hybridity 349
peoples of the Abrahamic faiths, as Assmann (1997) explains. One strand of this
tradition concerns hybridity. Moses was born into a family of exiles, now slaves, into
a foreign culture. He was raised in such a way as to become an unwitting renegade to
the Hebrews, and he eventually became a great traitor to the Egyptians as well as a
hero to his own people. Moses as a person became a hybrid of Egyptian and later
Hebrew languages and practices. Numbers 12.1–16 records that Moses married an
Ethiopian or Cushite or Midianite woman (probably Zipporah), and his siblings
Aaron and Miriam objected, presumably on religious, ethnic, or racial grounds. The
significance of this story is that Moses was no stranger to mixed marriages and his
children would be hybrids. Yet in this case God stoutly defended Moses and punished
Miriam with leprosy for her criticism. Also, in the eyes of some boundary maker,
almost every marriage might be defined as mixed and the children hybrid.
The great unities of the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean provide many
examples of joiners, renegades, and acts of creative self-invention. Paul of Tarsus
(c. 5–67 ce), cited earlier for his great statement on universal Christian identity, was a
very complicated person. Laying claim to his identities as a Jew and a Roman citizen,
clearly multilingual and an indefatigable traveler and letter writer, a preacher and a
tentmaker, a rabbi and an apostle, a prisoner, exile, and seen as a renegade or traitor
by some—what aspect of hybridity does Paul’s life not illustrate, except perhaps in his
elusive family life? Being born again, as he frequently put it, was after all a kind of
serial identity never losing its connections to the previous iteration. His constant use
of the metaphor of adoption reminds us how Mediterranean cultures valued this cul-
tural practice by which anyone might become a son or daughter of a new parent and
obtain a new identity. Even Paul’s tragic death evokes the usual fate of those provok-
ing too strenuously the boundary makers of the day.
Anselm Turmeda (c. 1350–c. 1423) was born in Palma de Majorca and was a
Bologna-trained Franciscan (Boase, 1996–1997). The key event in his life occurred
sometime in the late 1380s or early 1390s when he traveled to Tunis with the intention
of converting to Islam. Several elements of his biography raise questions about hybridity.
His own reason for changing religions seems rooted in a developing belief when living
in Italy that Muhammad was actually the Holy Spirit mentioned in Christianity, which
he came to believe had drifted far from Jesus’ teaching. Raised in the Balearics, he had
known something about Islam since childhood, and as a Franciscan he certainly knew
his first faith. When he converted he changed his name to Abdullah al-Tarjuman, the
servant of God, interpreter. Turmeda was a bilingual (Arabic, Catalan) author (all of his
surviving works postdate his conversion), and a formidable multilinguist: Latin, Italian,
French, Castilian, and Hebrew. In Tunis he made a good living as an interpreter, and he
married and had children—presumably ethnic hybrids. Christians at Tunis, where there
was also by now a Franciscan convent, believed Turmeda converted because he wanted
to be married, but he could have left religious orders in Italy and done that. Something
more was at work in Turmeda’s spiritual crisis, though he will always seem to some
observers a duplicitous opportunist.
Turmeda wrote a self-serving autobiography, and a refutation of Christianity in
Arabic that revealed a profound understanding of the Quran and the Bible. He also
wrote a very original comic work, A Disputation with a Donkey, a learned debate
between a Franciscan and a donkey about the superiority of animals over people. This
donkey can speak, but was bound to lose because Jesus (no hybrid) chose to come to