hybridity 353
extreme case of Venetian colonial fathers on Crete in the fourteenth century, even the
children they had with slaves followed their own status, and not the venerable rule
common across the Mediterranean since antiquity (and in Roman law) that the status
of the child followed the condition of the mother. Hybridity tended to follow and to
bolster the claims of patriarchy, another venerable Mediterranean tradition from the
beginning to the present.
As if hybridity were not complicated enough, we must pause to consider how it
might be related to racism. The mixed child has inherited traits from the parents and
in turn can pass these down to offspring. Racism may be simply defined as an ideology
valuing or devaluing people on the basis of traits called, however erroneously, innate
or inheritable. In other words, racism is about the parts of a mixed being that cannot
be changed, like the leopard’s spots, not in theory those subject to human choice, like
a faith. Modern racism seems to be a global phenomenon where the boundary makers
and bogus scientists have drawn lines on the basis of inherited traits like skin color and
ethnic markers, leaving languages and creeds to one side as human traits again in
theory cultural and hence not physically inherited from parents. Oddly, social class has
not interested the students of hybridity, who could if they wanted make some argu-
ments about a middle group, in some sense a hybrid of rich and poor.
Instead, we must raise a harder issue: is the Mediterranean a special breeding
ground for racist beliefs, more so than other parts of the planet? If so, this will have
profound consequences for the hybrid. Benjamin Isaac (2004) has argued persua-
sively for the origins of Western racism in the ancient Mediterranean world. Racism is
of course irrational and “races” seem at best bogus categories. The classical focus on
the connection between temperaments and physical traits, so clear in the science of
physiognomy, placed a special value on peoples who saw themselves as pure and
autochthonous types. The ancient Athenians believed they had always lived on their
own land, truly indigenous to the soil of Attica. Where such values prevailed, hostility
to strangers and foreigners could be especially strong, as it surely was in Athens. In
these and other cases, mixing with other types on a physical level produced degenera-
tion, just as commerce corrupted. Hybridity might occur out in the Athenian colonies
and possessions across the Mediterranean, but not at home where purity in theory
prevailed. This would be a familiar pattern across the millennia of Mediterranean
history.
The colonial experiments from the ancient world through the medieval experiences
of Genoese and Venetians in the Black Sea to the French and English in the modern
Levant, all behaved “out there” in ways often illegal or not tolerated “back home.”
Where these behaviors extended to having children, the hybrids appeared in an unwel-
coming environment, and would find a cool reception in their fathers’ places of ori-
gin. Crete’s history demonstrates many of these themes (McKee, 2000). The island
experienced a long period of Venetian rule (1211–1669), after being detached from
the Byzantine Empire. The Ottoman Turks ruled the island from 1669 to 1898,
when after a brief period of independence it joined Greece. The great population
exchanges between Greece and Turkey beginning in 1923 meant that the significant
Muslim minority left the island. Throughout most phases of its history the “indige-
nous” population mounted great and unsuccessful revolts against its colonial masters.
Under Venetian rule the island was a complex mix of two legally-defined ethnicities,
Latins and Greeks, plus a large and old Jewish community, and a growing number of