348 steven a. epstein
is the venerable theme of the corrupting sea, itself a stance toward hybridity that views
human contacts and exchanges as ruining a pure simplicity by mixing, whether it be
through sex or trade in commodities or beliefs. Valuing autarchy and living hybridity
may seem incompatible practices, but history in the Mediterranean shows they easily
thrived together. A region of micro-regions and microclimates created by islands,
mountains, and weather patterns provides an ideal setting for a variety of types of
peoples needing to exchange things and ideas in order to survive, separated by the
boundary makers according to whatever values prevail at the moment. For these
authors, the Industrial Revolution marked the end of their distinctive Mediterranean.
David Abulafia (2011: 552–555) makes the easy-to-overlook point that the opening
of the Suez Canal in 1869 brought the Mediterranean into the global network of seas.
Jan Morris’ novel Last Letters from Hav (1989) imagines a city somewhat like Salonika
where a Chinese colony had existed since the Middle Ages. But in fact only with the
connections the canal forged did Chinese and other Asian peoples begin to establish
durable communities in Mediterranean cities. At some point in modern history the
specialness of the Mediterranean hybridity explored here will seem a not-very-distinctive
part of the mosaic globalization creates. In other words, the Mediterranean is now
part of a world system in the same way that the pre-modern Aegean forms part of its
story but also defines its distinctive hybridity.
In his letter to the Galatians (3.28) Paul famously proclaimed the universality of a
new faith that in some way erased the old lines between Jew and Greek, slave and free,
male and female. These dichotomies revealed social fissures along the lines of ethnic-
ity, language, personal status, and gender. And there were others. All such identities
could make a claim of purity that defined us, whoever we were, from our kin to a tribe
or “we people here in this place.” The closer we get to modern times and loyalties to
a state or some corporate alliance, some people’s travels, job, or preferences may
define them as transnational, as Rothman (2012) has proposed for the early modern
Levant, itself producing the vexed identity “Levantine.”
If contacts with strangers could in some sense defile “we people here,” then some
groups might collectively separate themselves from the mixers or sinners and flee,
perhaps into the desert like the Essenes around the Dead Sea at the time of Christ. As
an individual impulse, the hermit is an interesting test case for rejecting the possibility
of hybridity. Of course some successful hermits attracted followers, no matter how
deeply they retreated into the sandy wastes of Egypt at the beginnings of Christian
monasticism in the third century ce. Yet even these communities dedicated to group
purity renounced hybridity as they were invariably pro-celibate and increasingly
single-sex. We should expect Mediterranean societies, strongly valuing purity, to pro-
duce hermits of all types, even celebrated ones choosing vertical isolation on the top
of pillars in late ancient Syria or in caves up in the maritime Alps in medieval Liguria.
Where and when Mediterranean societies valued eremitism, hybrid people were likely
to stand out. Societies reverencing hermits but not joining them can hold on to the
value of purity while not always practicing it. They may produce hybrid children, a few
of whom may become hermits—the most successful of whom completely disappeared
from the historical record.
Let us consider some individual people whose lives illustrate some of the issues we
are exploring here. The prophet Moses, located sometime in the late second millen-
nium bce, became the subject of considerable cultural memory for Mediterranean