346 steven a. epstein
in the abstract the antithesis of hybridity and purity creates a spectrum where we
may find and analyze the generations of humanity in the Mediterranean.
“Syncretism” evokes a process usually limited to cultural and religious history. It
presumes a fusion or mixing of customs or beliefs that produce something new, draw-
ing on both antecedents. For example, take the famous tombs of the patriarchs at
Hebron. The graves of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have profound but different mean-
ings to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Religious observances have taken place at these
tombs for centuries and some have described the site as a place of religious syncretism,
or better, a place of spatial convergence. But in fact we are observing a religious syn-
chronicity or coincidence there, occurring on the same spot, but still with rigorously-
separated beliefs and traditions. In Jerusalem the spatial distances between the creedal
holy spots (Dome of the Rock Mosque, Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Wailing
Wall) make this clearer. Despite these proximities, mutual ignorance among Jews,
Christians, and Muslims in the Mediterranean in all periods is a durable fact of its
culture and may even define the region as the place of mutual incomprehensibility
(compare, though, Couroucli, this volume). What can it mean when an early modern
archbishop of Corfu reports that Muslims “often” baptize their children to protect
them from leprosy (Dursteler, 2011: 80)? This cultural practice, if reliably recounted,
is evidence for religious confusion rather than syncretism of faith.
Stuart Schwartz (2008: 55, 174–175) has argued that the conversos (Jewish con-
verts to Christianity, voluntary or forced) of early modern Spain over the generations
practiced a syncretic Christianity (see also Catlos, this volume). They kept a rigorous
monotheism (as opposed to trinitarianism) and many apparently clung to the belief
that following the law of Moses was as acceptable a path to salvation as believing in
Jesus, and hence all sincere monotheists might be saved. In some ways the faith of the
New Christians, subject to surveillance and persecution even when it was sincerely
held, may be a rare example of true religious syncretism. Schwartz located genuine
hybrid religions, an amalgam of indigenous and Christian beliefs, not in the
Mediterranean but in the New World (though naturally in the colonies of Mediterranean
powers, with Portugal and France honorary members).
It might be argued that certain forms of Portuguese and Spanish music do fuse
Arabic and other melodies into something truly new, syncretic, and hybrid. The
Ladino language, emerging from a fusion of Castilian and Hebrew in late medieval
Iberia, eventually spread to the Ottoman lands in the eastern Mediterranean as a
result of the expulsion of its speakers from Spain. This language, subsequently bor-
rowing words from Greek and Turkish, became a vibrant cultural vehicle in places like
Salonika, where by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it developed a published
literature and school curricula. In this case the speakers of the language seem to have
preserved more ethnic homogeneity than their hybridized or syncretic language. For
all the ethnic mixing and ethnogenesis occurring in the Mediterranean, it is interest-
ing that hybrid languages and even pidgin dialects are so rare. Hence for our purposes
we will limit syncretism to cultural outcomes and reserve hybridity for people.
“Creole” refers to both categories but may represent a different phenomenon than we
find in the Mediterranean. Despite Fernand Braudel (1972–3; 224–230), we do not
conclude that the Caribbean creolism is an offspring of the Mediterranean, since we
now know much more about its African and Native American roots. Syncretism has
yet to attract as much scholarly attention as hybridity. Certain professions like being