of idealized Gypsies.

The Impact of Zingarellas on European Musical Culture It is very possible that the Mediterranean roots of the so-called zingarella and its strong connections with exoticism as embodied in Gypsy themes influenced the fate of the genre, which never reached the status of other romantic genres, such as for example nocturnes. Strikingly Gypsy motifs were easy to find in poems by romantic poets, who treated them as a pretext to express their own views on such issues as freedom, love or a close relationship with nature. These poems soon became prospective lyrics for songs which, although symptomatically were not called zingarellas, usually followed their formal pattern. For example, the composer Robert Schumann (1810–1856), who was acclaimed for his songs, also turned to Gypsy topics. Simplicity of formal construction, narrowed range of musical material, the choice of minor keys and piano accompaniment exploiting arpeggios predominantly characterize these songs, which not only reproduce the stereotyped understanding of the phenomenon of Gypsyness (the naivety of Gypsies seen as noble savages – children of nature, but also the sadness of their fate, etc.) but also represent typical features of a genre called zingarella, alas without the actual use of the name. In two songs about Gypsies from 1849 Schumann used texts by a German poet Emanuel Geibel capitalizing the potential of Gypsyness as a romantic ideal. Entitled Zigeunerliedchen both are for voice with piano accompaniment and belong (as number 7 and 8) to the set of songs opus 79 (altogether 29 songs.) Despite the title directly alluding to the Gypsy associations, the word Gypsy only appears in song no. 7. Gypsyness was in fact treated by the poet – and consequently later by the composer – as a mere excuse to present such romantic tropes such as the sadness of life or the beauty of nature. Simplicity of musical material characterizes both songs which are set in A minor and rely on tonic-dominant relations in their harmonic layout. Their melodies flow steadily, either in eighths or sixteenths, rarely – as in no. 8 – do triplets of sixteenths appear. Untypical meter of two quarters in the first song is followed by the 34 Ibid., p. 49.

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characteristic triple (three eighths). Both songs are short in length (36 and 24 bars), always containing three stanzas. The first song Unter die Soldaten ... opens with stanza A (symmetric, periodic structure: four measures plus four) repeated with new words in a somewhat modified form in A’. Between A and A’ the composer introduced a four-measure long, purely instrumental interlude, repeated in an identical shape again at the end of the composition. The formal outline of the song is then the result of a compromise between a stanzarefrain scheme and a ternary (ABA) form. Similarly constructed is the second song One Morgen… maintaining slow tempo (annotation Langsam). The accompaniment fulfilled with arpeggiated chords seems to suggest the sound of the dulcimer or, alternatively, the guitar – instruments generally associated with the Gypsies (due to the literature and travellers’ accounts). Identical musical material (with symmetrical arrangement: four plus four bars) is repeated three times throughout the whole song. The influence of the song-form (ABA) on the composition can be observed in the suggested arrangement of the lyrics: the first and the third stanzas are identical; it is the middle one that brings the new content. Another song by Schumann alluding to Gypsy topics can also be categorized as a zingarella. Stemming from the earlier period in his life, more precisely from the so called ‘year of the song’ i.e. 1840, the music was also composed to a poem by Geibel and included in Drei Gedichte nach Emanuel Geibel für mehrstimmigen Chor und Klavier as Zigeunerleben op. 29 no. 3 (Im Schatten des Waldes, im Buchengezweig….). It is a simple song in E minor and C meter, whose harmony is encapsulated within the range of cadential references. Its internal logics is closely connected with the periodic division due to the order of introducing new melodic ideas. The construction of the song falls into five parts, maintaining the concept of a ternary form: A BCD A. Prevailing throughout the majority of the song homophony (dominating in parts A and C) based on the chords using the simplest harmonic relations constitutes the skeletal structure. The only exception is the beginning of part B where the composer introduced a quasi-imitation and part D – with a piano solo followed by solos for various voices, starting from the highest (sopranos, altos, tenors and basses). Despite the text presenting instruments associated with the Gypsies (both the guitar, attributed mostly to Andalusian Gypsies, and Hungarian Gypsies’ dulcimer are mentioned), the composer resisted the temptation to mimic their effects in accompaniment. Rather, when the phrase “Heiß lockt die Gitarre, die Zimbel erklingt” appears he simply repeats one motif – identically constructed – in all voices. Only the ad libitum sign may be interpreted as the feature alluding to Gypsy musical practices as if as a reminder of the supposedly improvisational character of Gypsy music. The freedom to decide whether the song should be performed with the accompaniment of two additional percussion instruments and whether to choose the triangle and tambourine – also refers to Gypsy traditions. The latter, associated with Spanish music, especially

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evoked such connotations. Such references do not belong to characteristic features for zingarella and may have resulted from a number of other reasons. Geibel’s text’s possibilities were also discovered by other composers, who set it to music. Johanna Kinkel, née Möckel (1810–1858) used it in her 1838 collection Sechs Lieder op.7, where number 6 is the song Die Zigeuner. She also composed Der Zigeunerknabe (as number 1 in her opus 8 Der Hidalgo) with words by Geibel. The poet’s other poem Der Zigeunerbube in Norden was used by the composer Karl Gottlieb Reissiger (1798–1859) as number 2 in his opus 206.35 Zingarellas’ impact can be seen throughout Europe of the 19th century. In Poland before 1868 Stanislaw Moniuszko (1819–1872) composed to Russian words a song called Cyganie (Gypsies), which was later translated into Polish by Piotr Maszyński (1855–1934). Gypsies were portrayed there in a stereotypical way as wanderers unafraid of either poverty or hunger. The composer referred to the typical zingarella by the use of parallel – minor and major keys (G minor and G major). The simplicity of the piano accompaniment and the melodic line suggest popular, even folk connotations. Coupled with the typical schemata with stanzas classify the work by Moniuszko – if not as a typical zingarella then at least – as a song conceived under its influence. Despite such popularity cherished in the 19th century zingarellas completely lost their impact in the early 20th century – Gypsy related compositions at that time were open to a number of new influences, among others the ongoing popularity of csardas. Well into the early 20th century Gypsy topics dominated the world of operetta, generally contributing to the trivialization of issues relating to Gypsies and Gypsy music. This banalization was also reflected in songs with Gypsy motives in their lyrics. The increasing popularity of popular music, jazz, and – especially in Paris – cabarets resulted in the production of more and more light, Tin Pan Alley-style songs superficially referring in their lyrics to very general Gypsy associations. The trend has influenced contemporary zingarellas, such as Zingara by Enrico Riccardi and Luigi Albertelli which was presented at the 1969 Sanremo Festival, or a song by Enrico Macias – his 1988 hit Zingarella depicting a Bohemiene girl as a foreign and at the same time familiar figure, stereotypically with black hair and darker complexion. The Gypsy girl is sexually attractive to the boys looking at her in admiration, wild (barefoot) and romantic at the same time, independent; most importantly her whole life is dominated by music – she is dancing and singing to the sound of the guitar. The degree to which this particular song became associated with the promiscuity and sensuousness of Gypsy girls is seen on the youtube video-sharing website where it is accompanied by Esmeralda’s dance

35 Lawrance D. Snyder: German Poetry in Song. An Index of Lieder, Berkeley: Fallen Leaf Press, 1995, p. 100.

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scene from the 1956 French movie Notre Dame de Paris featuring Italian sex symbol – actress Gina Lollobrigida.36 From the moment of their appearance in Europe, Gypsies found themselves perceived as belonging to the realm of the exotic (with all its consequences), and during the period of the Enlightenment this view was to find its academic substantiation. The fact that Gypsies inhibited southern parts of Spain, the area most strongly associated with Spain’s Muslim past, only deepened the perception of them as Others. Within the history of music the exclusion of Romany music from musicological narratives in the 19th century and the perception of imaginary Gypsies as the inspiration for professional music, coupled with the Mediterranean implications described above, set standards in which subaltern and anti-hegemonic conceptions have managed to influence the perception of Gypsy culture and their music.

36 See: [accessed March 9, 2014].

CHRISTOPHER SCHLIEPHAKE

Ithaca Revisited – Homer’s Odyssey and the (Other) Mediterranean Imagination Tell me, Muse, of the man of many turns who wandered long and far after he sacked the sacred town of Troy. Many were those cities he viewed and men whose minds he came to know, many the troubles that he suffered in his heart as he sailed the seas, labouring to save himself and to bring his comrades home. But his comrades he could not keep from ruin, strive as he might.1

Thus begins the story of the king from the Western islands of Greece, who, in the late Bronze Age, lost his way while sailing home from a ten-year-long war in the East, but who finally managed to return after another 10 years to restore his rule and to regain his wife and son. The prologue to his story is “as traditional as it is enigmatic”2. It opens, like other epics, with an invocation to the Muse, an address to what was believed to be the source of the imagination of artistic creation. And yet, the hero in question is only hinted at in the famous periphrasis polútropos, a word that eludes easy translation as much as the hero that it came to connote evades any neat categorization or interpretation.3 “The man of many turns” or “much-turning man”4 was imbued with the traits of an early age trickster, a man of disguises, many voyages, and the mythic aura of intricate narratives that, while rich in everyday detail, invoked the realm of the fantastic. The group of stories that were associated with his adventures may have been circulating as early as the Bronze Age and underwent, much like the hero that they described, numerous cultural changes and re-workings, until one of the bards who passed them along assembled them in a narrative that he wrote down in phonetic script.5 Both the author and his protagonist have since * 1 2 3 4 5

My gratitude to Franziska Waßerberg for her unremitting support and inspiration. Homer: Odyssey, edited and translated by Walter Shewring, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, 1.1-6. Suzanne Saïd: Homer and the Odyssey, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 95. Cf. Edith Hall: The Return of Ulysses. A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey, London: Tauris, 2012, p. 19. Homer: Odyssey (note 1), 1.1. The viewpoint articulated here is part of the neo-analytic tradition according to which there was one author of the Odyssey, but multiple, heterogeneous sources from which he drew and which explain the inconsistencies within the text. On the vast scholarship surrounding the ‘Homeric question’ cf. Saïd: Homer and the Odyssey (note 2), pp. 7-45. On Homer and

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formed the benchmark of the ‘Western’ imagination and have long entered into the transnational canon of world literature. The author, Homer, and his mythical hero, Odysseus, have, indeed, travelled far and wide since presumably the late 8th or 7th century BCE; they have crossed oceans and were used to literally interpret the geographies, people and experiences of near, and at times, faraway places. In antiquity, the oral poem had already become a cultural artefact, used for schoolboys’ grammatical learning, pictured in mosaics on the walls of aristocrats’ houses, and told in various social contexts – from gatherings in open air amphitheatres to the dingy atmosphere of port town brothels. Greek, and later, Roman colonisers and their Hellenized people adopted and transformed, in ever new ways, the Odyssey and made it their own. It became a defining cultural possession of Greekspeaking communities which eventually spread over the vast geographical region that we now refer to as the Mediterranean and its content allows for a glimpse into what interested and fascinated a society of seafarers, traders, explorers and pirates. Many commentators since antiquity have, in fact, identified the Odyssey as the ultimate sea-faring poem, both in terms of its maritime themes and socio-historical background as well as its composition in hexameter verse, often associated with the rhythm of waves. Accordingly, personifications of the Odyssey were usually depicted on ships and, up to the present, the tales of Odysseus and his adventures resonate strongly with adventures, exploration and travel in unknown or wide spaces.6 The Mediterranean Sea, before the advent of satellite images and navigational cartography, was itself just such a vast geography, waiting to be explored and eventually conquered by different people and cultures, whose history has been marked by peaceful co-existence, violent clashes, and cultural transfer processes. In this piece I seek to show the role of the Odyssey in the formation of ‘Mediterraneanism’, how it has become connected to the vast cultural memory of Mediterranean culture and its geography. While I suggest that the Homeric narrative and its reception have ascribed multi-layered levels of meaning to the abstract space of the sea and its coastlands, I want to explore, against this background, the relation that the Odyssey has to ‘the other’ of this world. ‘Othering’ will thereby be seen as one of its central poetic strategies, offering a complex meditation on cultural identity and ethics – an aspect that will be analysed in a close reading of the famous Cyclops episode, the Cyclopeia, in book nine. Finally, some strands of the complex reception of Homer’s epic will be sketched out in order to show how the poem has been used in colonial contexts and for imperialist ideology as well as the way in which, with the advent of post-colonialism, the reception has taken on another turn and become a central text for discussing cultural alterity and hybridity.

6

his time cf. the formidable collection of essays in: Homer Handbuch. Leben –Werk – Wirkung, edited by Antonios Rengakos and Bernhard Zimmermann, Stuttgart: Metzler, 2011. Cf. Hall: The Return of Ulysses (note 3), pp. 7-15.

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Revisiting a highly canonized ancient text can help us not only in coming up with new interpretations or in detecting new levels of meaning in it, but can also, I argue, help us in thinking about what the Mediterranean is and how we want to live in it.

The Odyssey and the Mediterranean Imagination Although the Odyssey has played an integral role in the formation of what I tentatively refer to as a ‘Mediterranean imagination’, both because of its setting and its stories which lent themselves to adaption by the societies and cultures which would only emerge much later, it is “misleading” to ascribe to it the status of a “foundational”7 text. As commentators have noted, it rather represents the outcome of cultural contacts with Ancient Near Eastern storytelling and poetic myth-making in cultures whose area of influence encompassed a region that stretched from the Eastern Aegean to the Persian Gulf. The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest and first great literary text to have been passed down the millennia, preceded Homer and his contemporaries by at least 1000 years. It, too, is a story about travel and adventure with many parallels to the Odyssey, involving the help of gods, a visit to the underworld and fights with giants.8 Perilous quests, being lost at sea or encounters with fantastic beings, often representing the non-human world, feature prominently in many mythical systems all over the world, but they were certainly a distinctive trait of early Mediterranean storytelling. An Egyptian prose tale called ‘The Shipwrecked Sailor’, which has been preserved on a papyrus of the Middle Kingdom from around 2000 BCE, is also made up of these narrative elements9 and attests to the way in which early sea-faring societies rendered and made sense of their experiences through the means of imaginative storytelling and world-making. The same is true for the oral tradition out of which the Odyssey evolved and which had almost certainly been around since the Bronze Age. The ‘Trojan War’ became, in this context, a kind of mythical groundwork to which a series of associated narratives could be attached and which left succeeding bards enough room to both enter and improvise on an age-old tradition. Most likely, the Odyssey developed out of a series of so-called nostos-stories, which told about the ‘return’ of the Greek heroes that had fought at Troy. If there ever was an individual called Homer, his original genius was to tap into what was circulating all around him and to forge, out of a series of interconnected narratives, an archetypal story, imbuing it with an imaginative quality which still resonates today. In consequence, while the epic has become a repository of 7 8 9

Hall: The Return of Ulysses (note 3), p. 8. Cf. ibid. Cf. ibid., p. 164.

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cultural imagination and memory, it served as a cultural archive right from the beginning – an archive both of knowledge and of the age-old traditions and narratives that had been weaved into its complex fabric. Thus, although the question as to whether there ever was a ‘historical Trojan War’ has been hotly debated in academic and public circles since the early modern age, the issue is, for our subject at hand, not the factual or fictional quality of the events recorded in Greek epic, but rather the fact that they created an imaginary world which has endured over generations and which, even today, has lost nothing of its appeal.10 In antiquity, subsequent generations took the Trojan War as a historical fact and used it for political argumentation, making it part of their ‘intentional history’;11 and since at least the 5th century BCE, Greeks took the Homeric epics as an interpretative foil to explain a world that they preserved through the lens of binary thinking, West and East, Greek and Asian and/or Barbarian. The reception of Homer’s texts has thus, from the beginning, been marked by the tendency to read them against the background of a real geography and real socio-political developments. The Odyssey that has been passed to us can therefore be said to be made up of a series of readings and multiple layers of meaning that constantly shift between an imagined world and its utopia and the socio-historical milieu of changing Mediterranean societies and the places in which they lived. The latter aspect brings us to the complicated issue of the ‘Mediterranean’ itself. The fact that the Odyssey was preceded by at least two millennia of textual productions by cultures that are located in what we now refer to as the Near East is a reminder of where the cultural roots of a ‘Mediterranean imagination’ are to be sought. This aspect brings Marc van de Mieroop to note that “at times the Ancient Near East was the Mediterranean world”,12 that the “limits” of that world “depended on historical circumstances” and that “the small zones” of which it consisted “are connected to one another to an extent that depends on the activities of the humans inhabiting them. The geographical extent of those connections varies – and therefore what can be called the Mediterranean world changes”.13 As William Harris puts it, the question of what the “Mediterranean” is, has historically been a “problem of delimitation”.14

10 Cf. Gregor Weber: Der Trojanische Krieg: Historische Realität oder poetische Fiktion, in: Homer Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung, edited by Antonios Rengakos and Bernhard Zimmermann, Stuttgart: Metzler, 2011, pp. 228-256. 11 Cf. Hans-Joachim Gehrke: Mythos, Geschichte, Politik – antik und modern, in: Saeculum 45, 1994, pp. 239-264. 12 Marc van de Mieroop: The Eastern Mediterranean in Early Antiquity, in: Rethinking the Mediterranean, edited by William V. Harris, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 117-140, here p. 118. 13 Ibid., p. 117. 14 William V. Harris: The Mediterranean and Ancient History, in: Rethinking the Mediterranean, edited by William V. Harris, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 1-44, here p. 4.

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The ancient Roman and Greek terms for it,15 ‘mare nostrum’ (‘our sea’) or ‘he kath’hemas thalassa’ (‘the sea in our part of the world’)16, included the connotation of the appropriation of space. In fact, Western or Eurocentric historiography has been biased by these terms, equating ancient Greek and Roman history with Mediterranean history.17 Unearthing the roots of an epic like the Odyssey and uncovering the social context and imaginative mythical universe in which it evolved thus poses a challenge to this view and reminds us that the ‘our’, in the Greek and Roman sense, had always been full of ‘others’ from the very beginning.18 What I refer to as a ‘Mediterranean imagination’ in my essay is, against this background, not to be mistaken for a convenient shorthand for presupposing that there is a kind of cultural “unity”19 or a uniform imaginary that has been connected to the distinct geography of the Mediterranean world; rather; I employ the term as a way of re-enforcing the idea of the Mediterranean as a zone of contact and of “connectedness”20 that has shown itself not only in violent conflicts or trade routes but also in forms of imaginative world-making, in the texts, stories and cultural artefacts that have constantly shaped and re-shaped one another, transforming the abstract geographical space into a sounding board for different voices and highly divergent world views. Studying works of art that have long been connected to ‘Mediterraneanism’ is, against this background, one strategy for reflecting on the cultural contexts in which these works developed as well as on how they have imaginatively transformed the social energy that inspired them, also posing epistemological challenges and subversive views for dominant social systems. Next to the geographical and material world and dynamic space of the Mediterranean seas and the many ‘sub-Mediterranean’ areas that surround it21, the cultural forms of articulation that have entered into the cultural memory and that have originated in this region of the world, can themselves be seen as imaginative spaces in which expressions, meanings and interpretations of what the ‘Mediterranean’ is can be sought and, finally, called into question. That the Odyssey itself has contributed to the idea of the ‘Mediterranean’ and its culture has been clear from the outset. From the 7th century BCE on15 Ibid., p. 18. 16 Hecataeus, quoted in Serenella Iovino: Introduction: Mediterranean Ecocriticism, or, A Blueprint for Cultural Amphibians, in: Ecozon@ 4, 2, 2013, pp. 1-12, here p. 1. 17 Harris: The Mediterranean and Ancient History (note 14), p. 2. 18 I hereby paraphrase Serenella Iovino, whose thought-provoking essay in the Ecozon@ special issue on “Mediterranean Ecocriticism”, a new, vibrant trend in the “Environmental Humanities”, closes with the sentence inspired by Italian writer Franco Cassano: “If it is difficult, to distinctly define a Mediterranean identity, this is for a very simple reason: Our ‘we’ is full of Others” (Iovino: Introduction (note 16), p. 12). 19 Harris: The Mediterranean and Ancient History (note 14), p. 26. 20 Ibid., p. 8. 21 Cf. David Abulafia: Mediterraneans, in: Rethinking the Mediterranean, edited by William V. Harris, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 64-93.

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wards, scenes taken from the epic featured prominently on Greek vase paintings which spread, as the Greek colonization of the West began, throughout the Mediterranean coastlands. It was included in schoolbooks and became the basis of education for learners of Greek everywhere, including Renaissance Humanists. For Romans, the epic became an explanation of how culture was transmitted to the West.22 Etruscans, as Farrell points out, believed that Odysseus had brought their people to Italy and saw themselves as standing in a cultural continuity with the Greek hero. The Romans of the Imperial period also drew on this genealogy and interpreted the Odyssey, long before Virgil, as a story pointing westward, as a story set in the Western Mediterranean world.23 Ancient geography thus “took Odysseus ever westward as the Roman Empire expanded and he became the mythical founder of cities in Spain and Portugal”24 – the most famous example being the city of Lisbon (from Olissipo or Ulyssipo, ‘Ulysses’ polis’), which became the starting point for the Portuguese empire of the 16th century. However, one should keep in mind that Odysseus’ adventures “are not known itineraries”25. Whereas the nostoi of the other heroes of Troy are set in a real geography, Odysseus’ adventures are played out, for the most part, in the utopia of a fantastical world. Yet, the geographical setting of the epic has itself become the repository of the cultural imagination. In the first edition of his classic tome La Mediterranée et le Monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, Fernand Braudel remembers the explorations of Victor Bérard who took it upon himself to search for the landscapes of Odysseus’ adventures throughout the Mediterranean space, remarking that we should rather look for traces of the Homeric hero in today’s humans.26 In the Early Modern Age, countless European travellers in the Mediterranean region looked for both – the Hellenistic ideal, embodied in the humans that they encountered on their cruises and that, most of the time, did not meet their expectations27 as well as the storied landscapes of myth which would reenforce the aesthetic pleasure of their classical reading.28 When Johann Wolfgang von Goethe travelled through Sicily, he read the Odyssey, whose “truth

22 Cf. Hall: The Return of Ulysses (note 3), p. 77. 23 Joseph Farrell: Roman Homer, in: The Cambridge Companion to Homer, edited by Robert Fowler, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 254-271. 24 Hall: The Return of Ulysses (note 3), p. 78. 25 Ibid., p. 76. 26 Fernand Braudel: Géohistoire und geographischer Determinismus, in: Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, edited by Jörg Dünne and Stephan Günzel, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2006 [1949], pp. 395-408, here p. 401. 27 Cf. Suzanne Saïd: The Mirage of Greek Continuity: On the Uses and Abuses of Analogy in Some Travel Narratives from the Seventeenth to the Eigteenth Century, in: Rethinking the Mediterranean, edited by William V. Harris, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 268-293. 28 Cf. David Constantine: In the Footsteps of the Gods. Travellers to Greece and the Quest for the Hellenic Ideal, New York: Tauris, 2011.

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and beauty were revealed to him with new intensity in the places in which, so he believed, the poem was set”29: Now that I have here present in my mind these coasts and headlands, gulfs and bays, islands and spits of land, rocks and beaches, bushy hills, gentle pastures, fertile fields, splendid gardens, well-cared-for trees, trailing vines, cloudy peaks and always-smiling plains, cliffs and banks and the all-surrounding sea – now that I have all this, in such variation and variety, only now has the Odyssey become for me a living world.30

The perception of landscapes and the reception of classical literature intertwine in Goethe’s account to create an imaginative geography in which the present and the past fuse into one another. We have, on the one hand, the real Sicily, as it shows itself in both a cultivated and non-human nature as well as a Sicily of the mind, imbued with fantasies, memories, and stories that have become attached to it and ascribe meaning to the abstract, perceptible landscape. The Sicily in Goethe’s account can, in this sense, be seen as a stand-in for the Mediterranean with its watery landscapes and diverse coastlands as a whole, for it, too, is a vast geographic region into which different historic accounts and narratives have become inscribed. The cultural imagination constantly works to turn abstract spaces into ‘storied’ places31 characterized by present needs and concerns as well as by culturally mediated pasts. The Mediterranean therefore can itself be seen as a ‘storied’ place that is dominated as much by the factual and geomorphological processes that constantly transform it as by the cultural imaginary. The Mediterranean is a space of relations – both between places as well as between the narratives, memories and fantasies that are attached to these places. Accordingly, it figures as a ‘heterotopia’ in the sense of Michel Foucault, a region that exists in space, but that is likewise marked by manifold temporal ruptures and culturally mediated layers of meaning that follow a logic of exclusion and inclusion.32 The heterogeneous image of the Mediterranean that arises was already present in Homer’s Odyssey, in which real and imagined landscapes constantly interact to form a space in which the narrow boundaries between civilization and wilderness, culture and nature, Greek and Barbarian are tested in a fictional medium. From here, they have served as a guide for countless societies and individuals that have read their own experiences of the “Mediterranean” against the background of the Homeric epic – from Roman 29 Ibid., p. 81. 30 Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Werke XI: Autobiographische Schriften III, edited by E. Trunz et. al., München: Beck, 1974 [1786], p. 323 (translation by David Constantine). 31 Cf. Christopher Schliephake: Memory, Place, and Ecology in the Contemporary American Novel, in: Literature, Ecology, Ethics, edited by Timo Müller and Michael Sauter, Heidelberg: Winter, 2012, pp. 95-112, here pp. 95-98. 32 Cf. Michel Foucault: Von anderen Räumen, in: Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften, edited by Jörg Dünne and Stephan Günzel, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2006 [1967], pp. 317-329.

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emperors to early modern travellers like Goethe or modern adventurers like T. E. Lawrence, who, when explaining to his publisher why he is the perfect translator of the Odyssey, compared his own experiences with that of the mythic hero: For years we were doing up a city of roughly the Odysseus period. I have handled the weapons, armour, utensils of those times, explored their houses, planned their cities. I have hunted wild boars and watched lions, sailed the Aegean in sailing ships, bent bows, lived with pastoral peoples, woven textiles, built boats and killed many men.33

The emphatic reception of the Odyssey co-relates with an ethnographic interest and an adventurous spirit that combines the mythical quest narrative with a socio-political rendition of the ‘other’ so that the layers of time are, in Lawrence’s account, suspended to create the impression that the Mediterranean of Homer’s age is still here, in the present. As such, Lawrence’s account is, like Goethe’s quoted above, a manifestation of the ‘Mediterranean imagination’ and a true testament to the way in which an ancient text can, in ever new ways, reach out and influence how we perceive a specific geographic region. How the impulse to meet the ‘other’ of that region was reflected in Homer’s text will be dealt with in the following paragraphs.

Imagining the ‘Other’ in Homer’s Odyssey One can safely say that the Odyssey is obsessed with ‘othering’. In his study Memories of Odysseus – Frontier tales from ancient Greece François Hartog underlines the importance of the idea of frontiers for an early Greek society that was beginning to sail the vast space between what we now refer to as the Black Sea and the Pillars of Hercules in the West, which would remain frontier markers until the Early Modern Age. Travellers, he remarks, were adopted as “guides” and “translators”34 of faraway places and people. There are many navigators, geographers, mercenaries, and philosophers who we know by name and who travelled in a world corresponding to real geographies and socio-cultural contexts. However, since they went beyond the narrow confines of their ‘own’ world, beyond the landscapes and languages that they knew, their experiences were easily translated in the guise of the highly imaginative vocabulary of myth and folktale. ‘Othering’ in the Mediterranean has always been, I would suggest, about the “sketching out of”35 identities – constituting the respective ‘we’ in opposition or, at least, in relation to an ‘other’ that had 33 Thomas E. Lawrence: The Letters of T.E. Lawrence, edited by David Garnett, New York: Doubleday, 1938, p. 710. 34 François Hartog: Memories of Odysseus – Frontier Tales from Ancient Greece, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001, pp. 4, 5. 35 Ibid., p. 5.

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to be rendered in ways which drew on the sign-systems of the cultures in which these identities emerged, but which also had to be imbued with the sense of the strange and unfamiliar. I would suggest that the early Greek epics became repositories of the cultural imagination in exactly this way, that they presented the vocabulary which could be drawn upon whenever Greekspeaking people encountered sailors, lands, or indeed beasts that they perceived as alien. The Odyssey is the first literary example to use the motif of the “voyage” in this way, “as a discursive operator and a narrative device”36 that would help Greek speakers to literally navigate the imaginary border zones between their own world and what lay beyond. It is thus marked by a discursive dialectics constantly moving between a “closure” and an “opening-up”37 of this world, between creating the notion and the sense of a ‘we’ and the recognition that some ‘other’, too, was part of the wider world in which the Greeks sailed their ships. In consequence, that wider world, the Mediterranean Sea, was portrayed “both as one and diverse”, made up of “several heterogeneous spaces, which it separates rather than unites”.38 The narrative trajectory that makes up the Odyssey can itself be seen as a “journey through successive spaces”39, as a way of imaginatively testing the very categories by which these spaces were read and could be made sense of. Accordingly, the dividing line between these spaces was not so much marked by the issue of Greek and Barbarian – although that would become an important interpretative measure later on – but by the question of whether that space was ‘cultivated’ by humans, showing the signs of a proto-urban lifestyle and of archaic Greek customs, or alien in the sense that it was either inhabited by savages or non-humans. The geography of the Mediterranean presented thus emerged out of “a series of increasingly distant zones”40, finally leading the hero into the realm of the fantastic which no longer had an equivalent in real geography, but was rather set in the utopia of an imaginative otherworld. Here, as Hartog notes, “Odysseus encounters a radical otherness, where the whole matter of boundaries is brought into question, and the categories separating human beings, beasts and the gods are all confused”.41 One of the emblematic figures in this context is the sea-divinity Proteus, who lived on an island named Pharos, north of the Nile. Proteus is the “archetypal shape-shifter” – his repertoire “includes water and fire as well as every beast on the earth; his labile nature is related to his identification with the mutable element of the sea”42. Proteus plays an important role in the return of 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 24. Hall: The Return of Ulysses (note 3), p. 31.

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Menelaus from Troy, but the reason why he offers himself as an example of ‘othering’ in the Odyssey is because he is in many ways “emblematic of the whole” text, due to the “central position it gives to transformation and disguise – indeed to the acting of parts”43. Odysseus, the protagonist, is a shape-shifter himself, when he returns to Ithaca he does so as a beggar not as a king. As Edith Hall has noted, the Odyssey can itself be said to be a Protean text, a shape-shifting object in itself. The poem has so many strands, some prematurely truncated, others winding through the text to re-emerge later, that it can be safely said to mirror its content in form.44

Equally important is its “epistemological dimension: It explicitly discusses the nature of truth and fiction”45. Odysseus not only appears in disguise, he is also a crafted liar and arguably the first unreliable narrator in world literature. I would argue that this particular feature of the text, which also sets it apart from the Iliad, is not only the side effect of its oral composition from different sources, but also a conscious narrative trait, steeped in the socio-historical contexts of a world in constant change and concerned with the negotiation of identity and with opening up an imaginative space to deal with the heterogeneous and diverse aspects of this world, symbolized by both the wanderings of the hero as well as by the fluid, unstable nature of the sea itself. As many commentators have noted, the epic “evokes the danger and excitement of traversing unknown seas to distant lands”46 and became a central cultural text for a society that began to sail to distant shores for trade or settlement. As Edith Hall puts it, “the resistance that early Greek tradesmen and settlers encountered abroad informs the poem, but it is mediated by the vocabulary of myth, so that the ethnically other is transformed into the supernatural and inhuman”47. Nowhere is this clearer than in the famous Cyclops episode that figures prominently within the poem and that has, with its rich visual detail and imaginative force, become a central trope of the imagination of visual artists. The Cyclops episode is a turning point in Homer’s Odyssey. The narrative of the action is framed by Odysseus’ stay on the mythical islands of the Phaeacians from which he, in the tenth and last year of his voyage, is about to be brought back to Ithaca. His narration takes the listeners back to the beginning of his voyage. Shortly after their departure from Troy, he and his companions were blown off their homeward course by a storm around Cape Maleia and landed on the shores of the islands of the goats which are devoid of any signs of civilization. Odysseus, the proto-colonizer is, however, quick to

43 44 45 46 47

Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid.

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note that “the land is not at all bad, and could produce every kind of seasonal crop”.48 Curious as to what kind of creatures live on the neighbouring island of the Cyclops, he decides to make an expedition there with some of his best men. They find the cave of the giant Cyclops Polyphemus and start to eat some of his supplies which are neatly ordered. When he returns with his sheep, he closes the entrance to the cave with a giant rock and detects the intruders. When the strangers expect to be treated as guests and be given presents according to the customs, he laughs at them and begins to eat them. Thanks to the cunning intelligence of Odysseus who passes himself of as ‘Nobody’, intoxicates the Cyclops with some wine that they brought along, and blinds him with a sharpened stick, he and his men can flee. It is only when they are at a safe distance that Odysseus states his real name which leads Polyphemus to curse him – a curse that will lead to the long wanderings of Odysseus due to the wrath of Poseidon. This episode is, as Lorna Hardwick has put it, “shaped by the interdependence of the motifs of identity and intelligence, the poetic device of punning and the organising structures of polarities”49: nature and culture, wilderness and civilization, freedom and captivity make up the poles that structure the episode and its language, which draws on a vocabulary well known to Greek speakers and included “the social and anthropological categories of xenia (hospitality), laws, lifestyle, technical skills and verbal skills”50. The ‘difference’ of the Cyclopes is set out, as Norman Austin51 has noticed, right from the beginning in a series of negatives: The lawless outrageous Cyclopes who, putting all their trust in the immortal gods, neither plough with their hands nor plant anything (…) These people have no institutions, no meetings for counsels; rather they make their habitations in caverns hollowed among the peaks of the high mountains, and each one is the law for his own wives and children and cares nothing about the others.52

This passage implicitly contains the description of a civilized man who is clearly opposed to the Cyclopes who do not know social institutions or laws, who are neither farmers nor sea-farers. The negation of these qualities has led to interpretations that see in the Cyclopes the ultimate embodiments of ‘other’ 48 Homer: Odyssey (note 1), 9.131-6. 49 Lorna Hardwick: A Daidalos in the later-modern age? Transplanting Homer into Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey: A stage version, The Open University, January Conference 1996: The Reception of Classical Texts and Images, , [accessed September 17, 2014]. 50 Ibid. 51 Norman Austin: Odysseus and the Cyclops. Who is who?, in: Approaches to Homer, edited by Carl A. Rubino and Cynthia W. Shelmerdine, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983, pp. 3-37, here pp. 22-24. 52 Homer: Odyssey (note 1), 9.106-15.

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in the Odyssey 53 – an interpretation that is supported by Odysseus’ motif for his visit to the island according to which he wanted to find out “whether they are savage and violent and without justice or hospitable to strangers and with minds that are godly”54. Although Odysseus’ discoveries and his descriptions (according to him, the Cyclops is a “monster of a man”55 “endowed with great strength and wild with no true knowledge of laws or any good customs”56), reenforce the impression of the ‘otherness’ of the Cyclopes, there is another aspect to his story that runs counter to his portrayal and that allows for another interpretation of the episode altogether. Odysseus’ storytelling is motivated by his need to explain why he stayed in the empty cave although his comrades urged him to leave. The Greek seafarers are, in this scenario, not so much explorers, but rather intruders into the home of Polyphemus, which is neatly ordered and which is not as desolate as the master-narrator has us believe, since the other Cyclopes, who live nearby, quickly come to Polyphemus’ cave when he screams for their help. They, too, it becomes clear, are social beings and cultivate their surroundings, albeit in different ways to those of the archaic Greek society in which the epic was sung. It is only Odysseus’ trickery and his command of language that allows him and his surviving comrades to eventually flee. The deciding aspect which allows Odysseus’ listeners to understand the episode in terms of ‘otherness’ is Polyphemus’ anthropophagy. As Lorna Hardwick points out, these “eating habits […] map cultural and moral boundaries. On one level, Odysseus asserts his own sense of identity and community in the categories which he uses to interrogate the Cyclops”57. On another level, one might add, these very “categories”, presented in a series of polarisations, drew on a language that was taken out of the context of Greek proto-urban lifestyle and a society that was beginning to travel the seas not solely on the grounds of trade and discovery, but also for the purpose of colonizing foreign, faraway lands. “Positioned in these polarised structures, the Cyclops could become a reference point for representations of ‘otherness’”58. Not only is he, “at all times, ancillary and subordinate to the representation of the hero himself”59, but his anthropophagy “articulates the boundaries between the civilized and savage worlds of Greeks and barbarians as well as between humans and animals”60. Dougherty thus interprets the episode against the background of a 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

Cf. Hardwick: A Daidalos (note 49). Homer: Odyssey (note 1), 9.174-6. Ibid., 9.187. Ibid., 9.214-5. Hardwick: A Daidalos (note 49). Ibid. Ray J. Clare: Representing monstrosity: Polyphemos in the Odyssey, in: Monsters and Monstrosity in Greek and Roman Culture, edited by Catherine Atherton, Bari: Levante, 1998, pp. 1-17, here p. 7. 60 Carol Dougherty: The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer’s Odyssey, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 136.

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colonizing discourse which rendered the settlement of oversea territories as a “violent process” in which the negative portrayal of the otherness that would be encountered “served to redirect the violence and the transgression involved […] from coloniser to colonised”61. The depiction of the ‘other’ of the Mediterranean world in which this colonisation took place produced, in the guise of “an adventure story”, as Hartog notes, a “long-lasting paradigm” for the interpretation and the portrayal of the boundaries of that world and became a repository for the cultural imagination of the ‘other’, a poetic background against which to literally read and negotiate the confines, places and violence that would make up its experiential base. The “poetic anthropology” of the Odyssey thus “provided the basis for the Greeks’ vision of themselves and of others”.62 However, as I have noted before, it would be wrong to interpret the Odyssey as a normative text; rather, the literary epistemology of the multilayered and complex epic constantly works to question the very moral and linguistic backcloth of the categories of ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘human’ and ‘animal’, ‘nature’ und ‘culture’. Homer’s epic does not project the question of ‘otherness’ onto the real geography of a Mediterranean space, but rather relegates it to the realm of the imaginary and of language. It is on this realm that subsequent generations have drawn in their respective portrayal of a ‘Mediterranean other’.

Other Odysseys From antiquity onwards, the Odyssey became and has remained one of the central cultural texts of the Western literary canon, it has inspired countless writers and artists from Virgil over Dante to James Joyce, and, as such, it has travelled itself, in ever new disguises and contexts, all over the world and has long entered into the transnational cultural heritage of humankind as a whole. That is to say, now, it belongs to everyone. However, that has not always been the case. When it was adopted first by Romans and later by Renaissance seafarers it was done so under the sign of imperialist ideology and cultural hegemony. It became an integral part of what Edward W. Said has termed the ‘cultural topography’ of imperialism, a phenomenon that Said perceives in terms of geographic ‘location’ as well as linguistic reference to space. According to him, imperialism is not only a phenomenon that works in terms of power relations between centre and periphery, but also in terms of cultural texts that inscribe imperialist ideologies into the lands and cultures of the colonised, thus constantly re-producing inequality on the level of culture as well. However, the tension and distance between metropolis and colony also has the curious effect of opening up new room for cultural creativity and productivity 61 Ibid., p. 137. 62 Hartog 2001, p. 25.

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that can lead to new forms of cultural world-making and even to the subversion of hegemonic texts.63 I would argue that the Odyssey can itself be seen as an example of this mechanism. Adopted by colonial powers, it became a central ingredient of imperial curricula and schoolbooks64 and featured prominently in the travel writings of proto-imperialist explorers like Columbus or Cook. As Hartog has noted in this context, their discoveries opened up the discursive category of the “savage”65. What they encountered beyond the Pillars of Hercules (which featured as a prominent sign of the zeitgeist of the time, as the imaginative border zone between civilization and the unknown awaiting in the West), was a New World – yet, they did not describe this world, at first, in terms of a new language or poetics, but rather in a curious “mélange de fantastique et de familier”66. Although the Ancients had presumably never seen these spaces and people, their texts offered a cultural archive for making sense and ascribing meaning to what the modern seafarers saw and would imbue their writings with a rich imaginative quality that was familiar to their audience at home. Columbus wrote of Sirens, Amazons and monsters that he encountered on his travels. Even the complex cultural construction of ‘cannibalism’, a term that was adopted from a Native Caribbean tongue, harked back on ancient myths and ethnographic texts.67 It was in this sense that the classical tradition played an integral role in the project of empire building – not only because it had evolved out of cultures that had themselves been colonial powers, but because it offered a language and an imaginary backdrop that helped “in constructing the binary of a European self and a non-European other”, thus influencing “ways of seeing and modes of articulation that are central to the colonial process”.68 With its rich imagination of the ‘other’ outlined above, the Odyssey offered itself as a central text for this project and became implicated in colonial discourse. Especially the famous Cyclops episode has remained an influential cultural artefact, constantly re-written and reproduced in colonial (and post-colonial) times. Edith Hall has, in her brilliant reception study of the Odyssey The Return of Ulysses, sketched out a broad overview of the different ways in which this episode was read and re-interpreted throughout the modern era.69 As she points out, “the poem was almost always understood from the perspective of Odysseus the wayfarer”70, whereas, citing examples from writers as diverse as 63 Cf. Edward W. Said: Kultur und Imperialismus. Einbildungskraft und Politik im Zeitalter der Macht, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1994. 64 Cf. Norrell A. London: Curriculum and Pedagogy in the Development of Colonial Imagination: A Case Study, in: Pedagogy, Culture, and Society 10, 2002, pp. 95-121. 65 François Hartog: Anciens, Modernes, Sauvages, Paris: Galaade, 2005, p. 18. 66 Ibid., p. 35. 67 Cf. ibid., pp. 37-42. 68 Ania Loomba: Colonialism/Postcolonialism, New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 66. 69 Hall: The Return of Ulysses (note 3), pp. 89-100. 70 Ibid., p. 91.

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Columbus, Locke, and Darwin, “the Cyclops […] long represented the savages who inhabited shores ripe for invasion”71. However, as she also makes clear, “the story doesn’t end here, for the Cyclops has become not only a totemic but a contested figure”72. In recent, post-colonial literature, starting with the Négritude movement of the 1930s, “instances of the Cyclops becoming a point of identification by oppressed ethnic groups, or anti-colonial polemicists, can […] be multiplied”73. Writers like Aimé Césaire, Ralph Ellison or Derek Walcott have, all in their distinct ways, used the Odyssey as an important intertext of their own work, taking it as the basis for a re-formulation of black or Creole identity and have thereby taken on a new perspective on the Cyclops that is now seen increasingly seen as the victim of colonial oppression. Yet, it is important to note that their responses do not constitute a coherent or unified anti- or post-colonial viewpoint, but rather “a multitude of postcolonial and anticolonial responses”74. I cite them as an example of an “ethos” that Justine McConnell sees at work in the postcolonial re-working of the Homeric epics, namely that they make clear that the ancient texts do “not belong inherently to Europe, that they can be as African, Caribbean, and American, as they are European, as ‘black’ as they are ‘white’”75. The Odyssey can be seen, against this background, as a primary example of what Stephen Greenblatt and others have termed ‘cultural mobility’, of the way cultural texts can travel between cultures and how they constantly change their meaning once they circulate in different socio-historic contexts.76 This latter aspect brings us, in fact, back to what I have referred to as the ‘Mediterranean imagination’. If the Odyssey can be said to be an early example of how cultural contacts and the encounter with the ‘other’ have produced a myth that became deeply entrenched in the ways in which ancient people and subsequent generations have read and imagined the Mediterranean world, how does the postcolonial re-working of a text like the Odyssey affect this imagination? Can it, in the end, change our perception of what we refer to as ‘Mediterranean’? I think it can. The postcolonial readings of the Odyssey can, in this context, be seen as a “writing back” strategy, in which the re-writing and re-reading of canonical texts of the “Western” literary canon can be seen as “counter-discursive practices”77 that follow a “revisionary impetus” and can

71 72 73 74

Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 93 (emphasis in original). Ibid., p. 96. Justine McConnell: Black Odysseys. The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, p. 3. 75 Ibid., p. 9. 76 Cf. Cultural Mobility. A Manifesto, edited by Stephen Greenblatt et. al., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 77 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin: The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, London: Routledge, 1989, p. 196.

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be interpreted as acts of “reinscription”78 in which the colonial periphery transforms the sign- and meaning-making systems of the cultural centre. If “Hellenism” is to be “thought of as one of the modes of Western discourse […], one of the vocabularies the West uses to think about itself”79, then the postcolonial encounter with Hellenism is one way of subverting this traditional self-image and to emancipate the classical tradition from a Eurocentric (or even racist) agenda. It is also one way of inscribing African, Caribbean, Indian or Asian elements or forms of culture into a cultural fabric that had traditionally been associated with a ‘Western’, Greco- or Roman-centric Mediterranean world. The imaginative re-exploration of the ancient texts from various sources and from various geographic regions thus functions to open the notion of the ‘Mediterranean’ up to a re-negotiation that denies, to Western European cultures, an interpretational sovereignty over this space and its cultural archive. In the words of Martin McKinsey, postcolonial writers “are working to re-place the Hellenic in its geographic and cultural matrix”80 and to question a viewpoint that relegates the classical tradition to a region narrowly defined as ‘Europe’. They have, in the terms of Said, undertaken the project of a cultural “re-mapping”81, of inscribing their local geographies into the canonical texts of the colonial centre. The ‘Mediterranean imagination’ that marks a work like the Odyssey is therefore imbued with multiple layers and heterogeneous geographies that transform its imaginative space into a transnational one. The ‘other’ Mediterranean that we can find in both the Odyssey and its postcolonial reception is thus one of cultural fluidity, porosity, and, in the end, hybridity. A good example of ‘other’ Mediterranean spaces is, in fact, the Caribbean and its vast geography of archipelagos and islands that have often been compared to the Mediterranean and, to be exact, to the Aegean world. As Emily Greenwood has shown, British travellers had long used ancient Greek epics to literally read the geography of the Caribbean and its people based on ancient texts that had never circulated in this region of the world. James Anthony Froude, for instance, had, in his The English in the West Indies; or, The Bow of Ulysses (1888) drawn this connection and had read his own role in the empire building against the background of Homer’s epic, comparing himself to the mythic hero.82 According to Greenwood, this reception on the part of the colonisers “had the unwitting effect of making the reinterpretation, or counterinterpretation, of this myth a vital part of the creative imagination of Anglo78 Martin McKinsey: Hellenism and the Postcolonial Imagination: Yeats, Cavafy, Walcott, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010, p. 10. 79 Ibid., p. 27. 80 Ibid., p. 34. 81 Said: Kultur und Imperialismus (note 63), p. 95. 82 James Anthony Froude: The English in the West Indies; or, The Bow of Ulysses, London: Longmans, 1888. Cf. Emily Greenwood: Arriving Backwards: The Return of The Odyssey in the English-Speaking Caribbean, in: Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds, edited by Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 192-210.

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phone Caribbean literature”83. In the terms of Lorna Hardwick, the cultural “energy” involved in reception processes “may flow in both directions and when it does the resulting synergy sparks new work”84. This can, for example, be seen in Derek Walcott’s famous epic poem Omeros, which draws on the Iliad and the Odyssey in its mythical re-figuration of a Caribbean world that is, in the end, lifted onto a par with ancient Greece: Only in you, across centuries of the sea’s parchment atlas, can I catch the noise of the surf lines wandering like the shambling fleece of the lighthouse’s flock, that Cyclops whose blind eye shut from the sunlight… and the blind lighthouse, sensing the edge of a cape, paused like a giant, a marble cloud in its hand, to hurl its boulder that splashed into phosphorous stars; then a black fisherman, his stubbled chin coarse as a dry sea-urchin’s, hoisted his flour-sack sail on its bamboo spar, and scanned the opening line of our epic horizon.85

This self-referential episode from Walcott’s poem plays with motives taken from Homer’s epics and uses the space of the sea, the travel of the waves, as an interconnecting link between the imaginative spheres of an ancient Mediterranean world and a poetologically re-figured Caribbean world so that both spaces share, in the end, the same “epic horizon”86. Walcott’s play on the motif of the “Cyclops” is a recognition of the status of ‘alterity’ that characterizes his poem, how it transforms a well-known literary tradition into a new guise, but, at the same time, it is a rejection of the status of the ‘other’, since the symbol of the Cyclops figure is creatively used to render a “lighthouse”, not the inhabitants of this world. What Sylvia Wynter calls the “Cyclops factor”, that is the status of “alterity” or “other” that the colonisers had imaginatively transposed on the “New World”, their “New Mediterranean”, is thereby undermined and the “dominant Imaginary” is called into question.87 Consequently, the use of “ancient texts and cultures” are de-centred from what used to be thought of as their dominant Western, cultural, social and political associations” and “liberated for reinterpretation […] released from oppressive constructions and exploitation and freed to assume new identities which are not 83 Ibid., p. 195. 84 Lorna Hardwick: Refiguring Classical Texts: Aspects of the Postcolonial Tradition, in: Classics and Colonialism, edited by Barbara Goff, London: Duckworth, 2005, pp. 107-117, here p. 108. 85 Derek Walcott: Omeros, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990, p. 13. 86 Greenwood: Arriving Backwards (note 82), p. 198. 87 Sylvia Wynter: A Different Kind of Creature: Caribbean Literature, the Cyclops Factor and the Second Poetics of the Propter Nos, in: Sisyphus and Eldorado: Magical and Other Realisms in Caribbean Literature, edited by Timothy Reiss, Trenton: Africa World Press, 2002, pp. 143-167, here p. 157.

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limited by the dictates, values and material culture of colonial appropriators”.88 Although Hardwick’s résumé may come across as too optimistic, since classical works are still very much tied to their ‘Western’ canonical appropriation, it is nevertheless a reminder of the emancipatory quality of that ‘other Mediterranean imagination’ which constantly works to imbue the classical texts with new meanings and to re-inscribe new geographies into its imaginative framework. What has, in academic circles, become referred to as “black classicism”89 is thus a challenge to Eurocentric world-views and one-sided cultural appropriation both of the classical tradition and of space. Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson have, against this background, coined the term ‘Black Aegean’ to describe the Aegean as a site of transit and transfer where cultural contacts and re-figurations of classic tragedies by African authors work to create new images and to uncover new layers of meaning within an old tradition.90 The image of the Mediterranean as a “‘fluid and multi-directional’ zone of linked or networked sites which trade in representations of Ancient Greece”91 becomes an apt way to characterize what I have, in the course of this essay, referred to as a ‘Mediterranean imagination’. Revisiting an ancient text like the Odyssey and its manifold and heterogeneous reception over the centuries is one way of exploring the cultural frameworks of the Mediterranean world and of showing that it is indeed multi-polar and multi-layered. ‘Others’ have been written into and have inscribed themselves repeatedly into this cultural palimpsest so that it is, like the tidal nature of the sea itself, ever-changing and dynamic. As I have tried to make clear, it is also mobile. In the guise of ancient texts, the ‘Mediterranean imagination’ has travelled all over the world so that the ‘Mediterranean’ can be found in spaces and cultures that are, geographically, very far away. Imaginatively, however, these spaces and cultures have themselves become part of that ‘Mediterranean imagination’, constantly transforming its frameworks. Recognizing this ‘other’ Mediterranean has farreaching ethical consequences, since it questions the narrow boundaries on which the Euro-centric image of the ‘Mediterranean’ and, in the end, a European identity is formed. Re-figuring this identity and image as open and fluid is one way of engaging with the hegemonic, closed-off systems that agencies like Frontex try to install on the imaginary border zones of what is commonly referred to as Europe. Even in this context, an ancient myth like the Odyssey, with its literary epistemology and the complex negotiations between appear88 Hardwick: Refiguring Classical Texts (note 84), p. 109. 89 For a concise overview and introduction into the field cf. Christopher Schliephake: Die Blendung des Kyklopen – Antikenrezeption und (post-)kolonialer Diskurs, in: Mitteilungen des Instituts für Europäische Kulturgeschichte 22, 2014, pp. 13-34. 90 Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson: Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 1-37. 91 Barbara Goff: “Your Secret Language”. Classics in the British Colonies of West Africa, London: Bloomsbury Academic/Bristol Classical Press, 2013, p. 6.

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ance and reality, can help us in finding ways of dealing with the ‘other’ of that world. When Odysseus lands, shipwrecked and in an abysmal state, on the mythical island of the Phaeacians and is found by Nausicaa, the daughter of the king of the island, she does not run away in horror, but turns toward him, saying that: Stranger, since you seem to be neither an evil man nor a witless, and it is Zeus himself, the Olympian, that gives happy fortune to men, both to the good and the evil, to each man as he will; so to thee he has given this lot, and you must in any case endure it. But now, since you have come to our city and land, you shalt not lack clothing or anything else of those things which befit a sore-tried suppliant when he comes in the way.92

Now in our times, with the Mediterranean becoming the stage of tragic odysseys again, her words have an eerie resonance. We should listen carefully.

92 Homer: Odyssey (note 1), 6.187-193.

PAUL A. SILVERSTEIN Thinking through the Diaspora: Anthropologies of Mobility across the Mediterranean This essay attempts to take stock of the ongoing cross-disciplinary and crossnational conversation around the question of Mediterranean otherness.1 There are certainly many ways to broach this subject, but in this essay I engage the old Braudelian provocation to think about the Mediterranean less as a boundary than as a space of flow, less as a divider of civilizations than as a channel for mobility and interaction2 – something recently emphasized by Julia Clancy-Smith in her historical study of the “central Mediterranean corridor,” as well as by Iain Chambers in his now classic work on Mediterranean “crossings” (understood in a host of spatial, rhetorical, and ontological connotations).3 More particularly, I want to try to apply the analytic category of ‘diaspora’ to the maritime region, most famously proposed by Paul Gilroy for the Atlantic and Engseng Ho for the Indian Ocean, to see what kind of traction it might provide for thinking through the contemporary social formations produced by ongoing flows of peoples, goods and ideas across the Mediterranean.4 Drawing on my own research which tracks the broader North African diaspora across the Western Mediterranean,5 my goal is to take critical stock of a field of scholarship to which many of us have contributed, though not always perhaps with full self-awareness of the broader intellectual context of our efforts. 1 2

3

4

5

This essay draws on a number of the themes broached in my longer review of diasporic scholarship of the Middle East and North Africa (Paul A. Silverstein: Anthropologies of Middle Eastern Diasporas, in: A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East, edited by Soraya Altorki, New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015, pp. 282-315). Fernand Braudel: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Vol. 1, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995 [1966]. Julia Clancy-Smith: Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in the Age of Migration, c. 1800-1900, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011; Iain Chambers: Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Paul Gilroy: The Black Atlantic: Double Consciousness and Modernity, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993; Engseng Ho: Empire through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat, in: Comparative Studies of Society and History 46, 2, 2004, pp. 210-246, idem: The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Paul A. Silverstein: Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race and Nation, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2004.

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In general, scholars have long noted mobility as a formative frame of sociopolitical life in the Mediterranean region. Historians have explored how commercial linkages, often doubling as vectors for diplomacy and warfare, contributed to the growth of port-city entrepôts across the region which were connected through networks of merchants, bankers, and itinerant peddlers with ties to local hinterlands and beyond.6 Researchers have pointed to the importance of pilgrimage in motivating a variety of commercial, religious and scholarly displacements across the region.7 Historians have emphasized how long-distance modes of imperial governance depended on the relocation of soldiers and slaves,8 and nationalist movements contrasted the establishment of settled cosmopolis to a proximate mobile past often symbolized by pastoralists as authentic, living ancestors – much as Ibn Khaldun described for the southern shores of the Mediterranean in the 14th century, and Michael Herzfeld has analyzed in terms of “cultural intimacy” for a contemporary Greece still burdened by its classical past.9 For cultural nationalists and scholars alike, tropes of the nomad, the Gypsy, the pilgrim, the caravan, and the merchant/ privateering ship have become iconic of the Mediterranean as a mosaic of interconnected cultural worlds.10 Although mobility has long been understood to be central to historical and contemporary social formations within the Mediterranean basin, only in relatively recent years have the region’s “out of place” peoples11 become privileged objects of study in themselves. To a degree, this new privileging is related to recent critiques from within the fields of history and the social sciences of operating methodologies historically premised on the spatial boundedness of community and nation, if not an even deeper presumption of primordial rootedness. As Khachig Tölölyan has noted, beginning in the mid-1980s fluid tropes of flows, processes, and rhizomatic networks generally displaced static 6

David Abulafia: A Mediterranean Emporium: The Catalan Kingdom of Majorca, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Braudel: The Mediterranean (note 2); Janice E. Thomson: Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extra-Territorial Violence in Early Modern Europe, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. 7 Maribel Dietz: Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims: Ascetic Travel in the Mediterranean World, A.D. 300-800, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005; Jill Dubisch: In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics of a Greek Island Shrine, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995; Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori: Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. 8 See Karen Barkey: Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. 9 Ibn Khaldûn: The Muqaddimah. An Introduction to History, in three vols., translated from the Arabic by Franz Rosenthal, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958 [1377]; Michael Herzfeld: Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State, New York: Routledge, 1997; idem: Anthropology Through the Looking Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 10 See Carleton Coon: Caravan: The Story of the Middle East, New York: Holt, 1958. 11 Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, New York: Routledge, 2005 [1966].

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metaphors of structure and order in much of the social sciences and cultural studies.12 In the meantime, material transformations in the Mediterranean have called into question the nation-state as the taken-for-granted model of sociopolitical belonging in the region: new transportation and communication technologies have increased the speed and scale of the movement of people, goods and ideas across the region; international conflict and civil unrest has displaced thousands; and a global discourse on globalization has become hegemonic in both scholarship and punditry. If previously the deterritorialization of cultural belonging – the lack of isomorphic fit between a single people, territory, culture, and government – testified to the incomplete modernization of the Mediterranean (in contrast to northern Europe), today it is seen to present a problem for states to navigate, as a potential threat to the national geographic order.13 Diasporas thus come into relief only when they appear exceptional, when they stop being simply another part of the wider cosmological order. As Eng Seng Ho has reminded us, with the expansion of the Westphalian compact in the name of national self-determination, “diasporas were now anomalous: everyone had to become a citizen of a state.”14

Diasporic Intimacy

Diasporas have thus recently emerged as a particular species of transnational social formations with their own specific features. Unlike cosmopolitan ideologies that traditionally posit Kantian individuals striving to transcend ethnocultural boundaries,15 diasporas are ostensibly premised on an intimate exteriority between an ethnic group and a putative ‘homeland’ it claims as its spatiotemporal origin.16 Unlike in cases of exile, where refugee subjects are violently reduced to a temporary state of victimized exception outside of the national order,17 diasporas actively re-root themselves and forge creative and produc12 Khachig Tölölyan: The Nation-State and Its Others: In Lieu of a Preface, in: Diaspora 1, 1, 1991, pp. 3-7. See also Arjun Appadurai: Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari:A Thousand Plateaus, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 [1980]. 13 Liisa Malkki: National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees, in: Cultural Anthropology 7, 1, 1992, pp. 24-44; Pnina Werbner: The Place Which is Diaspora: Citizenship, Religion, and Gender in the Making of Chaordic Transnationalism, in: Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 28, 1, 2002, pp. 119-133. 14 Ho: The Graves of Tarim (note 4), p. 306. 15 James Clifford: Travelling Cultures, in: Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 96-116; Bruce Robbins: Comparative Cosmopolitanism, in: Social Text 31/32, 1992, pp. 169-186. 16 William Safran: Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return, in: Diaspora 1, 1, 1991, pp. 83-99. 17 Malkki: National Geographic (note 13).

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tive dialogues across cultural and spatial boundaries.18 And, unlike in nationalist models of immigration that presume and demand cultural and political assimilation,19 lateral diasporic ties tend to transcend the host nation, reproducing what Pnina Werbner has called “communities of co-responsibility” and what Ghassan Hage has characterized as a single space of intimacy.20 Such translocal intimacy forces us to move beyond what the late French-Algerian sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad, referred to as “state thought” and recognize that every immigration is also an emigration, that “[t]he two are indissociable aspects of a single reality, and one cannot be explained with reference to the other.”21 For this reason, scholars have characterized diasporas as having a “here and there” dual orientation to both home and host societies,22 as “both ethno-parochial and cosmopolitan”23, which, as James Clifford remarks, “blend[s] together both roots and routes.”24 Importantly, as Brian Axel25 has theorized, diasporas are not simply the product of an initial, constitutive trauma of violent uprooting,26 but involve the ongoing organization of long-distance belonging,27 the continual reorientation of affect, aspiration, and engagement spatially to a world beyond the immediacy of everyday experience, and temporally to a fantasized anteriority of social totality. In this “repeated retroactive production of a time before”28 the diaspora nostalgically creates the very homeland that ostensibly called it forth. In this sense, diasporas and nation-states may exist less in oppositional tension than in a co-constitutive dialectical relationship.29 Rather than a linear pro18 James Clifford: Diasporas, in: Cultural Anthropology 9, 3, 1994, pp. 302-338; Stuart Hall: Cultural Identity and Diaspora, in: Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, pp. 222-237. 19 Etienne Balibar: The Nation Form: History and Ideology, in: Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, edited by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, New York: Verso, 1991, pp. 86-106; Rogers Brubaker: Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992; Abdelmalek Sayad: The Suffering of the Immigrant, Cambridge: Polity, 2004; Paul A. Silverstein: Immigrant Racialization and the New Savage Slot: Race, Migration, and Immigration in the New Europe, in: Annual Review of Anthropology 34, 2005, pp. 363-384. 20 Werbner: The Place Which is Diaspora (note 13), p. 121; Ghassan Hage: A Not So MultiSited Ethnography of a Not So Imagined Community, in: Anthropological Theory 5, 4, 2005, pp. 463-475. 21 Sayad: The Suffering of the Immigrant (note 19), p. 1. 22 Steven Vertovec: Three Meanings of “Diaspora”, Exemplified among South Asian Religions, in: Diaspora 6, 3, 1997, pp. 277-299. 23 Pnina Werbner: Introduction: The Materiality of Diaspora – Between Aesthetic and “Real” Politics, in: Diaspora 9, 1, 2000, pp. 5-20, here p. 6. 24 Clifford: Diasporas (note 18), p. 308. 25 Brian Axel: The Diasporic Imaginary, in: Public Culture 14, 2, 2002, pp. 411-428. 26 See Robin Cohen: Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London: University College London Press, 1997, p. ix. 27 Benedict Anderson: Long-Distance Nationalism: World Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics, Amsterdam: Center for Asian Studies, 1992. 28 Axel: The Diasporic Imaginary (note 25), p. 424. 29 Ibid., p. 426.

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gression from unity to dispersion, the “non-contiguous” time-space of the diaspora is better characterized as “discrepant”30 or “syncopated”31 or “chaordic”32, as a flexible and fluid “third timespace”33 across and between boundaries. In part, scholars of the Mediterranean have recently been turning their attention to diaspora-like communities, insofar as they seem to offer a model of community and social life beyond the ultimately racist tendencies of territorial nationalisms premised on claims of autochthony. Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin, for instance, reclaim an older, pre-Zionist Jewish idiom of Diaspora (galut) as a model for identification that presumes the sharing of space with cultural others without the erasure of one’s own specificity – in contrast with exclusivist forms of national self-determination that, in their example, structure Israel as a mono-ethnic Jewish state.34 Similarly, as Gilroy has argued for the “Black Atlantic”35, diasporas can chart out vectors of shared resistance to capitalist modernity by underwriting oppositional countercultures and alternate public spheres – what Michael Warner has elsewhere called “counterpublics” – that cross territorial and ethno-racial borders.36 Nonetheless, diasporas remain internally contested and politically variable. Rather than necessarily embracing a politics of resistance, diasporas tend to organize themselves through what Werbner calls “transnational moral gestures”37 in the ethical orientation of diasporans to other co-ethnics via social practices like philanthropy, lobbying, remittances, kinship and marriage, all of which speak to the affective challenges of maintaining a sense of ‘home’ across spatial divides in the absence of physical presence.38 Likewise, even the term ‘diaspora’ is only ambivalently embraced by many whom scholars would name as such, and indeed many originating from the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean living abroad do not necessarily envision their own deterritorialized predicament as analogous to Greek, Jewish, African, or Armenian precedents. ‘Diaspora’ resonates more in Anglophone settings where ethno-national identification does not necessarily conflict with social participation or one’s duties to the state; whereas Francophone structures of 30 31 32 33

34

35 36 37 38

Clifford: Diasporas (note 18), p. 317. Gilroy: The Black Atlantic (note 4), p. 281. Werbner: The Place Which is Diaspora (note 13), p. 123. Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg: Introduction: Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity, in: Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity, edited by Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg, Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, pp. 1-26, here p. 13. Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin: Diaspora: Generation and Ground of Jewish Identity, in: Critical Inquiry 19, 4, 1993, pp. 693-725. Gilroy: The Black Atlantic (note 4). Michael Warner: Publics and Counterpublics, New York: Zone Books, 2002. Werbner: Introduction (note 23), p. 7. See Hage: A Not So Multi-Sited Ethnography (note 20); Celia E. Rothenberg: Proximity and Distance: Palestinian Women’s Social Lives in Diaspora, in: Diaspora 8, 1, 1999, pp. 23-50.

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republican citizenship leave little legitimate place for articulations of diasporic solidarity or hyphenated belonging; and Germanic conceptions of Leitkultur foreground a national/foreign dichotomy that similarly ostensibly precludes multiple or layered identities. The common Arabic term to describe displacement is al-ghurba which implies a state of exile from one’s true home; Palestinians in particular refuse the settled permanence implied by the term ‘diaspora’ and instead uphold their ‘refugee’ status;39 and Salafi reformists tend to reject the territorial implications of ‘diaspora’ and instead reference a broader Islamic community beyond ethnic or national fractures.40 Others on both sides of the Mediterranean are suspicious of a discourse of diaspora that seems to deny their present lives and localized aspirations as legitimate in and of themselves. Identifying with a ‘diaspora’ as such for many thus involves embracing a nostalgic spatiotemporal perspective, a discrete ethno-national affiliation, a capacious sense of homeliness, and, ultimately, an implicit politics of settlement and return, however deferred.

The Mediterranean Today

Over the last decade, ethnographers and historians have responded to the simultaneously increased normativity of displacement as a material condition and heightened politics of suspicion (particularly in the wake of September 11th) of people out of place either with detailed studies of the internal complexity and heterogeneity of territorialized diasporic ‘communities’, or by critically contextualizing the socioeconomic and political conditions experienced by those labeled ‘diasporic’. The research attempts to balance analytical distance with political critique, to connect individual, agentive lives with the broader structures that encompass them. But, as Hage, writing of the Lebanese diaspora, insists, the goal of ethnography should be to cultivate a precise “double gaze” that unites both sets of imperatives:

capable of capturing both descriptively the lived cultures with all their subtleties and analytically the global which structures them, both people’s experiences and the social environment in which it is grounded, both the experiential surrounding that people are aware of and the macro-global structures that are well beyond their reach.41

In the case of the southern and eastern Mediterranean, the ethnographic task is complicated by the fact that the region is not just a homeland to globallydispersed diasporic communities, but also a hostland to various internal and

39 Julie Peteet: Problematizing a Palestinian Diaspora, in: International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 39, 2007, pp. 627-646. 40 Louise Cainkar: Global Arab World Migrations and Diasporas, in: Arab Studies Journal 21, 1, 2013, pp. 126-165, here p. 152. 41 Hage: A Not So Multi-Sited Ethnography (note 20), p. 474.

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external diasporas. Even poorer, peripheral countries like Egypt and Morocco – themselves with a long history of emigration across the Mediterranean – have increasingly become long-term hosts for African migrant and refugee populations caught semi-permanently in their migration north to Europe. Recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria have only amplified such intra- and cross-Mediterranean movement, as did the 2011 uprisings that destabilized state institutions of border control in Libya and Tunisia and challenged Europe’s ability to off-shore its migration management to the southern shores of the Mediterranean, as anthropologists such as Naor Ben-Yehoyada and Greg Feldman have tracked ethnographically.42 Scholarship on contemporary Mediterranean otherness needs to take into account such contemporary flows of asylum seekers which have often been presented as destabilizing forces for Europe. Maintaining a global perspective that accounts for the contexts and experiences of diasporic life as a single space of intimacy presents certain challenges. Anthropological field methodologies and historical archival work are still largely modeled on nationally-framed, small-scale social forms. Scholarship on Mediterranean diasporas has tended to privilege a perspective from either the ‘homeland’, the ‘diaspora’ itself or the various ‘hostlands’. The first focuses on the impact of diasporas on the social, religious and political worlds left behind, as well as on the efforts of government actors to recapture and redirect the loyalties and monies of diasporic populations to particular political and economic projects in the name of the ‘nation’. The second underlines the poetics and performances, the media and materialities that unite various Mediterranean others across space and time which constitute the social space of a diaspora qua diaspora. The third examines the fraught dynamics of incorporation of diasporic subjects within the lands in which they physically reside, their racialization as ambiguous denizens, and the social worlds they build for themselves within and beyond the nation-state. I will briefly elaborate on each of these perspectives in turn, drawing particularly on my own research between North Africa and France, while at the same time arguing that these three dimensions of diasporic life are ultimately intimately entangled.

Homeland Attachments

As much as diasporas produce the homeland, to reiterate Axel’s turn of phrase, homeland states and communities work hard to control the production process. Laurie Brand has explored the various ways southern and eastern Mediterranean states have sought to ensure the reproduction of homeland at42 Naor Ben-Yehoyada: The Clandestine Central Mediterranean Passage, in: Middle East Report 261, 2011, pp. 18-23; Gregory Feldman: The Migration Apparatus: Security, Labor, and Policymaking in the European Union, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.

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tachments of overseas populations.43 Historically, expatriate laborers, students, intellectuals and activists have been central to political life in the Mediterranean basin. The most well-known case is surely the Zionist movement. Its success in building an independent state has established what Tölölyan calls a “figure of diasporan achievement”44, a model for emulation to which many stateless diasporas now aspire. Not the least emulator is the Palestinian diaspora and its efforts to build a viable, autonomous nation-state.45 In the case of decolonizing Algeria, the diaspora functioned as a nationalist resource, with immigrant neighborhoods in France serving as a site for anticolonial recruiting, fundraising, strategizing, and revolutionary operations.46 In the aftermath of North African independence, Western Europe continued to be a space of refuge for oppositional political movements, whether of Marxist, Islamist or Berberist challengers.47 Lebanon and Turkey present equally compelling cases of the political lobbying of overseas populations. In response, southern and eastern Mediterranean states have engaged in explicit outreach projects towards their diasporic communities, in large part to head off the influence of opposition movements among their expatriate populations. In the case of North Africa, these efforts were coordinated by ‘friendship associations’ (amicales) to provide education and social services for emigrant workers and their families in Western Europe, including organizing diasporic cultural and religious life through religious personnel and even financing mosque construction. Such ‘embassy Islam’ – as Jonathan Laurence48 has termed it – served in large part to surveil and re-suture the diaspora to the nation-state. More recently, a number of states have established fully-fledged ministries for expatriate affairs. For instance, the Moroccan monarchy created a Ministry of the Moroccan Community Abroad in 2007 in an explicit effort to encourage the homeland investment by ‘Moroccan Residents Abroad’ (MREs) 43 Laurie Brand: Citizens Abroad: Emigration and the State in the Middle East and North Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 44 Khachig Tölölyan: Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment, in: Diaspora 5, 1, 1996, pp. 3-36, here p. 24. 45 Juliane Hammer: Palestinians Born in Exile: Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005; Peteet: Problematizing a Palestinian Diaspora (note 31). 46 Rabah Aissaoui: Immigration and National Identity: North African Political Movements in Colonial and Postcolonial France, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; Neil Macmaster: Shantytown Republics: Algerian Migrants and the Culture of Space in the Bidonvilles, in: Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World, edited by Hafid Gafaïti, Patricia M.E. Lorcin and David G. Troyansky, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. pp. 73-93. 47 Brand: Citizens Abroad (note 43), pp. 114f.; Paul A. Silverstein: Martyrs and Patriots: Ethnic, National, and Transnational Dimensions of Kabyle Politics, in: Journal of North African Studies 8, 1, 2003, pp. 87-111. 48 Jonathan Laurence: The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims: The State’s Role in Minority Integration, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012.

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and channel their private remittances through national banks.49 The 2011 constitution – provided explicit measures to ensure emigrants’ political rights in both Morocco and abroad, promising to “reinforce their contribution to the development of their homeland” (Articles 16-18). As such, if in earlier decades emigration was regarded by homeland state actors as an “economic safety valve”50, undertaken by the politically untrustworthy and who were good only for their hard currency earning capacity, by the end of the twentieth century they had been reconfigured as co-partners in national development.51 This largely formalizes the intimate circulations of people, monies and goods between the diaspora and the homeland that have long existed and compensated for the governments’ inability to provide adequate services and infrastructures. In the case of rural Morocco where I have conducted long-term field research, remittance monies finance the provision of electricity and running water to villages in the absence of state investment, as well as for the purchase of land, the building of homes and the capitalization of small enterprises.52 While some residents who have not left complain that the departure of able-bodied men and women has created veritable ghost villages and worry that emigrant remittances are leading to a brutal modernization of a once integrated rural way of life,53 in many ways remittances actually enable local socio-economic vitality in the face of larger structural and ecological transformation, permitting a larger percentage of the population to partake in those activities which are evident signs and performances of distinction – including commodity consumption, domestic architecture and conspicuous female modesty – normally reserved for a traditional elite.54 In the case of the southeastern pre-Saharan Moroccan oases where I research, the emigration of ‘black’ Haratin men – the former sharecroppers of ‘white’ Berber tribesmen and Arab notables – to the mines and factories of northern Europe has enabled their families to purchase land, irrigation rights and political power.55 49 Brand: Citizens Abroad (note 43), pp. 74-80. 50 Ibid., p. 17. 51 Abdelkrim Belguendouz: Les Marocasenins à l’étranger: citoyens et partenaires, Kenitra: Boukili, 1999. 52 Hein de Haas: Migration, Remittances and Regional Development in Southern Morocco, in: Geoforum 37, 4, 2006, pp. 565-580. 53 See Katherine Hoffman: Moving and Dwelling: Building the Moroccan Ashelhi Homeland, in: American Ethnologist 29, 4, 2002, pp. 928-962. 54 David McMurray: In and Out of Morocco: Smuggling and Migration in a Frontier Boomtown, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, pp. 64-97. 55 Hsain Ilahiane: Ethnicities, Community Making, and Agrarian Change: The Political Ecology of a Moroccan Oasis, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004; Paul A. Silverstein: The Local Dimensions of Transnational Berberism: Racial Politics, Land Rights, and Cultural Activism in Southeastern Morocco, in: Berbers and Others: Shifting Parameters of Ethnicity in the Contemporary Maghrib, edited by Katherine Hoffman and Susan Gilson Miller, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010, pp. 83-102.

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For many diasporans, a permanent return to the homeland remains a ‘myth’ perpetually deferred, and those who do make it back are forced to undergo “rituals of reintegration” and over-perform orthodox nativeness.56 Likewise, those born and raised abroad often feel culturally and socially disconnected from their ‘homelands’ and, when they do travel there, negatively treated as ‘foreigners’. Yet, men and women living in the diaspora do often still remain existentially oriented towards the homeland through holiday visits, pilgrimages, and cultural tourism, whether privately organized or increasingly underwritten by governments seeking to re-suture the diaspora to homeland states. Such visits provide the space for self-discovery, critique and solidarity across cultural, linguistic and political divides57 that can underwrite diasporic consciousness. Such transnational interactions are facilitated through various forms of media, whether through older technologies of letters and mandates or newer modalities of telecommunication that provide not only for the sharing of news but also help establish a virtual sense of intimate co-presence, creating what Peggy Levitt has called “transnational villages”58. The southeastern Moroccan town of Goulmima where I conduct my research has several websites designed for those diasporans originating from the Ghéris valley. The splash page of Goulmima.com, maintained by the Association Arraw n'Ghriss (the Ghéris Congress) announces: This site seeks to serve as a tie between Ghérissois from everywhere. It has the objective of keeping those Ghérissois who live away from their natal country informed of events occurring in the Ghéris and the cultural and organizational activities of the region.59

Such websites supplement diaspora-based village associations which provide social welfare for diasporans, organize festival celebrations, help coordinate the repatriation of migrant corpses and collect funds for village development projects.60 They also recapitulate genres of audiovisual media that have long critically evaluated the migration experience. In the case of North Africa, this includes both celebrations and laments of lghorba (exile) in song and poetry dating back at least to the 1940s;61 a prose literature and cinematic oeuvre by 56 Sayad: The Suffering of the Immigrant (note 19), p. 36; see Dalia Abdelhady: The Lebanese Diaspora: The Arab Immigrant Experience in Montreal, New York: NYU Press, 2011; Safran: Diasporas in Modern Societies (note 16). 57 Jasmin Habib: Israel, Diaspora, and the Routes of National Belonging, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. 58 Peggy Levitt: The Transnational Villagers, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 59 http://goulmima.com/ [accessed 22 October 2015]. 60 Mohand Khellil: L’Exil kabyle. Essai d’analyse du vécu des migrants, Paris: Harmattan, 1979. 61 Jane E. Goodman: Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to Video, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005; McMurray: In and Out of Morocco (note 54), pp. 98109.

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Maghrebi emigrant and Franco-Maghrebi (‘Beur’) authors and filmmakers which since the early 1980s have recounted the struggles of diasporans living with their proverbial bottoms ‘between two chairs’;62 and the more recent growth in popularity among younger diasporans of Algerian raï, Kabyle folksong, and Moroccan gnawa broadcasts on commercial radio stations like the French BeurFM.63 As Ayhan Kaya has discussed for the case of “Turkish hip hop youth” living in the “Little Istanbul” of Kreuzberg (Berlin), this renewed “orientation to homeland” is likewise marked in fashion, commodity consumption, supporting homeland sports teams or watching Middle Eastern or North African television channels received through the de rigueur satellite antennas attached to diasporic homes.64 Today homeland state-produced broadcasting competes with more informal Islamist, ethnic and multicultural media for diaspora identification.65 These fracture the broader structure of feeling through which diaspora and homeland are co-produced.

The Diasporic Third Space

Such transnational intimacy, reinforced through the mediation of sound and image, certainly underlines the ways in which the ‘homeland’ is continually produced and reproduced in and for the diaspora. But it also points to an alternative way of framing diasporic life as a set of enduring lateral or horizontal connections across space that ultimately privilege neither so-called ‘homeland’ nor ‘hostland’. Ethnographers and historians of the elite Arabian trade diaspora across the Indian Ocean have been particularly attuned to the material exchanges, modes of communication, intercultural negotiations, legal practices and forms of genealogical reckoning that outlined a single social world across a vast maritime space.66 Yet, even those Mediterranean diasporans liv62 Alec G. Hargreaves: Immigration and Identity in Beur Fiction: Voices from the North African Community in France, Oxford: Berg, 1997; Mireille Rosello: Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001; Silverstein: Algeria in France (note 5); Carrie Tarr: Reframing Difference: Beur and Banlieue Filmmaking in France, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 63 Hisham Aidi: Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and Muslim Youth Culture, New York: Random House, 2014; Goodman: Berber Culture on the World Stage (note 61); Joan Gross, David McMurray and Ted Swedenburg: Arab Noise and Ramadan Nights: Rai, Rap, and FrancoMaghrebi Identity, in: Diaspora 3, 1, 1994, pp. 3-39; Deborah A. Kapchan: Traveling Spirit Masters: Moroccan Gnawa Trance and Music in the Global Marketplace, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007. 64 Ayhan Kaya: “Sicher in Kreuzberg”: Constructing Diasporas: Turkish Hip Hop Youth in Berlin, Bielefeld: transcript, 2001, pp. 156-160. 65 See Kira Kosnick: Migrant Media: Turkish Broadcasting and Multicultural Politics in Berlin, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007. 66 Michael Gilsenan: Translating Colonial Fortunes: Dilemmas of In-heritance in Muslim and English Law across a Nineteenth-Century Diaspora, in: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 31, 2, 2011, pp. 355-371; Ho: The Graves of Tarim (note 4).

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ing in precarious circumstances participate in broader worlds of cultural and political engagement that transcend the here-and-now while not necessarily privileging a particular national ‘homeland’. As many scholars have attested, the diaspora has been a fertile center for the formation of new social movements configured along religious, diasporic, gender and generational lines that have had a wide impact on the culture and politics of the southern and eastern Mediterranean. Most significant, perhaps, has been the growth of a number of Islamic piety movements that reject particular schools of jurisprudence (fiqh), and project a global Islamic community (umma) beyond any geographical roots or routes, incorporating European converts alongside born-Muslim ‘reverts’ in complexly intertwined relations.67 Pious men and women, through their daily prayers and dress, their speech and bodily habits, and their performance and consumption behaviors, seek to construct ethical spaces within the built environments of the diaspora68 – spaces that now include halal fast food chains, cola brands, and comedy clubs, as Jeanette Jouili shows.69 Likewise, diasporic Marxist, anti-imperialist, feminist and gay rights movements have similar capacities to build upon intersectional solidarities that transcend particular homeland-hostland dyads.70 Generational solidarities around music or fashion similarly foster youthful cosmopolitanisms that register a consonance of tastes, living conditions and commitments across vast distances and interceding cultural divides.71 For instance, the 1980s Beur movement of young Franco-Maghrebis conceptualized themselves in terms of a burgeoning global condition of hybridity, not in their particular ties to North Africa; they declared themselves to be “mutants torn from the McDonald’s couscous-steak-fries society”72. Even explicitly ethno-nationalist movements based in the diaspora exhibit some of these intercultural connections that Ben Rampton has termed sociolinguistic “crossings”73. Alevi, Berber (Amazigh) and Kurdish activisms have particularly flourished in Western Europe in ways that transcend the ideological, class and regional divides that fragment homeland politics; indeed, in many cases the capacious sense of culture that is the condition of possibility for ethnic nationalism was formalized in diasporic settings and only subse67 See Esra Özyürek: Being German, Becoming Muslim: Religion and Conversion in the New Europe, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. 68 See Mayanthi Fernando: The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 69 Jeanette Jouili: Pious Practices and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 70 Fatima El-Tayeb: European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 71 Abdelhady: The Lebanese Diaspora (note 56), pp. 119-129. 72 Nacer Kettane: Droit de réponse à la démocratie française, Paris: La Découverte, 1986, p. 19, cited in Silverstein: Algeria in France (note 5), p. 164. 73 Ben Rampton: Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents, New York: Routledge, 2005.

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quently imported to homeland politics. In contrast to Algeria or Morocco where Berberness was long considered synonymous with rural ignorance, it was in the European diaspora where the Amazigh movement flourished, where avowing Amazigh identity was a claim to urbane, secular modernity in contrast to ‘Arabo-Islamic’ backwardness.74 It was among immigrant workers in France in the 1960s that the Berber language (Tamazight) was first standardized, the Berber alphabet (Tifinagh) first resurrected, and the first declarations of pan-regional Amazigh unity articulated as such. Ultimately, it has been the efforts of diasporans which have led to Berbers across the world recognizing themselves as one people in spite of their differences. In the process, diaspora-based, ethno-political movements have constituted veritable counterpublics through performances and aesthetic practices around the celebration of Ashura, Ramadan, Yennayer (Berber new year), Coptic Easter, and various Sufi festivals.75 For many growing up in the diaspora, ethnicity has become, in the terms of Herbert Gans, “symbolic ethnicity”76: a meaningful, ritualized sense of belonging that supplements but does not replace the everyday. Such ritual performances of identification outline diasporic ecumene that do not resolve to – and, indeed, often resist capture by – nation-states, whether so-called ‘homelands’ or ‘hostlands’.

Citizenship and Beyond

Nonetheless, diasporic performances are always sited in particular sociohistorical contexts and are always localized in distinct political geographies and national grammars of identification. Commemorations of Berber holidays unite Imazighen across the Mediterranean, but in the context of postcolonial France, play out for participants and spectators as assertions of belonging as commensurable national citizens. The stakes for such assertions are increasingly high, given the long history of racialization of North Africans as suspect or probationary citizens of France, and the contemporary amalgamation of the ‘Arab’ ethnicity, Islam and terrorism in public discourse. Whether in their individual presentations of self in everyday life or their collective affirmations of diasporic belonging, Mediterranean ‘others’ are necessarily always responding to configurations of formal and informal suspicion. If earlier scholars focused on the dynamics of immigrant incorporation into the structures of national life, whether conceptualized through the frame of as74 Bruce Maddy-Weitzman: The Berber Identity Movement and the Challenge to North African States, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011; Silverstein: Martyrs and Patriots (note 47). 75 Gross et al.: Arab Noise and Ramadan Nights (note 63); Kapchan: Traveling Spirit Masters (note 63); Werbner: The Place Which is Diaspora (note 13). 76 Herbert Gans: The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans, New York: Free Press, 1962.

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similation trajectories or multicultural pluralism, more recent scholarship has increasingly focused on public debates over immigration, charting the particular social situations, discourses, and institutional accommodations that have been produced in the intersection of potentially incommensurable state and diasporic projects. They have underlined what John Bowen calls the “public reasoning”77 that has given rise to legislation and institutions regulating Islamic practice within a secular or Christian state context, state efforts which have particularly targeted female Islamic dress and put young diasporic women at the center of what Ruth Mandel terms “cosmopolitan anxieties”78 over national cultural reproduction. But, as a number of scholars have likewise insisted, young, unemployed Muslim men in the diaspora – as ‘immigrant’ bodies without laboring purpose,79 as restless, delinquent, and potentially violent – have been increasingly subject to social stigmatization, state surveillance and racist attacks. Such processes of abjection have built on what Kathleen Ewing has analyzed as a broader “moral panic”80 over growing jihadi extremism on the diaspora’s urban peripheries like Saint-Denis or Molenbeek which have become sites of racialized confrontation and enhanced policing.81 Such racialized confrontations, and the consequences for life and selfexpression in the diaspora, have varied distinctly depending on historically sedimented national configurations that vary from French formal colorblindness,82 to officially embraced policies of English multiculturalism,83 to resurgent Dutch politics of autochthony,84 to a supposedly raceless discourse of German Leitkultur,85 to an ambivalent discourse of inter-religious convivencia 86. 77 John R. Bowen: Why the French don’t like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 78 Ruth Mandel: Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 79 Sayad: The Suffering of the Immigrant (note 19). 80 Kathleen Pratt Ewing: Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008, p. 10. 81 See El-Tayeb: European Others (note 70); Didier Fassin: Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing, Cambridge: Polity, 2013; Trica Danielle Keaton: Muslim Girls and the Other France: Race, Identity Politics, and Social Exclusion, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006; Susan Terrio: Judging Mohammed: Juvenile Delinquency, Immigration, and Exclusion at the Paris Palace of Justice, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. 82 Keaton: Muslim Girls and the Other France (note 81); Silverstein: Algeria in France (note 5). 83 Tariq Modood: Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity, and Muslims in Britain, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 84 Annelies Moors: The Dutch and the Face-Veil, in: Social Anthropology 17, 4, 2009, pp. 393-408. 85 El-Tayeb: European Others (note 70); Damani J. Partridge: Hypersexuality and Headscarves: Race, Sex, and Citizenship in the New Germany, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. 86 Liliana Suárez-Navaz: Rebordering the Mediterranean: Boundaries and Citizenship in Southern Europe, New York: Berghahn, 2004.

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These discursive and institutional configurations underwrite how and to what extent diasporans are able to recognize themselves as both subject to the racializing gaze and active participants in the reconfiguration of the national space of citizenship – the ‘double consciousness’ famously discussed by W.E.B. DuBois.87 The efforts of Mediterranean ‘others’ collectively to build flourishing lives in the here-and-now of the diaspora in spite of their abjection have included the building of community institutions – from religious establishments to cultural associations to shops, cafés and restaurants – that provide spaces for material reproduction, collective life and spiritual identification.88 These efforts contribute to what Kaya has called a “homing desire”89, an effort to create a sense of ‘home’ in the context of being repeatedly informed that one is merely a guest, an immigrant for life. Indeed, the implicit obligation to peacefully accept hospitality often tends to depoliticize diasporic communities in spite of the media portrayal of them as seedbeds of extremism and militancy.90 For Hage, this raises the question of one’s ethical duties as a man or woman living at the intersection of multiple (and sometimes incommensurable) moral codes.91 The struggle to negotiate such moral dilemmas explains in part the elaborated discourses of honor, duty, dignity, respectability, and piety within diasporic communities.92 The efforts to build ethical spaces where diasporans can both feel at home as locals, whatever their various transnational ties, are to a large extent behind the reproduction of enclaves that come to be known as “Arab France”93 or “Little Istanbul”94. These spaces, while generally heterogeneous in population, provide a degree of certainty and security (of Sicherheit), of face-to-face comfort and solidarity that is too often denied those living in situations of dispersion, displacement and socioeconomic precarity. They become sites for constructing new social memories, new affective intimacies which ultimately constitute touchstones for later nostalgia. Such neighborhoods thus invite a sense of citizenship in the broader sense, even if the places themselves take the di87 William E.B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk, New York: Penguin, 1989 [1903]. 88 Abdelhady: The Lebanese Diaspora (note 56); John R. Bowen: Can Islam Be French? Pluralism and Pragmatism in a Secularist State, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010; Silverstein: Algeria in France (note 5). 89 Kaya: Constructing Diasporas (note 64), p. 138. 90 Sayad: The Suffering of the Immigrant (note 19). 91 Ghassan Hage: Citizenship and Honourability: Belonging to Australia Today, in: ArabAustralians Today, edited by Ghassan Hage, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002, pp. 1-15. 92 Ewing: Stolen Honor (note 80); Nadia Fadil: Managing Affects and Sensibilities: On NotHandshaking and Not-Fasting, in: Social Anthropology 17, 4, 2009, pp. 439-454; Fernando: The Republic Unsettled (note 68); Jouili: Pious Practices and Secular Constraints (note 69); Michèle Lamont: The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000. 93 David McMurray: La France Arab, in: Postcolonial Cultures in France, edited by Alec Hargreaves and Mark McKinney, New York: Routledge, 1997, pp. 26-39. 94 Kaya: Constructing Diasporas (note 64).

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lapidated form of shanty towns, refugee camps or public housing estates. Diasporic avowals of a ‘ghetto patrimony’ (to use a French rapper term) thus maintain the same dual orientation of all diasporic life, simultaneously oriented to the local and transnational, to the ‘hostland’ and the ‘homeland’ with no necessary or universal privileging of the one over the other.95

Conclusion

Scholars of Mediterranean otherness thus face the daunting task of accounting for something which simultaneously is and is not. Using the language of diaspora risks naming into existence that which is always fleeting and fluid, creating a collective singularity out of a multiplicity of individual trajectories, glossing over nuances and complexities in order to draw attention to a social predicament that appears to mark our shared late modernity. In many cases, scholars have mirrored some of their interlocutors’ quests for recognition and visibility as fellow citizens, often in the face of racialized violence. But such desires for national belonging are always ambivalent; they exist alongside lateral, intersectional solidarities across the broader diaspora and beyond; as well as vertical ties back to kith and kin, past and present, in the ‘homeland’, irrespective of any personal experience or anticipation of return. Diaspora and homeland are co-constitutive and it is ultimately our scholarly task to provide a sense of the broader forms of collective intimacy that diasporans strive to forge. While such dynamics of mobility and belonging do not encompass the totality of the experience of Mediterranean otherness, they do certainly call for attention and analysis.

95 Paul A. Silverstein: Le Patrimoine du ghetto: Rap et racialisation des violences urbains en France, in: L’Atlantique Multiracial, edited by James Cohen, Andrew Diamond and Philippe Vervaecke, Paris: Karthala, 2012, pp. 95-118.

ANNA TOZZI DI MARCO

The Mediterranean Cult of the Seven Sleepers: Counter-Narrative vs Official Representation in Islamic Devotion The myth of the Seven Sleepers crosses borders of time and space and religious boundaries as is evidenced by its numerous manifestations. It is cultural heritage shared by Christians and Muslims. Nowadays the veneration of the Seven Sleepers is still widespread in many Mediterranean countries and beyond. It could be considered a Mediterranean interreligious myth which interconnects the three monotheistic faiths, as comparative historical studies have shown. The Italian philologist Ignazio Guidi and the French orientalist Louis Massignon were among the earliest scholars who analysed it in depth. Guidi collected and examined the Oriental texts from a comparative perspective (excluding the Georgian ones), while Massignon studied the Islamic renderings, tracing the spiritual geography of the Seven Sleepers.1 He also founded a Christian-Islamic pilgrimage in Brittany. Their works constitute the speculative basis for any research on this topic. In the field of Islamic studies we must also consider Father Paolo Dall’Oglio who highlighted the eschatological meaning of the Qur’anic sura al-Kahf (The Cave), wherein the tale is revealed (Kor. XVIII, pp. 9-26), as well as the Italian scholar Massimo Campanini who pondered the philosophical viewpoint.2 In the current anthropological field the French anthropologist, Manoel Penicaud, following Massignon’s investigations, has analysed the Breton pilgrimage, while the Tunisian scholar, Thierry Zarcone, has carried out studies in Central Asia.3 This anthropological fieldwork has shown how some of the caves dedicated to the Seven Sleepers high-

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Ignazio Guidi: Testi orientali inediti sopra i Sette dormienti di Efeso, Roma: Reale Accademia dei Lincei, 1885; Louis Massignon: Les Sept Dormants d’Ephèse (Ahl al-Kahf) en Islam et en Chrétienté: Première Partie, in: Revue des Études Islamiques 22, 1954, pp. 59112. Paolo Dall’Oglio: Speranza nell’islam. Interpretazione della prospettiva escatologica Corano XVIII, Genova: Marietti, 1991, Massimo Campanini: La surah della Caverna, Firenze, La Nuova Italia, 1986. Manoel Penicaud: Il était une fois les Sept Dormants d’Ephèse... , in: La pensée de midi 3, 22, 2007, pp. 47-54; Thierry Zarcone: Les Mausolées des Sept Dormants du Maghreb à la Chine: relecture et/ou partage d’un légendaire et d’un espace sacré par plusieurs religions, lecture (6 June 2011), Centre interdisciplinaire d’étude des religions et de la laïcité de l’université libre de Bruxelles.

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light their multi-confessional nature, as it is common among the many other shared sacred shrines and sanctuaries in the Mediterranean region.4 In Islam the tale took on a different hermeneutical significance. The Islamic adaption of the Seven Sleepers’ tale ranges from literary interpretations to more esoteric meaning, from household magic to artistic representations. Although there are Seven Sleepers’ sanctuaries from Northern Africa to Chinese Turkestan, my research concentrates on Sunni Islam and the Mediterranean area. In particular it focuses on the Turkish sites (afar the Greek and Cypriot locations, indicative of the Christian Orthodox cult). As far as the Orthodox creed goes the cult is still alive in Santorini (Greece) and in Paphos (Cyprus). Indeed, in the Cypriot veneration the Seven Sleepers and the Seven Maccabee brothers overlap. To a certain extent I am also researching the reinvention of Seven Sleepers’ devotion in the town of Angri in Southern Italy.5 This paper intersects the ethnographic research with the historical data. It is based on the first results of my fieldwork – still in progress – in particular, I emphasize how local Muslim communities ‘perceive’ the authoritative representation of this myth and how it interacts with their lives. The Muslims I surveyed are mostly Sunni (except in Syria). In Turkey there are four localizations of the Seven Sleepers’ cave: the Ephesian site (photo 1) is a shared religious predominantly tourist destination, even if it was recently (2010) enclosed with a gated fence. The other caves I examine are situated in Tarsus (photo 2), Afşin (photo 3) and Lice (photo 4). In every location I observed local beliefs, rituals and practices which form a counter-narrative to the official representation. The Seven Sleepers became popular for their narrative associations with divine protection, sleep and resurrection in Christendom as well as in the Muslim world. Hence we find numerous icons, charms talismanic pendants, amulets and objects of veneration, even souvenirs, relating to these holy figures. The many localizations of the seven sleepers’ grotto can be divided into two groups: the first consists of places which have evolved as transnational sacred and heritage touristic destinations;6 the second are sanctuaries attended mostly by local people wherein the seven sleepers are perceived as holy persons or saints according to the faith. However, in some cases this categorization is not so rigid and we can find both characteristics in a single place.

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Dionigi Albera and Maria Couroucli: I luoghi sacri comuni ai monotesimi: tra cristianesimo, ebraismo e islam, Brescia: Morcelliana, 2013. The social construction of a tradition as its reinvention was first analysed by the historian Eric Hobsbawm (The invention of tradition, edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983). Anna Tozzi Di Marco: Processi di valorizzazione dei luoghi della memoria. Il culto de ‘la Grotta dei Sette Dormienti’ ad Amman e a Il Cairo, in: Luoghi e oggetti della memoria. Valorizzare il patrimonio culturale; studio di casi in Italia e in Giordania, edited by Lucilla Rami Ceci, Roma: Armando, 2011, pp. 109-126.

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Historical Framework and the Tale in Brief The origins of the Seven Sleepers’ tale are Christian, dating back to the fifth century in Asia Minor. It is based on a historical episode which occurred in Ephesus7 in the middle of the third century during the reign of the Roman emperor Decius (249–251 AD). The Decian persecution of seven noble Ephesians who refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods after the edict issued by the Emperor,8 was accentuated by the first Christian authors. According to the bishop Cyprian’s account most Christians were not so true to their faith during that period9 so that the behaviour of the Seven Sleepers was offered as the ideal example for emulation by the populace facing oppression. Two centuries later, in the year 448, according with the scholar Honigmann10, the event was fictionalized by the Ephesian bishop Stephen in an effort to solve the theological controversies among the early Christian communities over the resurrection,11 such as, according to Gregory of Tours, the heresy of Sadducees12. It was truly the Origenist heresy.13 Once again Ephesus played a pivotal role in the religious controversies, being the theatre of the spread of the Christian orthodoxy. The Seven Sleepers tale was a steadfast model for all believers, being living proof of God’s promise of resurrection. Afterwards the message of 7

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Ephesus was firstly an important commercial and religious Hellenistic-Roman city. With the formalization of Christianity in the Roman Empire it maintained its prestige because of its double apostolic origin (St. John and St. Paul). In 1937 the publication of the findings of the Austrian Archaeological Institute described three religious edifices with Greek inscriptions, frescos and mosaics, numerous tombs and other evidence of pilgrims, and affirmed the authenticity of the Ephesian cave. However, the Decian edict did not refer to the Christians in particular. It mentioned all Roman citizens who had to thank the Roman gods for protecting Rome, even if in the III c. the Christian community already posed a strong challenge to the Roman Empire. In fact, Decius was considered the restitutor sacrorum, i.e. the restorer of the sacred rites. Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, wrote “De lapsi” in 251. He faced the question as to whether he should accept or not those, named lapsi, who had defected during the time of persecution. Ernest Honigmann: Stephen of Ephesus and the legend of seven sleepers, in: Patristic Studies, 1953, pp. 125-168. He based his theory on the historical fact of Theodosius’ arrival in Ephesus. Theodosius went to pray at John the Evangelist’s tomb, in order to know his successor’s name. Considering the second council, named Latrocinium by Pope Leo I the Great, occurred on August 449, after the first anniversary of the cult, the scholar concluded it took place in the year 448. Although the Italian scholar Ignazio Guidi (Testi orientali, note 1) affirmed the cult was known among Greeks, Copts, Armenians, Jacobite and Melkite Syriacs, but not among the Nestorians who were contemporaneous of Theodosius II. At the end of the V c. they separated into two groups, Nestorians and Monophysites, after the closing of Edessa school and the Seleucia council in 498. Therefore Guidi stated the tale could not have emerged earlier than the VI c. The Sadducees were a Jewish sect active between 516 BC and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD. They did not believe in the resurrection of the soul. Origen (184/185–253/254) was a theologian born in Alexandria, who argued for a spiritual, instead of corporal, resurrection. His doctrine was condemned at the Synod of Constantinople in 543.

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the story transcended its historical settings, as well as later geographical ones, to continue to influence readers centuries after its creation.14 In brief, the tale told about the seven Ephesians who were walled up in the cave on Decius’s orders. In the wall two Christians inserted a lead tablet with their names and their story. They were: Achillides (Archelides), Diomedes, Eugenius, Probatius, Sabatius, Stephanus e Cyriacus, (photo 5), according to the Coptic rendition and Theodosius’ report.15 Two centuries later they were resurrected after a shepherd took a stone from the wall. They thought they had slept just one night. Thus, one of them, Malchus, went down to the city to buy food and found Christian symbols everywhere. He was brought before the bishop and proconsul who questioned him. He was frightened and confessed their story. The Ephesian authorities and the citizens flocked to the cave to verify it. They attested the miracle, glorified God and informed Emperor Theodosius II. He came to Ephesus and at the cave he invited the seven Ephesians to come back to the city. In brief, they refused and departed again.16 Hence, Theodosius ordered the building of an oratory on their tombs and he established a yearly solemn feast to celebrate the day of their resurrection.

The Literature on the Seven Sleepers’ Tale and the Earlier LongSleepers Traditions The background to the Seven Sleepers’ tale is to be found in earlier legends, in particular the Greek tale of the prophet-philosopher, Epimenides of Crete17, and the Jewish story of Abimelech the Ethiopian.18 Indeed, there are also other Jewish stories about people favoured by the deity with miraculously long sleep.19 Moreover, the myth of sleeping and returning heroes is widespread in 14 As Edward the Confessor’s vision showed during the XI c. in England, cf. Frank Barlow: The Vita Æwardi (Book II); The Seven Sleepers; some further evidence and reflections, in: Speculum 40, 3, 1965, pp. 385-397. 15 Gregory of Tours gave a different list of names in his De septem Dormientibus apud Ephesum: Maximianus, Malchus, Martinianus, Johannes, Dionysius, Constantinus, and Serapion, cf. Le livre des Miracles et autres opuscules de Georges Florent Gregoire, translated by Henri Léonard Bordier, Paris : Société de la Histoire de France, 1857, pp. 258-263. 16 For more details of the tale in the different traditions, cf. Guidi: Testi orientali (note 1). 17 The story of the Cretan Epimenides (around 600 BC) stands in the tradition of poet-prophet, as he appears a half-mythical and half-historic figure. After 57 years sleep in a cave, on his awakening he found the city changed. 18 Abimelech was Jeremia’s slave who slept 66 years (in some versions 70 years, corresponding to the Babylonian captivity). The tale is in the Paralipomena of Jeremiah of the book 4 Baruch. For its details cf.: 4 Baruch (Paraleipomena Jeremiou), translated by Jens Herzer, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005, pp. 7-13. 19 For instance the story of Choni ha-me‘aggel in the Talmud Yerushalmi or in the later Midrash Tehillim. Abimelech and Choni legends developed at more or less the same time, around the turn of the I to the II c. AD. Cf. Pieter Willem van der Horst: Studies in ancient Judaism and early Christianity, London: Brill, 2014, pp. 248-265.

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many cultures around the world. The chief narrative motifs - divine favour because of the hero’s true faith and loyalty to God, the protective slumber, and the resurrection or returning – of the two older stories seem to have shaped the Ephesian tale. The knowledge of the Greek classical tradition could have been reused in Jewish circles and then by the Christians.20 The main theme linking the sleeping heroes of the two monotheistic faiths, was the hope (and its realization) of a deeply oppressed group (or of a religion itself) for a time of peace in the future. Due to its character as a mélange of cultural influences, the Seven Sleepers legend easily spread to Eastern Christianity, including the Coptic Church in Egypt and the Syriac Church. Hence from the Syriac area it migrated to the Arabian peninsula. Its migration and successive transformations in the other cultures reveal its multiple and fluid nature, oriented to metamorphosis beyond its religious beginnings. Among the Syriac accounts of the myth, the most ancient existent one is Bishop Jacob of Sarugh’s rendition, dating back to 525AD.21 Its adaptable nature and its eschatological meanings allowed it to achieve great popularity in the European kingdoms during the Middle Ages. In the year 590 Gregory of Tours22 translated the tale into Latin from a Syriac version with the help of a Syriac native. Afterwards it was spread throughout Western Christian world. Moreover, in the X c. the Byzantine hagiographer Simeone Metafrastes faithfully handed down in his Menologe the tale directly from a lost Greek manuscript.23 Among the Medieval renderings based on Gregory’s edition there are Paul the Deacon’s Historia Langobardorum (The History of Lombards 795) and the later Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend 1260), a collection of hagiographies which most of the frescos and icons in Italy are based on.

Christian Pilgrimage to the Ephesian Seven Sleepers’ Cave During the Middle Ages the cult thrived in Latin Europe and there are numerous records such as oratories, frescos, icons, charms, chants, talismans, poems 20 In the Late Antiquity the Jewish community of Ephesus was the major group in Western Asia Minor and some Jewish lamps have been discovered in the Ephesian Seven sleepers’ cave. 21 In his account the seven names are: Maximian, Malchus, Marcianus, Dionysius, Johannes, Serapion, Constantin (the same ones in Gregory’s rendition). 22 He was a Gallo-Roman historian (538–594) and bishop in Tours and Fozio, better known as author of The History of Franks. He wrote the “Passio Sanctorum Martyrum Septem Dormientium apud Ephesum” in his book Liber in Gloria Martyrum. In his Passio he named the seven sleepers as brothers. The Seven Sleepers’ and the Maccabees’ legends have been combined starting from a Judeo-Persian poem where Anthiocus has been confused with Decius. Cf. Bernard Heller: Élements, paralléles et origines de la Légende des sept dormants, in: Revue des Études Juives 49, 1904, pp. 190-218. 23 It is the most ancient Byzantine menologe, written in 985 by the order of the emperor Basilius II, hence called Menologe of Basilius II. Its 12 volumes with precious miniatures include 140 saints’ biographies.

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and medieval dramas representing the Seven Sleepers. The Catholic Church celebrates them on July 27th and the Eastern Orthodox Churches have two commemorative dates: the day they fell asleep August 4th and the day of resurrection October 22nd. Even if Christian devotion is not the focus of this paper, it is interesting to note that it is not clear why this veneration has disappeared in the Latin Christendom in modern times. Up to the Middle Ages there are accounts from Western Christian pilgrims who stopped in Ephesus en route to the Holy Land. Besides the tombs of St. John and St. Timothy24 they used to visit the Ephesian cave and they were probably responsible for spreading the tale across the seas and continents.25 For instance, in 525 the deacon Theodosius described in his travelogue De situ terrae sanctae, as reported by the scholar Hasluck, “septem fraters dormientes” in Ephesus.26 Saint Magdalveus, bishop of Verdun (France) claimed to have visited Mary Magdalene’s tomb, situated at the entrance of the Seven Sleepers’ grotto, in 745 during his journey to Jerusalem. Thus, the Jesuit scholar Moubarac supposed that the Seven Sleepers escaped towards Mary Magdalene’s tomb.27 During the Byzantine age the road to Palestine through Ephesus became more important and the Seven Sleepers’ grotto “received several stages of new decoration. A mosaic of saints in the vestibule of the Crypt has been dated to the eighth/ninth century”28. Later graffiti (XIV c.) shows the place’s enduring attraction as a Christian pilgrimage site. In modern times in My Pilgrimage to the Eastern shrines (1867) Eliza C. Bush gave a peculiar account of folk legends related to the Ephesian cave which she had heard.29 Specifically she reported a story about an inquisitive caliph and his followers who were struck dead by a violent burning wind on entering the cave. However her account is particularly interesting for our counter-narrative topic because she was also informed that 24 St. Timothy (Listra, 17, Ephesus, 97), St. Paul’s disciple, was ordained as first bishop of Ephesus by the Apostle. His relics were moved from Ephesus to Constantinople in 356 on emperor’s order. 25 Ephesus attracted many pilgrims for its holy tombs, increasing reliquaries over the years, even a piece of the Cross. The all-night festival in honour of St. John with its popular trading fair was particularly attractive, cf.: Cities of the Middle East and North Africa: A Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Michael R. T. Dumper and Bruce E. Stanley, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2007, p. 145. 26 Frederick William Hasluck: Christianity and Islam under the Sultans, vol. I, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929, pp. 309-319. We know little about the deacon Theodosius. Because he named the Arians and the Catholics as Vandals and Romans respectively, we presume his North African origins. 27 Youakim Moubarac: Le culte liturgique et populaire des VII Dormants martyrs d’Ephese (Ahl al Kahf): trait d’union Orient-Occident entre l’Islam et la Chretiente, in: Opera Minora III, edited by Louis Massignon, Paris, Pr. Univ. de France, 1969, pp. 119-180. 28 “two layers of frescos and crosses in the catacombs were painted in the tenth/eleventh century, respectively, and the Lascarids are probably responsible for the fine fresco of Majestas Domini which adorns the entrance of the catacombs” (Clive Foss: Ephesus after Antiquity: A late Antique, Byzantine and Turkish City, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979, p. 135. 29 Eliza C. Bush: My Pilgrimage to the Eastern shrines, London, Hurst and Blackett, 1867.

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once in a year, on a certain day in May, thousands of pilgrims come from all parts to visit it, and that for three days religious service are performed in its interiors […]. Moslem and Christians joining in their reverence for the place.30

She probably meant the celebration on the anniversary (May 8th) of the Evangelist’s death, as the Russian archimandrite pilgrim Daniel had also reported some centuries earlier in 1106.31 Every shrine at the resting place of a martyr or former home of a saint, were (and still are) receptacles of divine energy, where blessings, also in the form of objects such as sacred bread or oil, i.e. eulogiai, were offered to the pilgrims to bring home. Finally, it could be interesting to investigate whether there is a link between the traditional feast of St. John in Ephesus, during which pilgrims also visited the seven sleepers’ cave, and the May festival of the Seven Sleepers’ cave in Lice, whose Islamic veneration has yet to be examined more closely.

The Qur’anic Tale of the Seven Sleepers The Christian Seven Sleepers’ tradition was also taken up in the Qur’an, in particular in the first verses (9-26) of the sura XVIII (photo 6), titled al-Kahf, which means ‘the Cave’, wherein the Sleepers are called the “Companions of the Cave” or “People of the Cave”(Aṣḥāb al-Kahf or Aḥl al-Kahf). Scholars agree that Jacob of Sarugh’s liturgical homily stands as the major influence on the Qur’anic adaptation. In the Arabic Christian literature a XVI century manuscript, written in vulgar Arabic, refers to the seven young people as “those of the cavern”, instead of the seven sleepers, emphasizing the persecution of Christians. During the Roman and Byzantine times in the Arab peninsula Christianity was spread among the Bedouins by monks. The Christian Arabs’ creed had a Monophysite or Nestorian base, with some peculiar concepts regarding death as sleep and the immortality of the soul.32 While the first generations of Muslims accepted some of the Christian and Jewish stories which were circulating at the time, i.e. the isra'iliyats, including the Ephesian tale, they produced Islamic versions in order to integrate the understanding of the Qur’an. The philologist Guidi distinguishes two kinds of versions in Muslim Arab literature: the Qur’anic altered translation, and those derived from a 30 Ibid. pp. 61-64. 31 It is reported on May 8th the annual miracle of the sacred dust or manna flowed from St. John’s subterranean tomb. It was believed it cured all kinds of illness. This miracle reinforced the belief the Apostle didn’t die but he was asleep in his tomb and on his feast he would breathe and stir up the dust under the altar. Cf.: Derek Krueger: Byzantine Christianity, Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010, p. 90; Hans Willer Laale: Ephesus (Ephesos): An Abbreviated History from Androclus to Constantine XI, Bloomington, WestBow Press, 2011, p. 387. 32 The Christian Arabs did not believe in the immortality of the soul. They thought it would be resurrected together with the body after the death, meantime it sleeps while awaiting resurrection.

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Christian text.33 Within this last typology, the text attributed to Ibn Ishaq34 and reported by Ta’labi and Damiri35, seems to derive directly from another Syriac rendition, Dionysius of Tell-Mahrè’s chronicle (750 AD)36, which is different from that of Jacob of Sarugh37. In Ibn Ishaq’s version the name of the seven sleepers became: Maksalmina, Amliha, Martukus, Navalis, Senius, Batnius, Kasfutat (in Damiri, a corruption of the Syriac list of the names).38 Moreover, Ibn Abbas mentioned in a hadith 39 the occasion of the revelation of sura XVIII.40 According to the scholar Heller, the Islamic legend has Aggadic elements such as light entering in the grotto to resuscitate the sleepers or rain as a metaphor for God’s providence.41 Heller shed light on the connections between the various legends of Abimelech, Choni ha-me‘aggel and Qur’anic Seven sleepers. However, the sura XVIII has completely altered the prototype and the tale took on some particular features which were absent in the Christian legend. Firstly, the Seven Sleepers are the Companions or People of the Cave. Furthermore, they never passed away. Their numbers as well as the duration of their sleep are uncertain, and their names are not mentioned. Afterwards, the cave was not walled up but God struck their ears and placed a dog as their guardian at the entrance of the grotto.42 The dog is not named but some commentators deciphered al-Raqīm in verse 9 as the dog, “Or have you thought that the companions of the cave and al-Raqīm were, among our signs, a wonder?”. However there is no agreement among the commentators. AlTabari asserted that it referred to the inscription, by which he meant the lead tablet found in the wall. In another exegesis the name of the dog is Qiṭmīr. Verse 18 cites their dog was “stretching forth his two fore-legs at the entrance”. Moreover, each of the Companions had two angels who turned him from the right to the left side and vice versa, on the day of Ashoura according 33 Guidi: Testi orientali (note 1), p. 53. 34 He was a Qur’anic commentator in the VIII c. who wrote the nine names of the People of the cave as: Maksimilina, Mahsimilina, Yamlikha, Martus, Kaṣutunas, Birunas, Rasmunas, Baṭunas, Qalus. The History of al-Ṭabarī, vol. 4, The Ancient Kingdoms, annotated and translatated by Moshe Perlman, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1987, pp. 155-159. 35 Both were transmitters of ahadith. 36 Dionysius of Tell-Mahrè gave another list of the seven sleepers and they were eight: Maximilianus, Jamblicha, Martelus, Dionysius, Johannes, Serapion, Exustadianus, Antonius. 37 Guidi: Testi orientali (note 1), p. 55. 38 Ibid. p. 63. For instance the names in the Armenean texts are: Maksimianos (Massiminian), Amghikos (Amliha), Mardianos (Martinianus), Tionesios (Dionysos), Iohannes, Gosdantinos, Atoninos (ibid. p. 93.). 39 Hadith means a saying or fact belonging to the Prophet Mohammad and their collection represents the Sunna. 40 At that time Meccan citizens were incredulous of the new faith, the Islam, thus they consulted the Jews about Mohammad. The Jews told them to question him on three matters, among which the Ephesian theme. The Prophet answered after three days. 41 Heller: Élements, paralléles et origines (note 22), p. 198. 42 Indeed we already find the presence of the dog in Theodosius’ De situ terrae sanctae (530), Guidi: Testi orientali (note 1), p. 64.

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to Ibn Abbas or twice a year according to Abou Hurairah. Both the Qur’anic commentators were Mohammad’s companions and the ahadith transmitters.43 Another difference to the Christian tale is where the Seven Sleepers’ say to the emperor Theodosius “we exhort you to shelter in God against the evil of the men and malevolent spirits”, which is, according to Ibn Ishaq’s commentary, closely connected to the Syriac rendition of Dionysius of Tell-Mahrè.44 The mention of malevolent spirits could be behind the development of talismans and spells related to the Seven Sleepers against harm which we will examine later. Furthermore, verse 21 of the Qur’an cites: And thus We made their case known, that they might know that the promise of Allah is true, and that there can be no doubt about the Hour. When they [the people] disputed among themselves about their case, they said: “Construct a building over them; their Lord knows best about them”, then those whose opinion prevailed said: “We verily, shall build a place of worship over them.”

The last part of this verse could be the reason why mosques have often been built by the cave. Though the Qur’an does not mention the locality of the cave, nor does it indicate its geographical whereabouts, the commentary of Tha’labi (XI c.) cites Ephesus which, it is said, became Tarsus with advent of the Islam.45 Indeed during the Byzantine age, even if the site of Ephesus was known to Muslim geographers as the location of the People of the Cave, they would not have had access to it. Thus, it was easier for an Arab eyewitness to identify the cave on the route which crossed medieval Anatolia (Bilād al-Rūm) from the Cilician coast to Constantinople. In fact the accounts of Muslim travellers, ambassadors and scholars differ. Some narrators cited Karama district between ‘Ammūriya (Amorium in Phrygia) and Niqīya (Nicea in Bithynia), others mentioned Hūta al-Raqīm, a place in Lycaonia, and from the late XII c. other authors began to report another cave in Anatolia, near the city of Absīs (Arabissos).46 The confusion between the toponyms of Afsīs and Absīs could also be the reason for the different locations of the cave. Nevertheless it seems the establishment and the claim of the Aṣḥāb al-Kahf cave were utilised in some locations as landmarks of a territory which was peripheral in order to develop pilgrimage sites, hence attracting people and economic benefits, similar to the spread of saints’ relics in the medieval European monasteries. Consequently every Muslim country claims that its cave is the authentic one, and in some countries such as Turkey (which we will consider later), there are several caves with competing claims. Thus the symbolic connotation of the cavern must be analysed, as the title of the sura confirms its importance. Like the Christian tale the Qur’anic rendition must be read in a more ethical and 43 44 45 46

Heller: Élements, paralléles et origines (note 22), p. 201. Guidi: Testi orientali (note 1), pp. 54-56. Ibid. p. 200. This location of the cave can be linked to the political and territorial expansion of Seljuk state and the consolidation of its eastern frontiers.

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metaphorical sense. The refuge in the cave is often emphasized and it is an important element which constitutes a metaphor of the Islamic faith, i.e. “And when you withdraw from them, and that which they worship, except Allah, then seek refuge in the cave” (Kor. XVIII, p. 16). The miraculous experience of the cave is an image of the surrender (commonly said submission) to God which is the meaning of the word Islam. The cave has an immense symbolic resonance in the early Islamic epoch, also as symbol of initiation. It had been experienced by the Prophet Mohammad when he received the Revelation in a cave on Mount Hira, and later when God, in order to preserve him from his Meccan enemies, covered the entrance of the grotto where he hid.47 Thus it symbolizes both the revelation and the protection. Though the entire sura alKahf embodies the assertion of the principle of tawhid or “the oneness” of God.

Islamic Authoritative Representation of the Myth The Islamic authoritative representation of the myth is based on sura XVIII which is regularly recited at the beginning of Friday noon prayers. According to the orientalist Massignon, its reading is perceived by Muslims with an eschatological and thaumaturgical implication, because of the protection offered against the evil forces represented by Gog and Magog.48 In fact as the professor Campanini remembers the Aṣḥāb al-Kahf story has to be seen in relation to the other two stories in the following verses of the same sura, those recounting Moses’ encounter with the figure al-Khadir, and the story of the “man with two horns” God sent to fight Gog and Magog populations. “The link can be the dog of the Aṣḥāb al-Kahf, al-Raqīm, which can be identified with the character of al-Khadir […] both the custodian of the divine message”.49 Moreover, many ahadith report what Mohammad said about its recitation, the function of which was to remind believers of the necessity of “surrendering” to God. On one occasion the Prophet said that “Whoever recites the first [or last, depending on narrator] ten verses of Surah al-Kahf, he will be protected from the trial of the Dajjal” according to Sahih Muslim, a collection of hadith compiled by al-Naysaburi. In a more functional and less metaphysical way, it is believed that reciting it one hundred times will bring divine forgiveness for every sin of the week. Among other scholars, the writings of al-Ghazali, the prominent 11th century theologist, worked to reconcile the orthodoxy with the apotropaic context. He wrote that it was important to know the sleepers’ names because they understood God’s secrets and could read the secrets in 47 Muḥammad Ibn Ǧarīr al-Ṭabarī: Vita di Maometto, edited by Sergio Noja, Milano: Rizzoli, 1985, p. 125. 48 Gog and Magog were populations, or sometimes identified as places, of Central Asia, perceived as enemies in the Biblical scriptures (Kor. XVIII: 83-98). 49 Campanini: La surah della Caverna (note 2), pp. 42f. (my translation).

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peoples’ hearts.50 However, in accordance with the Qur’an, in every Arabian Aḥl al-Kahf site I visited (Chennini-Tunisia 2010, Damascus-Syria 2007-2009, Amman-Jordan 2008-2010, Marrakesh, Sefrou-Morocco 2007-2011) their names are never mentioned and I have never seen their iconic representation, not even as souvenirs outside the grottoes. It is quite different in the other Islamic countries such as Turkey. For orthodox Islam the veneration of saints or pious persons is considered bid’ah (heresy). Hence, in some cases the Aṣḥāb al-Kahf sites have recently been subjected to a State policy of ‘heritagization’ through a hegemonic construction, classification and display of the past. This procedure involved a ‘sanitization’ of the formerly religious sites through various forms of control, and consequently of ordering the individual spiritual experiences. For example, the Jordanian cave which is now included in a religious tour of the tombs of Mohammed’s companions and prophets, has been ‘sanitized’ of all traditional devotional elements. This is enforced by two guardians and through the construction of a new mosque for the cultic prayers nearby.51 The greater the state and religious authoritative control, the less traditional practises are still performed. The role of the water in devotional practices could be a tangible paradigmatic pattern which is common to every Seven Sleepers’ cave, and is something I will examine later.

The Counter-Narrative of the Myth My anthropological fieldwork in Turkey (2008-2014) has revealed incorporations of local beliefs beyond the various modalities of the Islamic Seven Sleepers cult. Thus, the rituals performed at the caves encompass an enormous variety of devotional practices and traditions. This coalescence of traditions traces some collective and personal sacred geographies which represent a counter-narrative to official representations. I will focus mostly on those localizations considered as heterotopias, in Focaultian words, spaces of otherness,52 where groups of people, ignoring the dominant discourses on Islam, still perform archaic forms of ritual. The sphere of interest is more the emotional side of Islam than the normative code. As an example of these subaltern perceptions I will analyse more deeply the rituals performed in the cave near Tarsus, comparing it to others such as those at the Ephesus, Afşin and Lice grottos. The ‘original’ cave of Ephesus, situated at the foot of the mountain Bülbül Dag (between the ruins of the ancient and the modern city), near the town of 50 Massignon: Les Sept Dormants d’Ephèse (note 1), p. 72. 51 Tozzi Di Marco: Processi di valorizzazione (note 6). 52 Manoel Penicaud: L’«hétérotopie» des Sept Dormants en Bretagne, in: Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions, 155, 2011, pp. 131-148.

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Selçuk, has today lost its sacredness. The Jewish lamps and pagan tombstones, dated I-II c., discovered on the site suggest that the cave was used even earlier. The whole area has been sacred since the Kriphi Panaya, a paleochristian cultic cave, probably dedicated to St Paul or to the Mother of God53 was also attested. Nowadays the Seven Sleepers’ cave is a more touristic than religious destination. A large sign indicating the Yedi Uyuyanlar, the Turkish translation for Seven Sleepers, lacks any Islamic reference (photo 7). However, in 2008 during my first period of fieldwork when the site was still accessible (and less dedicated to tourism), I observed groups of pilgrims of both faiths. They were on pilgrimage tours which included the Virgin Mary’s house (Meryem Ana Evi) and St. John’s tomb. It is useful to mention the tradition of dormitio of both figures54 in Ephesus as paradigm for the future dormitions. The pilgrims used to enter in the cave within which a basilica had been built,55 they looked at the vaulted crypt, the carved graves and the other archaeological details such as frescos. Then the pilgrims of each faith prayed in their own manner. Both Christians and Muslims concluded their visit by hanging a strip of cotton, a handkerchief or knotted rags on the same net or a tree56 nearby (photo 8). Some of them wrote their supplication of blessing or help on the strips. It is believed that as these rags disintegrate, the pilgrim’s troubles will decrease.57 This practice is very common in Islamic countries (but I observed also in Paphos-Cyprus), whether in every holy mausoleum or at the Virgin Mary’s house, as she is also venerated by Muslims.58 In the immediate vicinity there are shops, many of which sell souvenirs related to the Seven Sleepers. Some medals or pictures depict the seven young men in long tunics with the dog in the cave. Although the origins of the Ephesian grotto are Christian, the presence of the dog in the representation is an Islamic reference. The site is currently enclosed by a fence with a gate, and a large panel explains the story

53 The name of cave (IV-V c. AD), Kriphi Panaya, was given by the Orthodox Christian inhabitants of the nearby village of Kirckince (today Siringe) referring it to the Mother of God, because of her refuge from persecutions. However, the Greek inscriptions inside the cave are prayers to God, Christ and St. Paul. The frescos are representations of the cycle Actus Theclae, originally part of the Acts of Paul. It is not yet clear if the cave was a cultic site dedicated to St Paul, or Mary or Tecla (, [accessed 22 October 2015). 54 Data on Mary’s dormition are found in an anonymous script (VI c.), Transitus Mariae, and in contemporaneous apocryphal texts. The Feast of Mary’s dormition, August 15th, became popular during Byzantine Empire (VII c.). Stephen J. Shoemaker: Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003. 55 In the time of Justinian, Flavius Abradas, a banker, constructed a domed mausoleum at the tomb of the Seven Sleepers. It was the last expansion of the complex, since a large number of chapels and mausoleums grew up around the tombs. Foss: Ephesus after Antiquity (note 28), pp. 8, 84. 56 Instead in the House of Mary they have separate nets where the rags can be hung. 57 Hasluck: Christianity and Islam (note 26), p. 262. 58 Local Muslims believe three pilgrimages to the House equal a pilgrimage to Mecca.

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and the archaeological finds, which have been secularised and heritagized (photo 9). The most representative and the most popular Seven Sleepers’ cave in Turkey in terms of visitor numbers is located in the Taurus mountains about 15 km from Tarsus in the province of Cilicia59, even if it is contested by the city of Afşin in the province of Diyarbakir. In a story attributed by al-Tha’labi to the caliph ‘Ali Tarsus is said to be the Arab version of the name Ephesus (Afsīs). This textual confusion may be behind the establishment of a cult around its cave, which is mentioned by seventeenth century authors.60 The Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi in his travelogue recorded how he saw the Aḥl al-Kahf cave in three different places but did not know which was the real one.61 Tarsus has been a sacred destination since Christian and Byzantine times due to the presence of the tombs of so many martyrs and the shrine of St Paul.62 Nowadays St Paul’s well is venerated for its healing water by Sunnis, Alawites63 and Christians alike. From the minibus station there are frequent buses which reach the cave in half an hour. Approaching it a large billboard with the inscription Eshab-i Kehf welcomes the numerous visitors (photo 10).64 The complex of the ‘Companions of the Cave’, situated up the hill, is accessible by a long stairway. At the centre of its first stage there is an ablution fountain. At the second stage there is a large panel with an inscription of the Qur’anic story. At the top, in front of the entrance to the cave there is a mosque (photo 11) which was built by the mother of the Ottoman sultan Abdulaziz in the late nineteenth century (1873). A long set of steps leads the devotees to the cave; going down people make the first stop close to a large rock resembling a camel which stands on the left side of the descending corridor. Some kiss the stone, others take photos. Descending further they arrive at the 59 Since Antiquity the city has been a flourishing centre, even competing culturally with Alexandria and Athens. During the Roman Empire it was the capital of the Roman province of Cilicia, the scene of the first meeting between Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, and later where Paul the Apostle (Saul of Tarsus) was born. The settlement was located at the crossing of several important trade routes, linking Anatolia to Syria and beyond. After the Arab conquest (VII c.) it was a crucial centre at the border with the Byzantine Empire. During the Middle Ages it was disputed among Seljuks, Armenians, Byzantines until it fell under the control of Ottoman empire in the XVI c. 60 Hasluck: Christianity and Islam (note 26), pp. 315f. 61 Robert Dankoff: An Ottoman Mentality. The World of Evliya Çelebi, Leiden: Brill, 2004, p. 198. 62 For instance one of the pilgrimages was, according to “The Life and Miracles of Saint Thecla”, the mutual sacred journey between the St. Paul shrine and that of Thecla in nearby Seleucia among the inhabitants of Tarsus and Seleucia. Cf. David L. Eastman, Paul the Martyr: The cult of the Apostle in the Latin West, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011, p. 8. 63 Alawites or Nusayris believe in the divinity of ‘Ali, cousin and son in law of the Prophet Mohammad. 64 While the sign at the Ephesian cave gives their names only as Yedi Uyuyanlar.

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burial chamber of Eshab-i Kehf (photo 12) which is the holy precinct inside a large grotto surrounded by other small cavities. Here, even though the holy site is now regulated by the authorities (for example a bench from Tarsus belediye, i.e. municipality, and some warning signs), I could observe the spatial practices and the ritual performances. Despite the Ephesian cave, the visitors of the Tarsian cave are only Sunni Muslim, among which a small percentage are only sightseers. However the place is regarded as holy also by Alawi community of Cilicia.65 I never saw any foreign tourists. In fact the Tarsian cave is not a shared interfaith place like the Ephesian one. During the holy feasts, such as Bayrams66, the majority are villagers on pilgrimage tours, coming from faraway regions or from the countryside. They arrive in groups (mostly in colourful traditional dress) by bus and spend all day on the site, picnicking, buying fruit and vegetables, and shopping in the souvenir stores. They give offerings to the seven youths, usually sweets, which is a habit I saw only during the holy feasts. On the other hand all the Eshab-I Kehf sites generally foresee a ritual scheme which is typical of the ziyaret (visits) to the sacred graves (in Turkish türbeler). The devotees stop in front of the fence and recite the opening sura, the Fatiha. Recently the names of the seven Companions have been written on the wooden fence, and in Arabic calligraphy67, even if the majority of the pilgrims can not read them (photo 13). Furthermore, I often observed some pilgrims sitting on the bench or the ground in the cave and reciting the sura al-Kahf. This is the unique orthopraxi (Ar. adab, Tur. edep, the code of behaviour68) followed here. The interrelatedness of the written canon and local oral traditions were elucidated by Ibn Kathir (XIV c.), who in his commentary of the Qur’anic tale, related the various ways in which the sura al-Kahf could invoke protective powers. He used the ahadith to explain its verses, writing: “Recite this and it will bring peace”; “Whoever memorizes ten verses from the beginning of sura al-Kahf will be safeguarded from the liar or cheat (dajjal)”; “Whoever recites the beginning and the end of sura al-Kahf has light from his feet up to his head”; and finally, “Whoever recites sura alKahf on a Friday is protected for eight days from any trouble and if the liar were to come out during that time he would be safeguarded from him”.69 Thus 65 The Alawites visit the local holy tombs instead of going on the pilgrimage to Mecca. Cf. Gisela Prochàzka-Eisl and Stephan Prochàzka: The Plain of Saints and Prophets. The Nusayri-Alawi Community of Cilicia (Southern Turkey) and its Sacred Places, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 2010, p. 130. 66 Religious celebration for Ramazan (in Arabic Ramadan) or for Kurban, i.e. Abraham sacrifice. 67 I think this fact is singular considering the Kemalist history of Turkey, and could be connected to the current political course. 68 The researcher Logan Sparks elucidates the meaning of the adab in his essay, cf. Logan Sparks: Ambiguous Spaces. A Contextualization of Shared Pilgrimage in Ephesus, PhD thesis, Tilburg University, Netherlands, 2011, ch. 6 refers to Turkey, in particular pp. 220-222. 69 Ismāʿīl Ibn-ʿUmar Ibn-Kaṯīr: Tafsir al-Qur’an al-azim, vol. 4, Beirut, Dār Iḥyāʾ at-Turāṯ alʿArabī, [ca. 1987], pp. 363f.

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he stressed the use of memorization of the Qur’anic verses and in this respect the reading of the Qur’an in the cave expresses an Islamic sense of devotion at the site. After a while the pilgrims start to visit the cave and they perform a variety of traditional folk ritual and non-ritual behaviours, which are evidence of the encounter with the sacred. Various tales also connect the cave to the surrounding territory. Since the Companions of the Cave embody the sincere faith, the purposes of the ziyaret involve the protection and the invocation of God’s grace, the baraka70. Part of the local narrative says that one of the small cavities is still connected to the sea, and if the pilgrim enters some metres inside it, then he must come out backwards, requesting a blessing and pronouncing his vow. It is worth remembering the link between the Eshab-i Kehf and the sea which is represented in the imagery of the Turkish Ottoman navy. A ship in the stormy sea, where its prow, the deck and the stern are formed by a gilded calligraphic inscription of the Seven Sleepers’ names and that of Qitmīr, is a metaphor for divine protection for sailors71. The ritual of passing in a very restricted passage, as in this small cavity, pertains to the archetype of the cave as field of rebirth, regeneration of the spirit. This physicality of the devotion is still prominent and can be observed in other ritual gestures, which involve the rocks. Almost all visitors touch and kiss a small rock which is said to be Qitmīr, the dog (photo 14). The local narrative ascribes a strong protective power to Qitmīr since it embodies God’s will. The traditionalist Zamakshari relates an account in which the Companions of the cave met a dog (or a shepherd with a dog) with the miraculous gift of speech. It said to them: “Sleep and I will watch you”72. I saw many evil-averting talismanic pendants with the inscription of the name Qitmīr in the jewellery shops. Another tangible counter-narrative of lithotherapy consists of rubbing the rock in order to receive the baraka, the divine power. Because the entire sacred place holds the baraka, it is believed that to cure corporeal illness, the pilgrim must rub the sick part of his or her own body. Mostly I saw shoulders being rubbed against the rocky wall which stands in front of the Eshab-i Kehf burial chamber (photo 15). The rocks of the cave are seen as mediators in communication with God through the baraka. In the region one frequently finds a healing stone in a

70 The Encyclopaedia of Islam defines baraka as follows: “beneficent force, of divine origin, which causes superabundance in the physical sphere and prosperity and happiness in the psychic order [...]. God can implant an emanation of baraka in the person of his prophets and saints: Muhammed and his descendents are said to be especially endowed with baraka. These sacred personages, in their turn, may communicate the effluvia of their supernatural potential to ordinary men, either during their lifetime or after their death.” (The New Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 1, edited by H.A.R. Gibb et al, Leiden, Brill, 1986). 71 Even in Santorini the celebration of the Seven Sleepers’ day is connected to the blessing of the boats among the Orthodox Christians. 72 Gabriel Said Reynolds: The Qur’an and its Biblical Subtext, London, Routledge, 2010, p. 177.

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makam, a saintly tomb.73 These litholatric practices are reminiscent of past rock cults, as we know that these are among the most elementary forms of the sacred which are widely spread and they transcend cultures.74 Another element of folk veneration involving litholatrous rituals involves putting a stony fragment in a hole in a rock with a strange shape situated in the central cave as the symbol of a vow. We could define this vow as evidence of one’s own religious experience and also as recording one’s own presence in the sacred cave. The symbolic stones, the topographic archetype of the cave and the last element, the water, represent a linked triangle complex of healing powers through the sacredness of the place. The belief that the water falling from the ceiling of the cave is sacred epitomizes another typical counter-narrative, which is common to all holy graves. This water retains the baraka of the Eshab-i Kehf, which are perceived as close to God, that is God’s friends, hence it can cure all ailments, especially those related to sleep and it can also protect health with its healing power. The water has also a protective function against other troubles. Thus every visitor fills bottles with the Eshab-i Kehf holy water to bring home for future difficult times (photo 16).75. There are also small pools in the other holy caves such as those in Afşin and Lice. In Afşin (ancient ‘Arabsūs) cave (photo 17)76, the natural pool is enclosed by a fence nowadays. However some locals told me that in the past pilgrims used to drink from and wash their hands in its waters. Today since the site has been subjected to rules and regulations outside the cave a new fountain provides the water through seven taps, above which are written the names of the Companions of the Cave: Yemliha, Mislina, Mekseline, Mernuṣ, Tebernuṣ, Sazenuṣ, Kefeṣtetayuṣ (photo 18).77 73 For instance in Bahçe, a town around 50 km from Tarsus, at the Nabī Yūnus sanctuary, near the cenotaph there is a healing stone with a bottle of curative olive oil to rub on aching parts of the body. Cf. Prochàzka-Eisl and Prochàzka: The Plain of Saints and Prophets (note 65), p. 278. 74 The Anatolian Mother Goddess, Cybele, was symbolized by a black stone, and Mithra was born from a stone, just to mention two gods which were worshipped in the area from antiquity until the Christian age. The legend of St. Tecla is also connected with stones. The litholatry, which is based on the hardness and immutability of the stones, is also attested among Bedouin tribes as shown by the meteorite inside the Ka’aba sanctuary which precedes the advent of Islam. The second story of the sura al-Kahf is about Musas’ encounter with al-Khadir after his sleep on a rock. In many pilgrimage sites dedicated to al-Khadir whose Christian counterpart is St. George (in Turkish Mar Corcus), a rock is venerated and it is part of the healing therapy at the site. Cf. Jens Kreinath: Virtual encounters with Hızır and other Muslim saints: Dreaming and healing at local pilgrimage sites in Hatay, Turkey, in: Antropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia 2, 1, 2014, pp. 2566. 75 In the region other sites of holy water, such as those in some Greek villages which have been turkified, are interfaith junctures. 76 In the V-VI c. the Christian cult and church were confirmed by Byzantine funerary inscriptions and other finds incorporated in the edifice of the attached mosque, but it is not certain if they were associated with the Seven Sleepers. 77 For more details on Afşin cave see Oya Pancaroğlu: Caves, Borderlands and Configurations of Sacred Topography in Medieval Anatolia, in: Mésogeios 25-26, 2005, pp. 249-281.

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In the same way in Lice cave (photo 19), the most vernacular cave (among those considered) in a rural isolated environment, there is a small basin where the water filtering from the cave is collected, and then drunk by pilgrims (photo 20).78 The cave is situated at the top of a mountain near the small settlement of Duru which before Islamization was called Dêrqam (Dêr meaning church). However, it is said that the old toponym is a local abbreviation of Dêr plus Raqīm. As mentioned previously, the name Raqīm occurs in the sura al-Kahf alongside the Companions of the Cave and some traditions attach significance to the place. Thus the Kurds of the neighbourhood claim the validity of their local cave, renowned as Lice cave, since this is the name of the largest and best known nearby village in the region of Diyarbakir. The cave is reached by a long path through a wilderness. Inside the presence of many carpets and blankets reveals the habit of pilgrims of spending more than a full day there. The ‘incubation’ rituals are typical of the devotion to the saints, both Muslim and Christian, and they have their roots in the ancient pagan past. At the end of May each year the local Kurdish community celebrate the feast of Eshab-i Kehf which has yet to be examined in depth.

Conclusion In conclusion we can assume the Seven Sleepers’ cave represents the gateway to the transcendent. It is a liminal place between the ordinary and extraordinary, the upper and lower world, the visible and invisible realm. In Sunni Islam the ban on iconology and iconography or relics imposes a “dictatorship of the place”79, thus it is necessary to move towards the saint’s cenotaph or tomb, and request his intercession. Pilgrims move from the margins of their secularized society to become the centre of a temporary community, a communitas. The spiritual energy of each local holy Seven Sleepers’ cave flows through a personal and collective experience of the sacred, which consists of the pilgrimage (ziyaret) to their cenotaphs and a spiritual encounter with them. According to the anthropologist Victor Turner, within a theoretical framework the visitors to the Tarsian cave, in particular, can be categorized as antistructure 80, and their visits can be regarded as liminoid phenomena, as they perform a range of practices and rituals, orally transmitted, which are spontaneous and syncretise the Qur’anic verses and the relative ahadith in a tradition of 78 The fieldwork at this holy site has only just begun and it has yet to be examined more thoroughly. 79 Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen: Tombeau, mosque et zawiya: la polarité des lieux saints musulmans, in: Lieux sacrés. Lieux de culte. Approaches terminologiques, metologiques, historiques et monographiques, edited by André Vauchez, Rome: École Française de Rome, 2000, pp. 133-147. 80 Victor Turner: The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.

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constant flux, with local beliefs. This complex of ritual actions and gestures enacted in the Tarsian cave especially can represent a less constrained religiosity, where diversified tangible counter-narratives through the centrality of the pilgrim’s body embody their own religious experience.81 It is also possible because of the festive dimension of the ziyara, which creates and reinforces the social ties among the pilgrims, even through its profane aspects such as the fair and entertainments. The pilgrim through his body can experience the divine and it can represent a paradigm of analyses of the entire society, according to the scholar Thomas Csordas.82 Since the Companions of the Cave are symbolic referents of the divine force, the baraka, because of their proximity to God as holy persons, i.e. “saints”, each part of the cave is endowed with agency. The pilgrims, through the agency of the Companions of the Cave, transform and regenerate their lives. In vernacular Islam the baraka characterizes the saint and, according to the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, it “is a mode of construing – emotionally, morally, intellectually – human experience, a cultural gloss on life”.83 Even if the visit to the Seven Sleepers/Eshab-i Kehf is a generalised devotion in Islamic societies, the belief in this divine active force has generated heterodox, particular forms of veneration everywhere as local counter-narratives show, since the authoritative religion recognizes the sacred as always attached to the absolute transcendence of Allah. These counter-narratives belong to the informal sphere of popular religiosity and challenge the Islamic ‘right’ edep (behaviour) which the majority of theologians have always used to control and rule the lives of Muslims. It is not by chance that in Turkey we find a lot of holy places, even interreligious sites, where the practiced religiosity based on local narratives represents a processual negotiation of the sacred. It epitomizes also a means of reaffirming the local identity, through the collective memory of local community, going back to its own roots.

81 Cf. Anna Tozzi Di Marco: Al-Qarāfa. La Città dei morti del Cairo. Il circuito delle sette tombe sacre, in: Dada Rivista di Antropologia post-globale, speciale n. 2, 2015, pp. 251269. 82 Thomas J. Csordas: Embodiment as a Paradigm of Anthropology, in: Ethos 18, 1, 1990, pp. 5-47. 83 Clifford Geertz: Islam Observed, Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1971, p. 44.

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Ph. 1: Ephesus cave

Ph. 2: Tarsus cave

Ph. 4: Lice cave Ph. 3: Afşin cave

Ph. 5: Seven Sleepers’ icon Ph. 6: Sura XVIII al-Kahf

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Ph. 7: Ephesus: Yedi Uyuyanlar sign

Ph. 8: Ephesus: Knot rags at tree

Ph. 9: Panel outside Ephesus cave

Ph. 10: Tarsus: Eshab-i Kehf board

Ph. 11: Tarsus: Eshab-i Kehf mosque

Ph. 12: Tarsus: Eshab-i Kehf graves

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Ph. 13: Tarsus: Eshab-i Kehf name, Sazenuş

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Ph. 14: Tarsus: Eshab-i Kehf cave, the dog Qitmir

Ph. 15: Tarsus: Eshab-i Kehf healing rock

Ph. 16: Tarsus: Eshab-i Kehf holy water from the rocky ceiling

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Ph. 17: Afşin cave: the natural pool of water filtering from the rocks

Ph. 19: Lice cave up to the mountain nearby Duru settlement

Ph 18: Afşin cave: fountain with Eshab-i Kehf names

Ph. 20: Lice cave: small basin of water in the rock

FELIX WIEDEMANN Narrating the History of the Other(s). The Near East in European Historiographical Accounts of the 19th and 20th Centuries In 1883, the Munich assyriologist, Fritz Hommel, published a lengthy book on Semitic languages and peoples. In the preface and introduction, his actual agenda became very clear: the entire book should be read as an “Apology for the Semites”.1 In this respect, he enumerated the cultural and scientific achievements of the Semitic peoples, from ancient Babylonians to medieval Arabs.2 But why did he deem it necessary to defend a whole branch of nations and what had they been accused of? Hommel makes no bones about the fact that his remarks were particularly directed at the popular French scholar, Ernest Renan, who became infamous for calling the Semites an “inferior race”3. However, Hommel who “decisively objected”4 to Renan was no less a European Orientalist and not isolated in his field, with his criticism of the French scholar. It would nevertheless be misleading to regard his critique as a general attack on the concept of the Semites – he was not challenging the idea of the very existence of a Semitic race or of the principal difference between Semites and Aryans. Even if he regarded the “original Semites” and the “original IndoGermans” as “two branches of one and the same race”,5 he agreed with Renan’s basic ascriptions and insisted on the different historical roles played by each race. Accordingly, world history had been dominated from ancient to modern times by Aryans and Semites and, for the benefit of human civilisation they should work together rather than compete. To sum up, whereas Renan propagated a hierarchical relationship between superior Aryans and inferior Semites, Hommel delineated a polarity; neither Aryans nor Semites could ex*

1 2 3

4 5

This article is based on research made possible by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, project WI 4102/2-1, “Wanderungsnarrative in den Wissenschaften vom Alten Orient. 1870–1930” at Institut für Altorientalistik, Freie Universität Berlin. Fritz Hommel: Die semitischen Völker und Sprachen. Als erster Versuch einer Enzyclopädie der semitischen Sprach- und Alterthumswissenschaft, vol 1, Leipzig: Schulze, 1883, p. viii. Apart from quotations from Hegel all translations from German sources are mine. Ibid., pp. 38-42. Ernest Renan: Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques, vol. 1, Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1855, p. 4. Hommel: Die semitischen Völker (note 1), p. 27. Fritz Hommel: Arier und Semiten, in: Correspondenz-Blatt der deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte 10, 1879, pp. 52-61, here p. 54.

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ist in isolation and, consequently, he characterised the relationship as a true historical marriage.6 Remarkably, the book includes a chapter on the “Jewish question”, clarifying two points; firstly, Hommel distanced himself from the rising anti-Semitic movement of the time; secondly, he explained that contemporary European Jews had lost their original character and were no longer “true Semites”7. Thus, he encouraged these “renegade sons” of the Holy Land to reassemble themselves in the shadow of Levantine palms – in other words, he pleaded for the emigration of the European Jews to Palestine.8 Assertions like this could be regarded as a poorly disguised anti-Semitic wish for a German society without Jews; on the other hand, he came astonishingly close to the historical narrative of the emerging Zionist movement. However, to come to my central question, who actually is ‘the other’ in representations like this? The ancient Semites, the Arabs as their modern heirs, the (European) Jews, or all of them? I wish to demonstrate the plurality and complexity of constructions of ‘the other’ by looking at representations of the history of the Semites in ancient Near Eastern studies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.9 Given the importance of the concept of the Semitic in the debate on the post-colonial concept of ‘Orientalism’, it is necessary to start with a short look at these theories.10 6 7 8 9

Hommel: Die semitischen Völker (note 1), pp. 45f. Ibid., p. viii. Ibid., pp. 67f. See on the formation and history of ancient Near Eastern studies in Europe: Omar Carena: History of the Near Eastern Historiography and its Problems, 1852-1985, Kevelar: Butzon and Bercker, 1989; Svend A. Pallis: The Antiquity of Iraq. A Handbook of Assyriology, Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1956; with a special focus on Germany: Suzanne L. Marchand: Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany 1750-1970, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996, pp. 188-227; idem: German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race, and Scholarship, Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2009; Sabine Mangold: Eine “weltbürgerliche Wissenschaft”. Die deutsche Orientalistik im 19. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004, pp. 164-175; Johannes Renger: Die Geschichte der Altorientalistik und der Vorderasiatischen Archäologie in Berlin von 1875 bis 1945, in: Berlin und die Antike. Architektur, Kunstgewerbe, Malerei, Skulptur, Theater und Wissenschaft vom 16. Jahrhundert bis heute, edited by Willmuth Arenhövel and Christa Schneider, Berlin: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, 1979, pp. 151-192; Ursula Wokoeck: German Orientalism. The Study of the Middle East and Islam from 1800 to 1945, London: Routledge, 2009, pp. 146-163. 10 There is an on-going debate on the theory of orientalism as developed by Said. It is not possible to go into detail here; but see among others: Aijaz Ahmad: Orientalism and After, in: Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, New York, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, pp. 162-171; James Clifford: Orientalism. Review Essay, in: History and Theory 19, 1980, pp. 204-223; Orientalism. A Reader, edited by Alexander L. Macfie, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000; Markus Schmitz: Kulturkritik ohne Zentrum: Edward W. Said und die Kontrapunkte kritischer Dekolonisation, Bielefeld: transcript, 2008; Daniel Martin Varisco: Reading Orientalism. Said and the Unsaid, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2007; Felix Wiedemann, Orientalismus, in: Docupedia Zeitgeschichte, [accessed October 22, 2015].

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The Semites – or, more precisely, the concept of the Semitic – play a vital role in post-colonial historical writings and were considered as one of the main topics of European fantasies about the so-called ‘Oriental other’. Three books were of particular importance in this respect. The most important is, of course, Edward Said’s Orientalism – a book that is often regarded as a foundational work for post-colonial criticism in general.11 According to Said, Semitic philology had an essential or even avantgarde position in European Orientalism, meaning “a Western style for dominating, restricting, and having authority over the Orient” which marks an “ontological and epistemological distinction” between East and West.12 For this reason, famous scholars in the field were the villains in his narrative – above all, the already mentioned Ernest Renan. For Renan and his colleagues, Said argued, the Semitic was just “the symbol of European [...] dominion over the Orient and over his own era”13. Said accused the orientalists of having invented the Semites as an inferior family of nations – or race – in order to pose as a negative foil from which the supposed ‘own race’, the Indo-Europeans or Aryans, could be distinguished. In other words, the invention of the Semitic exemplifies the essential element of orientalism, namely the construction of a dichotomy between self and other. In some respect, Martin Bernal’s no less controversial book Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation can be regarded as an expansion of post-colonial theory in the field of European classical and ancient studies.14 Examining how European historiography has narrated the roots of Greek and Roman civilisation since the late 18th century, Bernal distinguishes two models. According to a more traditional ‘Ancient model’, Greece was colonised and civilised by Semitic (or Afroasiatic15) peoples like the Phoenicians and Egyptians. However, he claims that this view was overcome and marginalised in the early 19th century by an ‘Aryan model’. Against the backdrop of rising European colonialism and racism, mostly German, classical and ancient scholars insisted upon the ‘Northern’ or Indo-European roots of civilisation.16 11 12 13 14

Edward W. Said: Orientalism, London: Penguin Books, 2003 [1978]. Ibid., pp. 2f. Ibid., p. 141. Martin Bernal: Black Athena. The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, 3 vols., London: Free Assoc. Books, 1987-2006. 15 In modern linguistics those languages of Western Asia and Northern Africa, which were previously separated as Semitic and Hamitic, are subsumed to the Afro-Asiatic branch of languages. See: The Afroasiatic Languages, edited by Zygmunt Frajzyngier and Erin Shay, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012; Richard J. Hayward: Afroasiatic, in: African Languages: An Introduction, edited by Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 74-98. 16 Martin Bernal: Black Athena, vol. 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, London: Free Assoc. Books, 1987.

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Thus, in a process that Bernal describes as “the fabrication of ancient Greece”, the rise of civilisation was explained by the invasion of Indo-European warriors from the North. In contrast, the Oriental – or Semitic – contribution to the history of civilisation was completely denied and forgotten.17 As the term ‘anti-Semitism’ indicates, there is a connection between the concept of the Semitic and European animosity towards Jews. Thus, Said himself regarded his approach as a contribution to the historiography of antiSemitism and presented a more or less homogenous European Orientalism as a “strange secret sharer of Western anti-Semitism”18. However, he did not enlarge upon this argument and, in fact, excluded the history of anti-Semitism from his analysis. Said’s basic consideration was later picked up by other scholars who have delineated the relationship between anti-Semitism and Orientalism in a much more complex way.19 However, in his monograph on the Semites (2008), Gil Anidjar followed more Said’s basic argument and intended to demonstrate that Jews and Arabs have always constituted two aspects of the same European concept of the enemy.20 Since the concept of the Semitic was applied in the 19th century to Jews as well as to Arabs, he argues, “the Semitic hypothesis” represents a “historically unique, discursive moment whereby whatever was said about Jews could equally be said about Arabs, and vice versa”21. However, he did not refer to historical sources and his insistence

17 See on the debate especially Suzanne L. Marchand and Anthony Grafton: Martin Bernal and his Critics, in: Arion, Third Series 5, 1997, pp. 1-37; furthermore, the articles in: Black Athena: Ten Years after, edited by Wim Binsbergen, Hoofddorp: Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society, 1997; Black Athena Comes of Age: Towards a Constructive ReAssessment, edited by Wim Binsbergen Berlin: Lit, 2011. The obvious dependency of ancient Greek culture on Near Eastern sources is still a controversial issue. See Suzanne L. Marchand: What did the Greeks Owe the Orient? The Question we can’t stop asking (even though we can’t answer it), in: Archaeological Dialogues 17, 2010, pp. 117-40; especially for the archaeological discourse, Tobias L. Kienlin and Beat Schweizer: Der Orient als Gegenbild Europas: Zur Konstruktion kultureller Einheiten, in: Mauerschau. Festschrift für Manfred Korfmann, edited by Rüstem Aslan, Stephan Blum, Gabriele Kastl, Frank Schweizer and Diane Thumm, Remshalden-Grunbach: Greiner, 2002, pp. 191-220. 18 Said: Orientalism (note 11), p. 27. 19 Most of these works focused on European representations of Judaism as an ‘Oriental’ religion and its relationship to Islam. See: Orientalism and the Jews, edited by Ivan D. Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar, Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2005; James Pasto: Islam’s “Strange Secret Sharer”. Orientalism, Judaism, and the Jewish Question, in: Comparative Studies in Society and History 40, 1998, pp. 437-474; Achim Rohde: The Orient within. Orientalism, Anti-Semitism and Gender in 18th to early 20th Century Germany, in: Fremde, Feinde und Kurioses: Innen- und Außenansichten unseres muslimischen Nachbarn, edited by Benjamin Jokisch, Ulrich Rebstock and Lawrence Conrad, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009, pp. 370-411; Bryan S. Turner: Religion and Social Theory, London: Sage, 1991. 20 Gil Anidjar: Semites: Race, Religion, Literature, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008; see also idem: The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 21 Ibid., p. 18.

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on the overlaps of Western orientalism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia22 has also political grounds.23 To sum up, the three authors present the ‘Semitic hypothesis’ of the 19th and early 20th centuries as an essential part of Western constructions of the Orient. However, none of these works actually focuses on the history of Semitic philology and its importance for the writing of the history of the Near East.

The Semites in Philological Theory since the 18th Century

The terms ‘Semites’ and ‘Semitic’ are derived from the Bible: Shem is the oldest son of Noah and the brother of Ham and Japheth. The so-called Table of Nations (Gen. 10) contains a genealogical list of the descendants of these three brothers representing the dispersion of mankind. Even though the Table of Nations has provoked endless exegetical literature since antiquity,24 it was not until the late 18th century that the term ‘Semitic’ was used to signify a certain branch of languages including Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic and Ethiopian. The Göttingen historian Ludwig August von Schlözer is said to have been the first to use the term for the classification of languages. However, this is not strictly correct, since in his essay Von den Chaldäern (On the Chaldeans), Schlözer actually defined ‘Semitic’ as the language of the ancient Syrians, Babylonians, Hebrews, Phoenicians and Arabs but without giving any linguistic criteria.25 It was left to his disciple, Johann Gottfried Eichhorn,26 and the Orientalists of the early 19th century to add features like the so-called trilateral roots, the general dominance of the consonants over the vowels and the high number of gutturals, as general features of the Semitic languages.27 Space does

22 The term ‘Islamophobia’ for modern hatred toward Muslims or the Muslim world is highly controversial, see for instance, Javier R. Lorente: Discrepancies Around the Use of the Term “Islamophobia”, in: Human Architecture. Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 8, 2010, pp. 115-128; however, it has been widely established in political and scientific discourse. 23 Anidjar, one of the main proponents of the academic boycott of Israel at Columbia University, intended to uncover the supposed ‘anti-Semitism of Zionism’, Anidjar: Semites (note 20), p. 33. 24 Arno Borst: Der Turmbau von Babel. Geschichte der Meinungen über Ursprung und Vielfalt der Sprachen und Völker, München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995. 25 August L. von Schlözer: Von den Chaldäern, in: Repertorium für biblische und morgenländische Literatur 8, 1781, pp. 113-176, here p. 161. 26 Johann G. Eichhorn: Einleitung in das Alte Testament. Erster Theil, 2nd ed., Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1787, p. 45; idem: Semitische Sprachen, in: Allgemeine Bibliothek der biblischen Literatur 6, 5, 1795, pp. 772-776; idem: Geschichte der neuern Sprachenkunde. Erste Abteilung, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1807, pp. 403-672. 27 See for modern definitions and classifications: The Semitic Languages, edited by Robert Hetzron, London: Routledge, 1997; Edward Lipiński: Semitic Languages: Outline of a Comparative Grammar, Leuven: Peeters, 1997; Antonio Loprieno and Matthias Müller: Semitic, in: The Afroasiatic Languages, edited by Zygmunt Frajzyngier and Erin Shay,

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not suffice here to enlarge upon the history of Semitic philology in the 19th century but it should be mentioned that the category of the Semitic was far less self-evident to scholars than it is often claimed.28 The term ‘Semitic’ itself was disputed from the beginning. Schlözer and Eichhorn were well aware of the inconsistencies of the biblical narrative and the distribution of languages. Most important in this context was that the Table of Nations presents Canaan as a son of Ham, whereas it was well known that the Phoenician (or Canaanite) language is more or less the same as ancient Hebrew.29 In this sense, the epistemic status of the Semites remained precarious. However, alternative terms like “Syro-Arabic”30, “Near Eastern”31 or “trilateral”32 languages have never gained currency. Against a still dominant narrative,33 there was no general conflation of philological and anthropological categories – of language and race – in the 19th century.34 In theory, at least, most philologists were well aware that languages do not correspond to physical features. However, two points make it more complicated. Firstly, languages were not regarded just as linguistic or

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Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 145-235; The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook, edited by Stefan Weninger, Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, 2011. See the older literature on this subject by: Maurice Olender: The Languages of Paradise: Aryans and Semites, a Match Made in Heaven, New York: Other Press, 2002; Léon Poliakov: The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe, London: Chatto & Windus Heinemann, 1974; based on these titles: Anidjar: Semites (note 20); on the complexity of Oriental philology in the 19th century, see especially Marchand: German Orientalism (note 9). Schlözer and Eichhorn explained most of these discrepancies with historical migrations (August L. von Schlözer: Fortsetzung der Allgemeinen Welthistorie der Neuern Zeiten durch eine Gesellschaft von Gelehrten in Teutschland und Engeland ausgefertigt. Dreizehnter Theil, Halle: Gebauer, 1771, p. 266; idem: Von den Chaldäern (note 25), p. 161; Eichhorn: Semitische Sprachen (note 26), pp. 775f; idem: Geschichte der neuern Sprachenkunde (note 26), pp. 449f.). With reference to Herodotus (I, 1; VII, 89), they argued that the Phoenicians had originally been a Hamitic people living on the shores of the Red Sea that had only adopted the Semitic (Hebrew) language after settling at the Levantine coast. In doing so, Schlözer and Eichhorn followed their teacher, the famous Biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791), who had developed this theory in order to disprove the tenures of the Canaanites on the Land of Palestine and to defend their expulsion by the Hebrews, cf. Johann D. Michaelis: Mosaisches Recht: Teil 1, 2nd ed., Reutlingen: Grözinger, 1785, pp. 136-140. See on this debate: Ofri Ilany: From Devine Commandment to Political Act: The Eighteenth-Century Polemic on the Extermination of the Canaanites, in: Journal of the History of Ideas 73, 2012, pp. 437-461. James C. Prichard: Researches into the Physical History of Mankind. vol. III, 1: Researches into the Ethnography of Europe, 3rd ed., London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1841, pp. 5f. Hermann Hupfeld: Ausführliche Hebräische Grammatik. Erster Theil, erster Abschnitt: Schriftlehre in historischer Entwicklung, Kassel: Krieger, 1841, p. 2. Bernhard Stade: Lehrbuch der hebräischen Grammatik. Erster Theil: Schriftlehre, Lautlehre, Formenlehre, Leipzig: Vogel, 1879, pp. 16f. E.g. Ruth Römer: Sprachwissenschaft und Rassenideologie in Deutschland, 2nd ed., München: Fink, 1989. Wort Macht Stamm: Rassismus und Determinismus in der Philologie (18./19. Jh.), edited by Markus Messling and Ottmar Ette, München: Fink, 2012.

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philological entities. For philologists and historians, they constituted the main traits for distinguishing peoples so that the genealogy of languages represented the genealogy of peoples. Secondly, in scholarly writings of the 19th century, the term ‘race’ was not restricted to anthropology; it could also been used as a philological category. Thus, references to a ‘Semitic race’ – often in opposition to the ‘Aryan race’ – are not automatically an indication for racism in the modern sense of the word. I focus here on another aspect, namely the heterogeneity of the ‘other’ which the Semite represents in historiographical accounts of the ancient Near East. As already mentioned, neither the clearly derogatory concept of Renan nor the ambivalent one of Hommel can be regarded as representative of the whole field of Oriental studies in the late 19th century. Depending upon the disciplinary, political and ideological context, there were several rivalling and coexisting concepts of the Semitic. I want to demonstrate this by looking at the ‘Sumerian question’ as discussed in ancient Near Eastern studies at the turn of the 20th century.

The Near East as the Cradle of Civilisation

One major subject in the field of classical and ancient studies in the 19th and early 20th centuries was the identification of the so-called founders or bearers of human civilisation. This question referred to certain peoples or races considered as especially culturally gifted. Since the ancient Near East was traditionally seen as the cradle of human civilisation, identifying the supposed founders of these cultures appeared highly promising. In this respect, it seemed beyond doubt that the Semitic peoples of the ancient Near East had at least, at one time, possessed high cultural skills. It is therefore important to mention that the Orient has never been imagined as a space without history or, to refer to Hegel’s infamous remark on Africa, as a continent that must always remain “on the threshold of history”.35 As Andrea Polaschegg has rightly pointed out, the Orient posed in European imaginations of the 19th century rather as “another culture” than as “the other of culture”.36 Following this, the history of the Near East could not be presented as ‘the other of history’ but only as ‘another history’. This means that the peoples of the Near East, such as the Semites, did not appear as savages – and that the ‘oriental other’ should not be confused with the ‘colonial other’ in general. According to the Bible, the central areas of the ancient Near East were populated by the descendants of Shem. That the ancient Babylonians, Assyrians, 35 Georg W. F. Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Translated from the third German Edition by J. Sibree, London: Bohn, 1861, p. 103. 36 Andrea Polaschegg: Der andere Orientalismus. Regeln deutsch-morgenländischer Imagination im 19. Jahrhundert, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005, p. 142; see ibid., pp. 135-142.

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Phoenicians and Hebrews spoke closely related languages was finally proved in the course of deciphering the cuneiform script in the middle of the 19th century.37 However, with increasing knowledge of the texts the assyriologists found traces of an older, non-Semitic language that must have been dominant until the end of the third millennium BC. This hidden language was soon identified as ‘Sumerian’ and contrasted to the Akkadian (or Babylonian, i.e. Semitic) language of later periods. The discovery of the Sumerian language raised several questions: How could it be classified and where had its speakers come from? What did the Sumerians contribute to early civilisation and what could be said about their relationship with the Semites?38 Based on contemporary philological and anthropological theories, the Sumerians were assigned to the so-called ‘Turanian’ race from Central Asia.39 In contrast, the Semites seemed to have a very different racial, philological and geographical background. On the cultural capabilities of the Semitic peoples, ethnographical theories that identified Nomadism as the original Semitic way of life became highly important. These theories were by no means European inventions, since they clearly drew upon traditional Arab narratives. In the 19th century, for instance, one of the main sources was the famous Muqaddima by the historian Ibn Khaldûn (1332–1406).40 Following his theory about the supposed roots of Arab civilisation in the desert, European Orientalists claimed all Semitic peoples stemmed from the Bedouin. Thus, it was the nomads who appeared as the cadre and purest form of this whole branch of nations. Since the position of the nomadic in European imagination has always been highly 37 See on the decipherment of the cuneiform script: Pallis: The Antiquity of Iraq (note 9), pp. 94-187; furthermore Kevon J. Cathcart: The Earliest Contributions to the Decipherment of Sumerian and Akkadian, 2011, [accessed October 22, 2015]. 38 See on the history of the Sumerian question: Cathcart: The Earliest Contributions (note 37); Jerrold S. Cooper: Sumerian and Aryan. Racial Theory, Academic Politics and Parisian Assyriology, in: Revue d’Histoire de Religiones 210, 1993, pp. 169-205; Pallis: The Antiquity of Iraq (note 9), pp. 132-187; Gordon Whittaker: The Sumerian Question. Reviewing the Issues, in: Ethnicity in Ancient Mesopotamia, edited by Wilfred van Soldt, Uitgaven van het Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten te Leiden, Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 2005, pp. 409-429. 39 The term ‘Turanic’ (or ‘Turanian’) was used in the 19th and early 20th centuries to categorise several agglutinating languages and peoples in Europe and Central Asia; later, these languages were mostly classified as ‘Uralic’, whereas modern philologists disagree about the question of whether one can speak about a distinctive branch of languages at all. See: The Uralic Languages, edited by Daniel M. Abondolo, New York: Routledge, 1998; The Uralic Languages: Description, History, and Foreign Influences, edited by Denis Sinor, Leiden: Brill, 1988. 40 Ibn Khaldûn: The Muqaddimah. An Introduction to History, in three vols., translated from the Arabic by Franz Rosenthal, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958 [1377]. See for European reception: Azis Al-Azmeh: Ibn-Khaldun in Modern Scholarship. A Study in Orientalism, London: Third World Centre for Research and Publ., 1981; Krzysztof Pomian: Ibn Khaldûn au prisme de l’Occident, Paris: Gallimard, 2006.

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ambivalent,41 the association of the Semites with the Bedouin had important consequences for their representation.

Semites as Destructive Nomads

On the one hand, nomads have always had a highly negative reputation. They pose a permanent threat to sedentary life and indeed represent the opposite of civilisation. These ideas heavily influenced scholarly writings in the 19th and 20th centuries. Renan, for instance, drew upon the negative association of nomadism in his description of the violent and intolerant character of the Semitic peoples.42 However, his assertions were not based on theoretical considerations of the general relationship between nomads and sedentary peoples. Establishing such a theory was the work of the Leipzig geographer and ethnologist, Friedrich Ratzel. Ratzel considered sedentariness as the main condition of human culture and civilisation. He emphasised that even after mankind had become sedentary, the deserts and steppes remained a reservoir of wild nomadic peoples, who would periodically form themselves into threatening human waves: “For such a wave the comparable image of a glowing stream of lava scorching everything on its way is not too daring”43. This was the basis of his general law of migration, according to which the central areas of civilisation are periodically overwhelmed or steamrollered by nomadic invaders from surrounding areas. Ratzel’s ideas became highly popular in historiographical writings at the turn of the 20th century. One of the first fields that adopted his theory was indeed ancient Near Eastern studies. Most important in this respect was the Berlin Assyriologist and archaeologist, Hugo Winckler, who developed a whole theory on the assumption that the “starving and rapacious mob of Arabia”44 – meaning the Semitic nomads – would periodically destroy the Near Eastern civilisations. Thus, he expatiated upon how the uncivilised nomadic tribes of the Arabian Desert had formed themselves into distinct peoples between 3000 BC and 1000 AD and had overrun the so-called Fertile Crescent.45 41 Isabel Toral-Niehoff: Der Nomade, in: Grenzverletzer: Von Schmugglern, Spionen und anderen subversiven Gestalten, edited by Eva Horn, Stefan Kaufmann and Ulrich Bröckling, Berlin: Kadmos, 2002, pp. 80-97. 42 Renan: Histoire générale (note 3), pp. 6f. 43 Friedrich Ratzel: Der Ursprung und das Wandern der Völker geographisch betrachtet, in: Berichte über die Verhandlungen der königlich sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philologisch-Historische Classe 50, 1898, pp. 1-75, here p. 36. 44 Hugo Winckler: Die Völker Vorderasiens. Der Alte Orient 1,1, Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1899, p. 10. 45 The theory of the so-called Semitic waves became a standard approach in ancient Near Eastern studies of early 20th century, cf. Felix Wiedemann: Völkerwellen und Kulturbringer. Herkunfts- und Wanderungsnarrative in historisch-archäologischen Interpretationen des

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How these ideas shaped the interpretation of history can be demonstrated by looking at the ‘Sumerian question’. For most historians and archaeologists there was no question that the foundations of the first civilisation or Hochkultur in the Near East (or even human history as a whole) could have been laid by a Semitic people like the Akkadians, the founders of the first empire in the region. In contrast, cultural skills such as the invention of the oldest form of writing, the cuneiform script, were assigned to the non-Semitic Sumerians. Consequently, the Semites appeared only as copyists or – even worse – as peoples who had just taken possession of another’s cultural achievements. In this sense, the scholars presented the ancient Akkadians, Aramaeans and Hebrews as former nomads who had violently overrun the cultural heartlands of the Near East. Thus, the relationship between Semites and Sumerians appeared as completely antagonistic. Generally, the negative figure of the Semitic nomad comprised all Semitic peoples; therefore, it might be said that it was ‘anti-Semitic’ in the literal sense of the word.46 However, against the backdrop of contemporary European antiSemitism, the overlap between the Sumerian question and the ‘Jewish question’ was all too obvious The identification of the ancient Semites as a permanent threat to civilisation was clearly aimed at their supposed modern heirs and representatives: the Jews.47 Most archaeologists and assyriologists restricted themselves to insinuations; however, the most explicit of them was also the most famous in the field of ancient Near Eastern studies, Friedrich Delitzsch. He openly avowed the connection between the Akkadians and the Jews. His praise of the cultural achievements of the Sumerians was followed by a description of how this civilisation had been ‘absorbed and bled dry’ (playing with the German words aufsaugen and aussaugen) by the invading Semites. Thus, he ended with a solemn warning: “Since they have been living voluntarily without a state, the Jewish people represent at least the same danger”48. Given this “historical-archaeological variant of anti-Semitism”, as AnVorderen Orients um 1900, in: Ethnographisch-Archäologische Zeitschrift 51, 2010, pp. 105-128. 46 However, since the term ‘anti-Semitism’ has come to mean modern hatred toward Jews and has been exclusively used in this sense, it is simply an anachronism to “take anti-Semitism at its word, literally that is, as targeting all Semites and not only the Jews” (Ivan D. Kalmar: Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. The Formation of a Secret, in: Human Architecture. Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 7, 2009, pp. 135-144, here p. 136). 47 Andrea Becker: Neusumerische Renaissance? Wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Philologie und Archäologie, in: Baghdader Mitteilungen 16, 1985, pp. 229-316; Arkadiusz Soltysak: Physical Anthropology and the ‘Sumerian Problem’, in: Studies in Historical Anthropology 4, 2004, pp. 145-158; Felix Wiedemann: Zwischen Völkerflut und Heroismus. Zur Repräsentation der Beduinen in kulturhistorischen Deutungen des Vorderen Orients um 1900, in: Die Begegnung mit Fremden und das Geschichtsbewusstsein, edited by Judith Becker and Bettina Braun, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012, pp. 207-228. 48 Friedrich Delitzsch: Die große Täuschung. Kritische Betrachtungen zu den alttestamentlichen Berichten über Israels Eindringen in Kanaan, die Gottesoffenbarung am Sinai und die Wirksamkeit der Propheten, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1920, p. 103.

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drea Becker has put it,49 it cannot come as a surprise that the Sumerian question developed into an important reference for anti-Semitic ideologues. The infamous Houston Stewart Chamberlain, for instance, discussed the Sumerian question in detail in his Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts (‘The Foundations of the 19th century’, 1899)50, one of the most influential anti-Semitic books of the time.51 Chamberlain adopted several ideas from Adolf Wahrmund, a German-Austrian orientalist who used Near Eastern history to prove the supposed danger posed by the Jews. His most important contribution to fin de siècle anti-Semitism was the pamphlet Das Gesetz des Nomadentums und die heutige Judenherrschaft (‘The law of nomadism and the current rule of the Jews’). Therein, he established a so-called law of nomadism according to which nomads – and especially the Jews – have always been the ultimate terminators of civilisation in human history.52

Semites as Noble Bedouins

The association of the Semitic with nomadic raiding and destruction was just one possible representation of the Semites. Since the position of nomads in the European – and not only in the European – imagination has always been highly ambivalent the associations were not all negative. The most important positive image in this context is certainly the traditional myth of the noble savage, which has always been an integral part of European constructions of identity.53 There are different varieties of this topos. Unlike fantasies about islanddwellers in the South Sea, the attractiveness of the Bedouin was not based on the apparent harmony of their life with nature in a land of milk and honey, but on the challenges and hardships of a supposedly uncorrupted life beyond civilisation. Far from representing destructive barbarians, these invaders embodied natural virtues such as moral purity, virility and innocence. This romantic 49 Becker: Neusumerische Renaissance? (note 47), p. 237. 50 Houston Stewart Chamberlain: Die Grundlagen des 19. Jahrhunderts: Ungekürzte Volksausgabe, vol. 1, München: Bruckmann, 1932, pp. 421-423. 51 For further examples, see Wiedemann: Zwischen Völkerflut und Heroismus (note 47), pp. 216f. 52 Adolf Wahrmund: Das Gesetz des Nomadenthums und die heutige Judenherrschaft, Karlsruhe u. Leipzig: Reuther, 1887. See also his first anti-Semitic book: Babylonierthum, Judenthum and Christenthum, Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1882. On his influence on Chamberlain, see Houston Stewart Chamberlain: Lebenswege meines Denkens, München: Bruckmann, 1919, p. 346. Unfortunately, Wahrmund’s role in the history of anti-Semitism is still largely unexplored. See my short remarks: Felix Wiedemann: Das Gesetz des Nomadentums (Adolf Wahrmund 1887), in: Handbuch des Antisemitismus. Judenfeindschaft in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 6, edited by Wolfgang Benz, 235-36. München: Saur, 2013, pp. 235f. 53 Terry J. Ellingson: The Myth of the Noble Savage, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001; Der Alteritätsdiskurs des Edlen Wilden: Exotismus, Anthropologie und Zivilisationskritik am Beispiel eines europäischen Topos, edited by Monika Fludernick, Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag, 2002.

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myth was by no means a European invention but rooted in Arab constructions of identity.54 Adopted and transformed by European – mostly British – travellers, the noble Bedouin became a well-established figure in writings on the history and culture of the Near East.55 By drawing on this tradition, the Semites as the supposed main actors in Near Eastern history could be presented in a very different manner. Given the ‘English romance with Arabia’ in the 19th century, the romantic representation of the Semites was especially common among British scholars of the time. George Rawlinson, for instance, author of one of the first comprehensive accounts of Near Eastern history, clearly referred to the myth of the noble Bedouin and thus depicted the Semitic Assyrians as a noble race of warriors: “Nowhere have we a race represented to us monumentally of a stronger or more muscular type than the ancient Assyrian”.56 This image implies an important modification of the position of the Semites in representations of Near Eastern history. No longer barbaric destructors, they appeared as heroic conquerors, hardened by the challenges of the desert, who renewed the decadent civilisations of the Fertile Crescent. Like the entire myth of the noble Bedouin, this interpretation was not a purely European invention but rested upon traditional Arab narratives on the roots of civilisation in the desert – again, Ibn Khaldun can be regarded as the most important authority.57 However, references to Hugo Winckler’s aforementioned wave-theory were more obvious in this respect. Assyriologists and archaeologists thus identified a number of supposed Semitic immigrations from the desert, with each wave representing less the destruction of an old civilisation than the initiation of a new one. This can be seen by looking at a book by the Berlin orientalist and later director of the Vorderasiatisches Museum, Otto Weber on the pre-Islamic Arabs (Arabien vor dem Islam, 1902). Weber emphasised the historical im-

54 Isabel Toral-Niehoff: Der edle Beduine, in: Der Alteritätsdiskurs des Edlen Wilden: Exotismus, Anthropologie und Zivilisationskritik am Beispiel eines europäischen Topos, edited by Monika Fludernick, Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag, 2002, pp. 281-296. 55 Radhouan Ben Amara: The Desert in Travel Writing, Cagliari: AM & D, 2006; Kathryn Tidrick: Heart-beguiling Araby. The English Romance with Arabia, Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981; John Ure: In Search of Nomads: An English Obsession from Hester Stan-hope to Bruce Chatwin, London: Constable, 2003; Felix Wiedemann: Heroen der Wüste. Männlichkeitskult und romantischer Antikolonialismus im europäischen Beduinenbild des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts, in: Ariadne. Forum für Frauen- und Geschlechtergeschichte 56, 2009, pp. 62-67. 56 George Rawlinson: The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World or The History, Geography, and Antiquties of Chaldaea, Assyria, Babylon, Media and Persia, vol. 1, London: Murray, 1862, p. 299. 57 Ibn Khaldûn had not only emphasised the priority of the Bedouin as “the basis and reservoir of civilization and cities” (Ibn Khaldûn: The Muqaddimah (note 40), chap. II, p. 3) but also had delineated a kind of historical rhythm in Arab history. Accordingly, every dynasty has a natural life span, ranging from the founding of a new empire by nomadic tribes, its settlement and its creeping decline as a consequence of luxury and moral degeneration, to its final dismissal by a new, young and powerful dynasty of the desert. See Ibn Khaldûn: The Muqaddimah (note 40), especially chapters II and III.

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portance of the Arabian Desert as the heartland of the Semitic peoples, from which every historical wave had originated: “In Arabia, the cradle of all Semitic peoples came into being; thence the first Semites conquered the civilised world and thence new elements have succeeded through the millennia”. Thus, at the very beginning of every new civilisation or empire in the region, there had been Semitic immigration. At this point he clearly referred to but reversed the wave theory and glorified the “brave sons of the steppe”. Instead of destruction, each wave had “nourished the Semitic tribe of their degenerated ancestors” and was thus tantamount to a regeneration and rejuvenation.58 It cannot be a surprise that this narrative was also applied to the Sumerian question. In this sense, the Breslau assyriologist, Bruno Meissner, contrasted the “sedate” and even degenerate Sumerians with the invading Semites, mentioning the invaders’ supposed strong bodies and brave physiognomy.59 It is not difficult to put assertions like this in the context of the emerging cultural pessimism in fin de siècle Europe. Based on the theory of – or, to be more precise, on the Angst about – decline, the central idea was that, in the long run, the civilised way of life would lead to decadence and effeminacy. Every civilisation, it was argued, needs periodically vital impulses or it will simply dry up and vanish.60 Against this backdrop, romanticising the ‘uncivilized’ character of the Semitic nomads is an example of a narrative strategy that the historian Rainer Kipper has called “the revaluation of primitiveness into morality” with respect to the contemporary myth of the ancient Germanic people. Barbarism is advanced as the actual source of the positive properties and virtues of humanity, whereas culture and civilisation are identified as the main reason for decadence and human vices.61 To understand the ambivalent position of the barbarian in European historiographical thought, it is again important to distinguish this figure – at least ideal-typically – from the savage as represented, for instance, by South Sea islanders. John G.A. Pocock has recently demonstrated, that European representations of the ‘barbarian’ peoples of Eurasia – like the shepherds, herdsmen and nomads – and those of the savages were already diverging in the historiography of the 17th and 18th centu58 Otto Weber: Arabien vor dem Islam, Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1902, pp. 4-6; cf. Wiedemann: Zwischen Völkerflut und Heroismus (note 47), pp. 218-224. Unsurprisingly this romantic version of the wave theory was later adopted by pan-Arab historians and nationalists. See Ernest Dawn: The Formation of Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years, in: International Journal of Middle East Studies 20, 1, 1988, pp. 67-91; Nimrod Hurvitz: Muhib ad-Din alKhatib’s Semitic Wave Theory and Pan-Arabism, in: Middle Eastern Studies 29, 1993, pp. 118-134. 59 Bruno Meissner: Babylonien und Assyrien: Erster Band, Heidelberg: Winter, 1920, p. 16. 60 See on the German tradition of this thinking the classic work of Fritz Stern: The Politics of Cultural Despair. A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology, Berkely: University of California Press, 1974. 61 Rainer Kipper: Der Germanenmythos im deutschen Kaiserreich: Formen und Funktionen historischer Selbstthematisierung, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, p. 12.

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ries.62 In contrast to the savages, the barbaric nomads were not considered nonhistorical but pre-historical or, with Hegel’s words, as elementarhistorisch (‘elementary-historical’). Not completely outside culture and history, they embodied a basic historical force that could initiate ruptures and the beginnings of new eras.63 As a consequence of these general considerations, cross-historical comparisons and identifications became possible. There were several scholars who mentioned supposed similarities between the ancient Germans and the Semitic Arabs, i.e. both appeared as wandering and young peoples who had destroyed the decadent civilisations of late antiquity.64 The Breslau assyriologist, Arthur Ungnad, even emphasised supposedly racial similarities between the so-called pure Arabs and the ancient Germans.65 This association was, to some extent, used during the First World War66 and again in the 1930s67 as an argument for political alliances between Germany and the Arab world. At first glance, historical and even racial analogies between Germans and Semitic Arabs drawn by national-socialist scholars appear paradoxical, since they seemingly contradict racial anti-Semitism. However, at that time, Arabs and Jews were no longer seen as belonging to the same race as they had been in the middle of the 19th century. Whereas George Rawlinson had underlined the “striking resemblance” of the Semitic Assyrians “to the Jewish physiognomy” and thus described the Jews as the true heirs of this noble race,68 assertions like this become less common in the later period. Furthermore, there seems to be a significant difference at this point between the German scholarly discourse and the British one. It is in any case remarkable that almost all German orientalists of the 19th and early 20th centuries who narrated the history of the ancient Semites in a romantic mode excluded the Jews – at least the post62 John Greville Agard Pocock: Barbarism and Religion: Vol. 2: Narratives of Civil Gouvernment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 330-365; idem: Barbarism and Religion: Vol. 4: Barbarians, Savages, and Empires, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 133-153. 63 Hegel coined this expression with reference to the Mongolian family of nations and their role in European and Asian history, see Georg W. F. Hegel: Die orientalische Welt: Auf Grund der Handschriften herausgegeben von Georg Lasson, Hamburg: Meiner, 1968, p. 342: see on this: Jürgen Osterhammel: Die Entzauberung Asiens: Europa und die asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert, München: Beck, 2010, pp. 211-234. 64 See Richard Heigl: Wüstensöhne und Despoten. Das Bild des Vorderen Orients in deutschsprachigen Weltgeschichten des 19. Jahrhunderts, Regensburg: Universität Regensburg, 2000, pp. 78-84. 65 Arthur Ungnad: Die ältesten Völkerwanderungen Vorderasiens. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und Kultur der Semiten, Arier, Hethiter und Subaräer, Breslau: Selbstverlag des Verfassers, 1923, p. 5. 66 Tilman Lüdke: Jihad made in Germany: Ottoman and German Propaganda and Intelligence Operations in the First World War, Münster: Lit, 2005; Marchand: German Orientalism (note 9), p. 438-446. 67 Jeffrey Herf: Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. 68 Rawlinson: The Five Great Monarchies (note 56), p. 297.

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exilic Jews – from the role of heroic warriors, and restricted it to the Arabs or to their supposed precursors such as the Akkadians.69 After the turn of the 20th century, this exclusion was legitimised with a new ethno-historical cartography of the Near East that made sharp racial distinctions between the (Semitic) Arabs on the one hand and the Jews on the other. The latter were now assigned by anthropologists to the so-called ‘Near Eastern race’ (‘vorderasiatische Rasse’) that had always dominated the degenerated cities of the region, whereas the Semites – meaning the Arabs – appeared as the noble ‘oriental race’ (‘orientalische Rasse’) of the desert.70 Originally introduced by the anthropologist Felix von Luschan71 in order to refute the emerging racial antiSemitism in the late 19th century, this new racial cartography was soon adopted by anti-Semitic ideologues.72 Theodor Fritsch, for instance, one of the key figures of the völkisch movement, stressed in his infamous Handbuch der Judenfrage (‘Handbook of the Jewish Question’) the racial difference between the Jews as a Near Eastern race and all “other peoples of Semitic language”, 69 There were, however, important exceptions. Most strikingly in this respect were Jewish Orientalists who mostly represented the ancient as well as the current Semites (meaning the Arabs) in a highly romantic and positive manner. The Semitic Bedouin in particular were regarded as the true heirs of the ancient Hebrews and thus advanced to positive role models for European Jews at the turn of the 20th century. Although there has been some research on this phenomenon in the last decade, there is still a lot to do (see Steven E. Aschheim: The Modern Jewish Experience and the Entangled Web of Orientalism, Amsterdam: Menasseh ben Israel Instituut, 2010; Kalmar and Penslar: Orientalism and the Jews (note 19); Yaron Peleg: Orientalism and the Hebrew Imagination, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. On the complexity of Jewish Orientalism in general see: Kathrin Wittler: Good to Think. (Re)Conceptualizing German-Jewish Orientalism, in: Orientalism, Gender and the Jews. Literary and Artistic Transformations of European National Discourses, edited by Ulrike Brunotte, Anna-Dorothea Ludewig and Axel Stähler, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015, pp. 6381. 70 E.g. Eugen Fischer: Spezielle Anthropologie: Rassenlehre, in: Anthropologie, edited by Eugen Fischer and Gustav Schwalbe, Leipzig: Teubner, pp. 122-222, here pp. 170-174; Fritz Lenz: Die Erblichkeit der geistigen Begabung, in: Menschliche Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene: Band 1: Menschliche Erblichkeitslehre, edited by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz, München: Lehmann, 1927, pp. 499-583; Hans F. K. Günther: Kleine Rassenkunde Europas, München: Lehmann, 1925, pp. 63-67; Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß: Von Seele und Antlitz der Völker. Eine Einführung in die vergleichende Ausdrucksforschung, München: Lehmann, 1929, pp. 16-24. 71 Felix von Luschan: Die anthropologische Stellung der Juden, in: Correspondenz-Blatt der deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte 23, 1892, pp. 94102; idem: Völker, Rassen, Sprachen. Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1922, pp. 55-152. 72 According to Luschan, the modern Jews were – like all other people – a mixture of different races but predominated by the so-called Near Eastern race. On the consequences of this distinction in racial theory see: Veronika Lipphardt: Biologie der Juden: Jüdische Wissenschaftler über “Rasse” und Vererbung 1900-1935, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008; Amos Morris-Reich: Photographs and Economies of Demonstration: The Idea of the Jews as a Mixed Race People, in: Jewish Social Studies 20, 2013, pp. 150-183; Felix Wiedemann: The North, the Desert, and the Near East: Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß and the Racial Cartography of the Near East, in: Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 12, 2012, pp. 326-343.

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who “stood in sharp contrast to the Jews”.73 For this reason, he strongly criticised the term ‘anti-Semitism’ which had once been a self-designation but slowly disappeared out of the anti-Jewish discourse of the early 20th century.74

The Heterogeneity of the Others

Representations of the Semites – and, it might be added, ‘Orientals’ in general – in European historiography of the 19th and early 20th centuries were by no means homogenous and should not be reduced to the depiction of them in their supposed role as ‘other’. What matters here, is the particular kind of ‘other’ – the way this role is ‘filled’. With respect to the historiographical role of the Semites, it is important to distinguish it – at least ideal-typically – from those of the ‘savages’ who were simply excluded from history and thus from historiographical reflexion. In contrast, the Semitic peoples were traced back to Semitic nomads as primitive but by no means non-historical ‘barbarians’. Given the highly ambivalent character of nomadism and barbarism, there were at least two different role-models for the Semites depending on the cultural, scientific (historiographical) and political context. On the one hand, Semites appeared as barbaric nomads who were held responsible for the repeated destruction of civilisation. For this reason, it was not imaginable for historians and archaeologists of the time to present the Semitic Akkadians as founders of Near Eastern civilisation, and thus they assigned this position to the nonSemitic Sumerians. On the other hand, the Semites were considered as noble Bedouins and represented dynamic and rejuvenating forces in Near Eastern history. According to this narrative, the Sumerian culture was already old and degenerate when it was revived by the Semitic nomads from the desert. The romantic image of the noble Semitic Bedouin is not just the other side of one and the same ‘orientalist’ coin, but a really different figure that is embedded in different culture-historical narratives. However, both roles mirrored contemporary anxieties and thus expressed different modes of the Unbehagen in der Kultur, to put the original German title of Freud’s famous work “Civilisation and its Discontents” (1930). Focussing on the destructive and barbaric forces of nomadism reflected the fear that civilisation is always threatened by noncivilised people from outside, whereas the romantic presentation of the Noble Bedouin was driven not least by the fear that a civilised way of life would provoke effeminacy and degeneration. However, whichever concept historians and archaeologists adhered to depended upon, not least, personal convictions and beliefs. With respect to rep-

73 Theodor Fritsch: Handbuch der Judenfrage. Die wichtigsten Tatsachen zur Beurteilung des jüdischen Volkes, 31st ed., Leipzig: Hammer, 1932, p. 18. 74 See Mosche Zimmermann: Aufkommen und Diskreditierung des Begriffs “Antisemitismus”, in: Deutsch-jüdische Vergangenheit: Der Judenhass als Herausforderung, edited by Mosche Zimmermann, Paderborn: Schöningh, 2005, pp. 25-39.

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resentations of the Semites, the ideological and political background was another important factor. At the turn of the 20th century, contemporary antiSemitism was most important in that the question of the historical role of Semitic people was deeply connected to the ‘Jewish question’. The representation of the Semitic nomads as destructive historical forces fitted all too well into the anti-Semitic ideology, and it is not surprising that such theories were immediately adopted in anti-Jewish writings of the time. However, even antiSemitic ideologues drew upon the romantic figure of the noble Semitic Bedouin – although only after a new racial cartography of the Near East had made a sharp distinction between Jews and Semites. Thus, the category of the Semitic in the 19th and 20th century had by no means a fixed meaning but shifted from one context to the other. The same might be said about the process of ‘Othering’: it never refers to a fixed unity of entities but in fact includes a very heterogeneous ensemble so that ‘the other’ always appeared in the plural. Stating that a particular historical or contemporary group is represented as ‘other’ should never be the conclusion of one’s research – it is the point at which closer reading should begin.

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