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The Mediterranean has been a significant meeting-point for the three Abrahamic religions, while at the same time each of those religions identified as its place of origin lands a little away from the shores of the Yam haGadol, or ‘Great Sea’, which lay just over the horizon of the Jews and early Christians of Jerusalem, and further over the horizon of the early Muslims of Mecca and Medina. At certain points in the history of Judaism, lands to the east, notably Babylonia, were of far greater importance than the Mediterranean lands in the development of religious ideas and practices, and much the same can be said of early Islam. Adherents of the three religions jostled with one another in Iraq and Iran over many centuries. And yet the Mediterranean has been an exceptionally important place of interaction, competition, and, at times, of conflict among Jews, Christians, and Muslims, throughout the centuries since the rise of Islam. It has been a space in which members of these religions have defined their identity ever more sharply in relation to one another, in which sectarian divisions characterized all three religions, and in which there has existed a constant flow of population, as Jews migrated (or were deported, or expelled), as Muslims arrived as conquerors, and as the ethnic composition and sectarian identity of the Christian lands around the Mediterranean constantly mutated. One cannot, then, argue that these religions are in some fundamental way ‘Mediterranean’; but it is impossible to deny that the Mediterranean provided a stage on which they were able to interact in positive and negative ways. In this chapter, the emphasis will be upon the themes of crystallization of identity and dispersion, though some attention will also need to be paid to the bloodier forms of interaction, epitomized by the Crusades and by the Ottoman confrontation with imperial Spain. Relations between sects within the three religions will not be treated here, except where they are relevant to the relationship to one of the other religions.
There are still many open questions concerning the origins and permanence of Jewish dispersion across the Mediterranean. Cicero bears witness to the presence of Jews in Sicily during the latter days of republican Rome, while Roman Jews, who have preserved their distinctive liturgy, like to see themselves as a 2,000-year-old community. The slave trade apparently brought Jews into Etruscan lands even earlier. The continuities are impossible to prove, but one feature of the dispersion needs to be emphasized. It was the Judaean Jews rather than the Samaritans, their rivals in the Holy Land, who were mobile. The Samaritans ranged little further westwards than Egypt, although they experienced deportation eastwards, away from the Mediterranean; this exposed them in the early Byzantine period to mass extermination by imperial troops campaigning in Palestine. The Jews of Palestine had already undergone massive slaughter under Vespasian and Hadrian; but the presence of Jews much further afield provided a demographic reserve that rendered possible their survival through the calamities and persecutions of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Rome itself became home to many thousands of Jews, whose presence is documented both in the Jewish catacombs in the north-east of the modern city and in the synagogue of Ostia, which may have functioned for 400 years, and apparently contained a bake-house and classrooms.
It is uncertain how recognizable the Judaism practised by these people would have been to later generations of rabbinic Jews. The poet Juvenal wrote satirically about the Jews, and he shared general incomprehension about Sabbath observance. Although avoidance of pork was a well-known feature of Jewish life, it is probably impossible to establish whether an elaborate code of kashrut (Jewish dietary law) existed, or how widespread were conversion and intermarriage with non-Jews. In particular, the presence of ‘God-fearers’ who had not actually become Jews and were constrained only by the much simpler code of Noachide laws makes it hard to distinguish Jews of Palestinian descent from those who were gradually brought into the community. Among the latter, we certainly have to include circumcised slaves, who might continue to live a Jewish life (whatever that meant) after many became freedmen. Even if DNA evidence appears to show that a high proportion of Jews, right up to modern times, are descended from ancient inhabitants of Palestine, the argument that the Mediterranean world was a major theatre of conversion to Judaism in late antiquity and right up to the seventh or eighth century carries weight. This is a theme that has been heavily emphasized by some modern writers, although the claim (by Shlomo Sand) that the dispersal of the Jews is in effect a later myth cannot be seriously sustained.1
Patristic theologians such as John Chrysostom might inveigh against the Jews; stallholders in the bazaar in Constantinople might refuse to sell their produce to those who disagreed about the relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, but the boundaries between the faiths were much fuzzier than those examples might indicate. The vituperation expressed towards Judaism derived from a sense of bitter competition, not a wish to kick those who were already down. The wider public was attracted by ethical codes and religious aspirations that were not vastly different—love for one’s neighbour, the hope that God would offer rewards in the next world if not in this one. The Christian martyr Pionius, who died at Smyrna in 250 during the Decian persecutions, refused to take part in the pagan cult at a time when both Jews and pagans were celebrating their festivals (possibly the Jewish festival of Purim and the pagan Dionysia—both times when drunkenness was more than tolerated). On such occasions the celebrations of Jews and Gentiles merged imperceptibly.2 In the early fifth century, there is evidence that Jews and Christians coexisted peacefully in Minorca, in what the bishop described as ‘easy acquaintance’ (rather too easy for his liking), until, inspired by the arrival of the bones of the Protomartyr Stephen, the Christians marched on the major centre of Jewish settlement, Magona, and attacked the synagogue, after which they engaged in debate with the Jews, partly on these lines: ‘if you truly wish to be safe and honoured and wealthy, believe in Christ.’ In the end the Jews of Minorca were browbeaten into accepting Christianity, but it is impossible to escape the conclusion not just that Jews and Christians had been on good terms until St Stephen arrived, but that the boundaries between Judaism and Christianity had been very permeable, which was exactly what bishops disliked. Violence prompted the Jews of Minorca to convert; but mutual familiarity lessened the shock of conversion.3
To say that the boundaries between faiths were fuzzy is not to say that religion was a thin veneer and that belief was half-hearted—rather, the opposite: the existence of several layers of religious belief, including a thick pagan residue in some areas, gave religious life more, not less, intensity. A similar mistake is often made when looking at religion in Japan or China: there, a single individual can worship in many ways, just as ancient Mediterranean travellers might invoke the gods of the Phoenicians or Etruscans when far from home in Greece. These attitudes long persisted in the Mediterranean, and it is said that peasants in the countryside near Naples were sacrificing to pagan gods as late as the nineteenth century, ‘just to be sure’. Many modern scholars emphasize that it was in a heavily laden atmosphere of religious interaction and competition that Islam was born: the Quran is full of references to Jews, Christians, and ‘Sabeans’; and the Samaritans already proclaimed that ‘there is no God but God and Moses is his prophet’. Nor is it clear that Muhammad’s ‘Jews’, to whom the Quran makes repeated reference, were rabbinic Jews, rather than Judaizing pagan tribes, or breakaway sects.4 These characteristics of early Arabia were even more marked in the Mediterranean. Alongside religious syncretism we observe ethnic mixing, as Berbers, in particular, wandered in and out of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Whether Kahina, the Berber prophetess who resisted the Arab armies, was in some way Jewish is far from certain, but the arguments that the conquering armies that eventually ended up in Spain included Jews, Christians, and indeed pagans makes sense; the Islamization of the Berbers of the Maghrib was a slow process that was only completed in the twelfth century. One Berber tribe is said to have converted to Islam twelve times, as new waves of conquerors entered its territory from the east time and again, making their demands for submission (Islam), which were quickly obeyed and then as quickly forgotten. The existence of syncretic groups such as the Barghawata in western Morocco between the eighth and the twelfth centuries further reveals the interpenetration between the Abrahamic religions not very far from the Mediterranean, though more needs to be known about the apparently Jewish and Christian elements in their beliefs, and the extent to which they were attempting to create a Berber parallel to Islam using their own Berber alternative to the Quran; it is possible that the information we have concerning their beliefs and practices was doctored to make them appear less faithful to Islam than was actually the case.5 The Islamization of Morocco was effected with the coming of the Almoravids in the eleventh century and the Almohads in the twelfth, but these movements too had a strong sense of tribal Berber identity, as will be seen shortly.
The Barghawata emphasized their identity as Masmuda Berbers. But ethnic mixing also characterized the early medieval Mediterranean, and left its mark on the relationship between the three religions. The Jewish example deserves particular attention, in view of the traditional assumption that this religious group sealed itself off from its neighbours by discouraging conversion and intermarriage. It is possible that Visigothic legislation forbidding circumcision was directed not at the children of professing Jews but at the practice of circumcising slaves, which had the convenient result that they could then count as Jews and handle wine for their Jewish masters. (It is also possible that much of this legislation was the result of confusion between one circumcised people, already present in Spain, the Jews, and another, the Arabs, of whose successful military campaigns, tending ever westwards, there was increasing awareness.) Later, in Muslim-ruled Spain (al-Andalus), Slav captives were brought into Jewish households, alongside the thousands of Ṣaqāliba who served Muslim and Christian masters; and again some, many, or maybe even most were made into proselytes.6
This ethnic mixing had parallels among the much larger Christian and Muslim communities. Just looking at al-Andalus, we can detect the arrival of Coptic Christians, Yemenite Arabs, and many other easterners during the eighth and ninth centuries. A protest movement among Córdoban Christians in the 840s, generated by the awareness that their culture was becoming Arabized and even Islamized, was stimulated by contact with the Christian monasteries of the Holy Land. Forty Christians denounced Islam in public and were put to death, which was exactly what they hoped to happen. Intermarriage between Muslim men and Christian women drew the children of these families away from Christianity towards Islam, though some of the martyrs were the product of such mixed marriages. Christians of high status, and probably others too, avoided pork, had their children circumcised in grand ceremonies, and thus assimilated into the dominant religion by a process of religious osmosis that at a certain point left them or their children with an Islamic identity, even if they had never formally converted.7 The erosion of Christianity in al-Andalus has to be understood as part of a wider set of relationships, one that left the boundaries between the Abrahamic religions much more open than was to become the case after the tenth century. The status of the Christians and Jews as dhimmīs (protected peoples), paying additional taxes, sometimes the target of abuse, and, at least in theory, denied political office meant that Islam could be a lure, especially for those who hoped for a career at court (something similar is visible among the Jews and Samaritans at the Fatimid court in Egypt). Interestingly, though, the Jews did not assimilate on a similar scale to the Christians, and developed a different, but also intimate, relationship with Islam, borrowing religious ideas, poetic techniques, and attitudes to law and their sacred texts. The presence of Islam reinforced Spanish Judaism, while it weakened Spanish Christianity. The Judaism of al-Andalus became a mirror image of Islam, as the Jews adapted Arabic rhyming verse to Hebrew, as they assimilated Islamic ideas about the nature of God, and as they immersed themselves in Talmudic studies with the same vigour as Muslim students of ḥadīth.
The era of ill-defined boundaries came to an end at different times in different areas of the Mediterranean. Indeed, it lingered longest in the eastern Mediterranean. It was a phenomenon of frontier regions, above all. The Byzantine–Seljuq frontier region saw much crossing of boundaries, not just military, as raiding parties of ghāzīs and akritai roamed the open spaces of Anatolia, but religious crossing occurred too, well represented by the Gabras family; this was a noble Greek family, several of whose members reappear as Muslims under Turkish dominion.8 In what are now Syria and Lebanon, the shading between communities remained grey, at least within the different religions: the Maronites and some Armenians accepted the pope’s authority, even though their theological differences from Rome might have made a papal courtier uneasy. And in Syria sundry religious groups persisted that retained elements of pre-Islamic beliefs; some, like the Alawites and Druze, saw and still see themselves as true Muslims, but others, deeper into the interior, owed more to Zoroastrian and pagan beliefs, notably the Mandaeans, the Yazidis, and the elusive, and very possibly mythical, planet-worshipping Sabeans, who may simply be a misrepresentation of one of these groups.9 In eleventh- and twelfth-century Egypt, the political ascendancy of the Shīʿah Fatimids could only be sustained by tolerance towards the Sunni majority, not to mention the substantial Coptic and Jewish population. Rome too was a frontier region in that period, since to the south there lay extensive areas inhabited by Christians owing religious allegiance to Constantinople, even if in parts of Apulia and across the water in Dalmatia they followed a Latin liturgy. Southern Italy became the home to a Uniate liturgy, using Greek but acknowledging papal supremacy, that still survives in the monastery of Grottaferrata, at the very gates of Rome, founded by Nilus of Rossano at the start of the eleventh century. For the city of the popes lay not at the centre of the Catholic world but at its southern edge, even though it also lay at the centre of the greatly fragmented Christian oikoumené if one counted in Byzantium and the Christians of the Islamic Mediterranean.10
The important question is how this changed—how the indeterminate boundaries turned into walls. Here we are talking not just of lines on the map (as places such as Sicily became predominantly Latin Christian rather than Greek Christian) but of walls between the different communities in places where they coexisted side by side, as they did in reconquista Spain and in Norman Sicily. We can observe the crystallization of the religious groups into self-confident communities led by literate elites and wedded to codes of law embodied in the Talmud, in the evolving system of canon law, and in Muslim ḥadīths and fatwas. Among the Spanish Jews, for instance, the study of the Talmud seems to have developed in the tenth and eleventh centuries, thanks to the patronage of Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut, the courtier of the caliph of Córdoba, and Samuel ibn Naghrīla (Shemuel ha-Nagid), the vizier of the Berber king of Granada. The great revival of legal studies at Bologna and other Italian centres brought into existence codes of canon law built upon the Decretum of Gratian.11 Increasing self-confidence was reflected in the explicit antagonism between and within the three religions: Latin Christian critiques of not just Judaism but of Greek Orthodoxy; Greek Orthodox critiques of Latin and Armenian Christianity (sometimes for being too ‘Jewish’—as shown by the use of unleavened bread in the Mass!); sharp words from the eleventh-century Spanish Muslim ibn Ḥazm about Judaism, including accusations that Jews were secretly condemning Islamic beliefs; and, by the late twelfth century, heresy-hunting within the Latin Christian communities of the Mediterranean, particularly against the Cathars of Languedoc and Italy, who were themselves influenced by Byzantine heretical groups such as the Bogomils and beyond that by pre-Islamic religions of the Middle East. (The recently revived argument that the Cathars were a fantasy of the Catholic imagination, and particularly of the early Inquisition, ignores the survival of Cathar and Bogomil texts in Western Europe, in the former case strongly dualistic).12
In the Islamic world the increasingly sharp boundaries can be seen most clearly in the Maghrib and al-Andalus. The imposition of strict Sunni orthodoxy by the Almoravids in the eleventh century marks the final stage in the Islamization of the Berbers of Morocco, and an important stage in the Islamization of Berber tribes in the western Sahara. But the tribal nature of this process is revealed by the arrival of a radical challenge from the Almohad movement, encompassing Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and parts of southern Spain, which seized control of the Almoravid capital at Marrakesh in the mid-twelfth century and imposed a Berber form of Islam (with prayers in Berber, as among the Barghawata), with a prophetic leader (establishing a new caliphate), and with a radical theology that proclaimed a return to the pristine purity of early Islam. Significantly, the Almohads had some difficulty with the concept of toleration for the Peoples of the Book, which has been maintained by their Almoravid predecessors, though with far greater strictness concerning the subordination of Christians and Jews. Although Almohad policy towards Jews and Christians varied from place to place and decade to decade, the Almohads presided over the extinction of Latin Christianity in the Maghrib and over the suppression of Jewish communities in parts of Spain and North Africa. In essence, they saw their system of beliefs as universal, and there was no room in them for the other Abrahamic faiths, nor indeed for Sunni Muslims.13 Practical politics and underground resistance, especially in al-Andalus, rendered these ideals impossible to achieve; but the battle lines had been drawn. Already with the coming of the Almoravids, and the deportation of many Andalusi Christians to Fez (or the flight of Christians and Jews northwards to Toledo and Burgos), the struggle for control of the Iberian peninsula had mutated from a contest among many petty kings, Muslim and Christian, who were skilled at making alliances across the religious boundaries, into a Christian crusade against a Muslim jihad.
The boundaries also became more visible in the eastern Mediterranean as the crusading movement absorbed the energies of western Christendom from the late eleventh century onwards. While the establishment of Christian crusader states in what are now parts of Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Jordan was initially seen from Cairo, and to some extent from Constantinople, as another irritating barbarian invasion, the crusader occupation of Jerusalem gradually generated an Islamic response, particularly under the late twelfth-century Kurdish leader Saladin. His unification of Syria with Egypt meant that the Latin kings of Jerusalem could no longer play off one Muslim neighbour against another. The shaykh of Shayzar, Usāmah ibn Munqidh, had hobnobbed with Frankish nobles, wryly observed the primitive medicine of his Christian neighbours, and was allowed to worship on the Temple Mount/Ḥaram ash-Sharīf. He saw the Franks as brave but crude neighbours, a source of amusement more than hostility. By the time of Saladin the Haram mosques, converted into churches following the crusader conquest in 1099, had become the focus of a holy war for the recovery of what Muslims were reminded was their third holiest site.14
Two characteristics of this confrontation need to be emphasized. The Christian west was profoundly ignorant about Muslim beliefs; the translation of the Quran commissioned by Abbot Peter of Cluny in the middle of the twelfth century went under the unflattering title ‘Law of Mahumet the pseudo-prophet’, and was intended as a denunciation of Islamic beliefs. In many ways this ignorance persisted well into the eighteenth century. This did not, of course, preclude an interest in Arabic scientific works, or Greek works that were accessible (in Toledo and elsewhere) in Arabic translation, and this interest could extend to works of philosophy that had important religious implications, by Avicenna, Averroes, or the unidentified Avicebron (in fact the Spanish Jew ibn Gabirol). A meeting of minds was possible when contemplating questions such as how to prove the existence of God, where Thomas Aquinas could draw on Averroes and Maimonides, or in mystical circles where Ramon Llull could make use of Sufi contemplatives and where Abraham Abulafia’s Kabbalah reveals a knowledge of Christianity and Islam that one might expect from someone born in Zaragoza in 1240.15 On the ground, though, confusion persisted as to the status of Islam: a pagan cult built around the worship of Apollo and other gods (as in The Song of Roland)? Or a wild heresy, given the reverence shown to Jesus and Mary, ʿĪsā and Maryam? The general lack of curiosity also pervaded the merchant communities from Genoa, Pisa, Venice, and eventually Barcelona that gained a foothold in ports along the coasts of the Levant and the Maghrib.
There were, of course, some exceptions. A disputation recorded in 1286 between the Genoese merchant Ingheto Contardo and a Jew, which took place in Majorca, reveals a friendliness and sympathy between the two sides that was almost certainly far more widespread than hostile tracts denouncing the religious beliefs of the other side would suggest.16 Tolerant attitudes are also visible in the works of Ramon Llull (1232–1316). Llull was unusually well informed and mild-mannered about Islam and Judaism; he was born in Majorca in 1232, very soon after the Christian conquest, and died in 1316, by which time the Muslim population of the island had fallen considerably. But he was regarded in his day as an enthusiastic eccentric, and even investigated for wrong belief. However, Llull’s handbook on how merchants could engage in conversations about religion with Muslims, with a view to converting them, had no known users—and just as well, because public condemnation of Islam would only lead to expulsion or even execution. In his Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men he made plain his belief that Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worshipped the same God.17 But he was insisting on this at a time when this was an unfamiliar idea—even Jews could find themselves branded as devil-worshippers, though this, admittedly, was not a general view. The hardening of attitudes in the late Middle Ages can also be observed in his native Majorca. There, at the end of the thirteenth century, the king of Aragon set aside an area of the capital city as a walled reserve in which Jews would be compelled to live. Although it was quite a spacious area, this segregation—the first example in a Mediterranean Christian kingdom—enhanced the view of the Jews as alien others whose presence, unless carefully controlled, might contaminate society.18 No such act was performed for the Majorcan Muslims, but as far as is known they were not permitted a mosque and their numbers were in steep decline; and a few years earlier, in 1287, the entire population of Minorca, inhabited solely by Muslims, was sold into slavery by the Aragonese king. A hardening of attitudes can also be observed in Sicily and southern Italy. Conflict between Christians, including newly arrived ‘Lombards’ from mainland Italy, and Sicilian Muslims had been ignited following the death of King Roger II in 1154; he had tried hard to keep the peace between the Muslim and Greek communities who still constituted the vast majority of the island’s population a hundred years after the Norman conquest of Sicily had begun.19 By the early thirteenth century the Muslims had established an autonomous enclave in western Sicily and were in rebellion against the Crown. Frederick II crushed the rebellion and deported the entire Muslim population of Sicily to Lucera in southern Italy, over a period of years. Far from seeking to establish a Muslim foothold in southern Italy, Frederick sought to isolate the Lucerans from the Islamic world and, while his relations with the papacy remained equable, he encouraged Christian missions to persuade them to turn Christian. But he also valued them as soldiers and took pleasure in their dances and music; it was an ambiguous relationship, and they came to be treated as the ruler’s servi, a term that (as when it was applied to Jews) varied in its meaning, but could be interpreted to mean ‘slaves’ when it was convenient to do so. In 1300 all the Luceran Saracens were sold as slaves to private buyers. The current king, Charles II of Naples, needed the money to finance his war for the reconquest of Sicily, which he had lost to the Aragonese; and he also detested the practices of ‘Belial’ that his courtiers had detected among the Muslims of Lucera. Religious identity and personal freedom or unfreedom were closely tied together. It is no surprise to find that the same king also unleashed a vigorous campaign against the Jews, apparently on the basis of the blood libel alleging that Jews used the blood of Christian boys in their Passover unleavened bread. During the 1290s it was difficult to live as a Jew in southern Italy, particularly in Apulia, and groups of neofiti came into being, converts to Christianity who maintained Jewish practices in secret. Not just people underwent conversion: synagogues, such as the one in Trani now known as Santa Maria Scolanova (i.e. ‘the new synagogue’), were converted into churches.20
The stiffening of the boundaries can also be observed in Iberia, even though this was a region in which all three religions continued to coexist until the end of the fifteenth century, and in the case of Islam even into the sixteenth century. Rulers in Aragon, Castile, and the kingdoms of Navarre and Portugal adopted a pragmatic view of the presence of non-Christians, but also perpetuated a policy of toleration that was deeply rooted in Iberian history (and no doubt owed its existence to the toleration practised in al-Andalus). The Jews and Christians of al-Andalus had been treated as dhimmīs, but not, until the coming of the Almoravids, according to the strictest interpretation of dhimmitude; by comparison, the Jews and mudéjars (subject Muslims) of the Christian kingdoms were treated as the king’s servi, as a literal part of the ‘Royal Treasure’, and like dhimmīs they paid a tax (that of the Muslims of Aragon was known as the peyta) and were in theory denied the chance to exercise authority over Christians.21 Muslims played a significant role in the armies of Castile and Aragon, while Jews, some of whom also served as soldiers (though more rarely), functioned as royal tax collectors—members of families such as ibn Yaḥya and Benveniste in Aragon-Catalonia, and Abulafia in Castile. The rewards could even include permission to build a substantial synagogue, as can be seen in the surviving case of Don Samuel Abulafia’s sumptuous Tránsito synagogue built in the 1350s, probably to compensate the Jews for damage to their synagogues from riots that took place during the Black Death. But it was a precarious existence: Don Samuel was accused of peculation by his possibly psychotic boss King Pedro the Cruel and put to death in 1360. The same Don Pedro was keen to support allies in the faction-ridden Muslim kingdom of Granada, of which more in a moment, and was criticized both for appearing in public in Arab robes and, inevitably, for his reliance on a Jewish treasurer. What the Tránsito synagogue reveals is that the relationship between the religions was triangular: the stucco decoration, contemporary with that of Pedro’s Alcázar in Seville and parts of the Alhambra, is the work of mudéjar craftsmen, and it is adorned with inscriptions both in Hebrew and in Arabic.22 As late as 1400 Jews continued to favour Islamic styles of architecture, as in the synagogue at Segovia (which also survives); this style apparently became a badge of identity, as did the continuing knowledge of Arabic, which could be harnessed in translation work. Alongside these still quite Arabized Jews we can count the Mozarabs of Toledo, an extraordinary community of Arabic-speaking Christians, who retained a separate identity and their own parish structure following the conquest of the city by the Christians in 1085, and whose distinctive liturgy and music survives to this day in Toledo cathedral.23 Further evidence for the survival of some degree of mutual toleration can be found in the persistence of the mudéjar communities that could be found across Iberia—by the late fifteenth century this even applied to parts of northern Spain remote from the Mediterranean, as they dispersed northwards out of the conquered south.
One Iberian kingdom has barely been mentioned so far, contrary to the romantic view disseminated by tour guides in the Alhambra; Nasrid Granada, the Muslim kingdom that survived from 1250 to 1492, was not a haven of toleration for the three Abrahamic religions. Its Christian population was very small, as a result of the suppression of Christianity in the Almohad realms out of which the Nasrids carved their dominion. They were not Almohads at all, but strict Sunni Muslims following the Malikite interpretation of Islamic law. They did rule over a Jewish population, but that was much smaller than it had been in the eleventh-century kingdom of Granada, under the rule of the Berber Zirid dynasty; at that time Lucena and Granada itself had had large Jewish populations. As home to many Andalusian Muslims who had been displaced by the Christian conquest of other parts of southern Spain, Granada was marked by a strong sense of its Islamic identity, amply recorded on the walls of the Alhambra palaces.24 Thus a sharp line divided Christian Spain, even while it contained a large Jewish and Muslim population, from the almost exclusively Muslim kingdom of Granada. This line became sharper after the conquest of Granada by Ferdinand and Isabella at the start of 1492: although they tolerated the practice of Islam for several years, rebellion led to its suppression in 1502–3, throughout the lands ruled by Castile (but in Aragon not until 1525).25 And this coincided with the decision by these monarchs to expel all professing Jews from Castile, Aragon, Sicily, and Sardinia in 1492.
Here again the lines lie not exactly where one might expect. This decision, which had such implications for the religious map of the Mediterranean, was the result of the breaking down of barriers between Judaism and Christianity, as much as it was the result of the insistence on creating a new barrier. For in the aftermath of the anti-Jewish pogroms that broke out across Spain in 1391, large numbers of New Christians (conversos, Marranos) found themselves suspended between their old and their new religion, often ignorant about Christianity and unable for emotional reasons, or because they were indeed secret Jews, to abandon Jewish norms—dietary laws, the observance of festivals, circumcision, and so on.26 Some conversos took comfort in the advice of Maimonides, itself based on the Muslim doctrine of taqiyya, that concealment of one’s religion in time of adversity was acceptable. The expulsion of 1492 was an attempt, encouraged by the Inquisition, to remove professing Jews from society so that the converts and their descendants would not be drawn back to Judaism, as indeed happened, and continued to happen for centuries—there was something of a revival of crypto-Judaism in seventeenth-century Majorca, for instance.27
Yet one effect of the expulsion was to scatter the Sephardim across the Mediterranean (the Hebrew term Sephardim, ‘Spaniards’, is used here in its proper sense: Jews of Iberian origin or descent).28 They coexisted with Andalusi Muslims in Fez and Tunis, often sharing the use of Spanish and remembering the words of long ballads about Moors and Christians. They became so dominant in the Jewish communities of Italy, Greece, and Turkey that in many communities the Sephardim imposed their rituals as well as their language. One feature that they preserved from Spain was their multiple identity: Jewish merchants might move between the ports of the Ottoman world or Italy as Jews, especially after the duke of Tuscany gave them special privileges in his new commercial centre at Livorno; when they set foot in Iberia they were ‘Portuguese’, wary of the Inquisition but also well aware of how to pass themselves off as good Catholics. By comparison, the position of the Muslims who remained in Spain (very many in the kingdom of Valencia) seemed less difficult: in some areas no effort was made to ensure that the Moriscos, as they came to be known, actually practised or knew about Christianity, even though their contact with the Muslim world became weaker and their knowledge of Islamic law was in steep decline by 1500. Their expulsion in 1609–14, following suspicions about their allegiance at a time of Spanish–Turkish conflict, made no allowance for the fact that one could not generalize: some Moriscos, not least those who became priests, were indeed convinced Christians, and even without government orders to prohibit ‘Moorish dancing’ and Muslim dress, many had assimilated quite readily into the dominant Christian culture. So, not surprisingly, they, like the Sephardim and earlier Andalusi refugees, led a life somewhat apart from the indigenous inhabitants of the north African towns where they settled.29 They, like the Sephardim, insisted on their superior culture and breeding. Spain had seeded the Mediterranean with its own inhabitants, even if it was not until very modern times that the mother land thought of taking them back (the Spanish government issued a decree permitting all true Sephardim to claim Spanish citizenship in 2012; unsurprisingly it has not issued a similar invitation to those of Morisco descent).
A political boundary divided Christendom and Islam through the middle of the Mediterranean by the end of the sixteenth century, as Turks and Spaniards established their areas of influence. The Ottoman reach extended as far as the Barbary states along the coast of north Africa, even if their rulers adopted decidedly independent policies; but along the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean the Ottomans ruled over Christians and Jews, and interpreted the dhimmī regulations lightly enough to permit these communities to flourish, especially in the major trading cities such as Salonika and Izmir (Smyrna). Following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the Ottomans congratulated themselves on their acquisition of a large number of Jewish artisans and merchants, even if they declined to make use of one of the most impressive skills the Sephardim brought to Turkey: the art of printing. Muslims were a familiar sight on the streets of Marseilles, Naples, Palermo, and other cities in the Christian Mediterranean, but mainly as slaves—an exception must be made for the Muslim occupation of Toulon, fully countenanced by Francis I of France, as an enthusiastic ally of the Ottomans, in 1543–4.30 Raiding the coast for slaves became a profitable sport enjoyed by Barbary corsairs and by Christian pirates such as the Knights of St John (the Hospitallers), based in Malta; the great hope was to capture people of consequence or wealth, who could afford a big ransom. What we do not see is an engagement of cultures. In the sixteenth century some fragments of al-Idrisi’s world geography, written in Arabic for Roger II of Sicily in 1154, were at last published in Latin translation. But curiosity about Islam remained muted in Western Europe, even at a time when great swathes of Eastern Europe lay under the domination of Muslim emperors. In the Islamic world, there were some moments when religious interactions occurred: the bizarre career of the self-proclaimed Messiah Shabbetai Ẓevi, beginning in seventeenth-century Izmir, reveals interesting interaction between Zevi and Protestant merchants with whom he had contact as a young man.31 We hear of a lively disputation in eighteenth-century Tiberias between Rabbi Ḥaim Abulafia, who helped refound the city, and a Christian respondent.32 All this does not add up to much: the various communities inhabited their distinct worlds, and the millet system encouraged that. Western European curiosity about eastern religions (in the plural) was a phenomenon of the eighteenth century and after, and was more closely linked to the extension of British influence in India than to the Mediterranean. Napoleon was much more interested in the Egypt of the Pharaohs than in the Egypt of the caliphs, sultans, and Mamluks, both for geopolitical reasons and as a way of promoting his own imperial vision.
Yet what was created in this period was a series of port cities where different communities did manage to coexist; and in the nineteenth century, following the opening of the Suez Canal, this coexistence reached its most impressive scale in Alexandria, a city that had almost always been host to a mixed population, first of Greeks, Jews, and Egyptians, and now of Greeks, Jews, Copts, Italians, Turks, Lebanese, Maltese, and much else. Much the same can be said of Beirut, Izmir, Salonika, and a number of other key points on the Mediterranean shores of the Ottoman Empire; and of Trieste, the sole Mediterranean port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is not the place to describe the disintegration of this world of coexistence—a long, slow, painful process, marked by savagery (at Izmir in 1922, at Salonika in 1943) or at least dispossession (at Jaffa in 1948, at Alexandria in 1956).33 One of the most remarkable features of the Mediterranean since the mid-twentieth century has been the disappearance of Jewish communities from almost the entire Mediterranean apart from the place where they have become concentrated, the State of Israel (and, increasingly, and very controversially, the Palestinian territories next door); the only other area of dense Jewish population around the sea is southern France. One should not underestimate the significance of the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbours within the wider confrontation that took place between the western world and the allies of the Soviet Union; equally one should not overestimate the religious dimension, despite some ugly words about Jews and Judaism (as in the works of Quṭb and other revolutionary figures, or anti-Semitic cartoons in the Arab press). But the terms of engagement have changed: secular Arab governments in Gaza and Libya have been swept aside; the future of Syria is uncertain, but once again it may not lie in the hands of the nationalist secularists—the substantial Christian population of Syria is ebbing away, sometimes under brutal assault by a self-proclaimed caliphate; and Christianity has already declined steeply in the lands that may or may not some day become the State of Palestine. Even in Turkey and Morocco moderate Islamic parties have taken power, while Algeria, whose military had resisted Islamist rivals, faces a deadly threat from al-Qaeda. Tunisia, on the other hand, has achieved greater stability, with the election of a non-Islamist government and a reduction in political tension. The Mediterranean looks more fragmented than ever, and religion has become a more important factor in its politics than it was throughout the twentieth century, when nationalist and pan-Arab slogans were proclaimed throughout the Arab world, and when Marxism rather than Islam was the creed of Arab political leaders, even if it was sometimes transmuted into a strange potpourri (as with Colonel Ghaddafi’s ‘Green Book’ in Libya).
And yet—the ultimate irony—on the facing shores Christianity has lost its hold over more and more of the European population, while many Jews declare their Jewish identity to be cultural (whatever that means) rather than religious. The Mediterranean has ceased to be a place of encounter, sometimes peaceful, sometimes violent, between adherents of the three Abrahamic faiths; it is now one of several meeting-points between modern secular society and a revived and assertive Islam.
1 Goldstein 2009; Sand 2009; also Wexler 2009.
3 Severus of Minorca 1996.
5 Encyclopedia of Islam (2nd edn), ‘Barghawata’; cf. Iskander 2007.
6 On this see Wexler 2009.
9 Chwolson 1856; cf. Hjärpe 1972.
12 I thus reject Moore 2012, and other works in that vein; see instead Barber 2013.
13 Fromherz 2010; for a nuanced view of Almohad relations with Jews and Christians, see ‘Religious Minorities under the Almohads’, special issue of The Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies, 2 (2) (2010).
15 Urvoy 1980; Hames 2000; Hames 2007.
17 Ramon Llull, Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men, in Bonner 1993.
19 Abulafia 1990; Abulafia 2004a.
21 Abulafia, 2004b; Abulafia 2000.
28 The regrettable and ignorant practice in modern Israel and elsewhere of calling all Mizraḥi, i.e. ‘eastern’, Jews Sephardim derives in part from the similarities between the liturgy of the Spanish Jews and those of Babylonia and other eastern lands. There were many true Sephardim in the Levant and even further east, with a strong sense of their identity, but that does not make all eastern Jews Sephardim; unfortunately it has not stopped them assuming Spanish descent.
29 García-Arenal 2003; Harvey 2003.