hybridity 355
This framework imposes a kind of periodization on our subject, since at least they
have beginnings at various points in time. As cultural phenomena they did not remain
pure types for very long, if they ever were. All along the people believing these ideas
were having contacts and children with strangers. People’s identities were wrapped up
in practices like renouncing wine or believing it could become the blood of one’s
savior. Because of sex we have individual hybrids; because of strong cultural traditions
it would be a long time before a Christian could both renounce the wine and believe
in the blood.
Jerusalem is a catch-all label for the cumulative effects of the Abrahamic religions
as they emerged from a tiny corner of the eastern Mediterranean to encompassing all
its shores (and well beyond). Its values go back into the deep past and may reflect
something of the harsh circumstances and struggle to survive that the eastern dry
climate imposed on its peoples. But there is no need to resort to a crude environmen-
tal determinism to find Jerusalem’s central value—purity in the spirit, to know and to
be like God. This summons to purity has a complex relationship with hybridity. On
the one hand purity is defiled by mixture, and the pure can be counted on to have
many rules on how to separate themselves from the others, however defined. The
pure can define themselves as chosen and have more rules about how to join their
number, if indeed one can. On the other hand this claim to purity can be so strong as
to obliterate all the other petty distinctions defining hybridity. At its strongest, purity
can absolutely define a new, universal identity, combining it with a belief in a mono-
genesis theory of human origins and a certainty that everyone outside the privileged
circle of the pure is lost and damned.
Jerusalem’s significance to the long history of Mediterranean hybridity is itself a
vast topic. As the cynosure of the Abrahamic faiths, the city anchors Islam to the sea
as securely as Judaism and Christianity. Consider one of the sea’s iconic places, the
Dome of the Rock mosque, built in the 690 s on the order of the caliph Abd al-Malik,
and restored in the sixteenth century. The rock in question, bearing the mark of the
Prophet Muhammad’s horse as they ascended to Paradise, is also the traditional site
of Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac. Over the centuries when this building was not a
functioning Islamic holy place, it served a variety of other purposes, including being
a Templar church during the crusader period. Visiting this building, and going down
to the Rock and being allowed to touch it, has often been impossible for some
Mediterranean people. The multiple significances of the Rock do not make it or
the mosque hybrid, and it has the effect on visitors of reminding them of purity and
the boundary makers.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have different stances toward hybridity. Very
crudely, the ancient Hebrews strongly deprecated hybridity and traced descent from
a common ancestor, yet their holy books are filled with stories of joiners and min-
gling. The Christian message promised salvation to all believers, depreciating many (if
not all) of the old boundaries. Islam too soon became a universalizing faith, stressing
common descent at the Arab core but offering Paradise to all believers no matter what
their condition. All three faiths drew the line at any compromise with people defined
as pagan idolaters—no hybridity with them! (Certainly a problem for the values
of Athens.) These creeds became global by the dawn of modernity. Purity may be a
universal human value across the planet. There may no longer be any distinctly
Mediterranean quality to these beliefs. Yet in their origins and early days, before the