ethno-religious minorities 363
was religiously inclusive. These societies claimed to recognize no formal hierarchy of
membership based on communal identity and advocated the equality of all citizens
under a single legal regime, which was presented as or assumed to be, if not secular,
then self-evidently superior.
A significant body of scholarship has addressed the status and situation of ethno-
religious minorities in the Mediterranean, although this has tended to focus on
particular regions, notably medieval “Spain” (for example, Castro, 1948; Sánchez-
Albornoz, 1956), or on specific religious groups, most notably, Jews (such as Goitein,
1967–1993; Cohen, 1994), and Copts (for example, Werthmuller, 2010), or proto-
national communities, such as Armenians (such as Dedayan, 2003). Common
characteristics that run through the earlier work include a tendency to idealize, or
Platonize ethno-religious identity, and to enunciate or reflect contemporary national
agendas. More self-critical, sophisticated and comparative work has been done on
minorities in medieval Iberia and Italy (for example, Nirenberg, 1996; Metcalfe,
2009), as well as on previously neglected “sub-groups,” such as Karaite Jews (such as
Rustow, 2008), but too often analyses have fallen back on arguments regarding the
supposed tolerance and intolerance of particular religious cultures or regimes, rather
than attempting to analyze the underlying dynamics of minority-majority relations
(as do, on the contrary, Catlos, 2002, and forthcoming; Glick, 1979; Guichard, 1977;
Nirenberg, 1996; and MacEvitt, 2008, for example).
Through late antiquity (to c. 600 Ce)At the beginning of the Common Era, the Mediterranean—the Latin Mare nostrum—
was a “Roman Lake,” with its islands, shorelines and habitable hinterlands under the
authority of the Empire (see also Purcell, this volume). And so it would remain for the
next 400 years. While the uniformity and cohesiveness of the Roman world should
not be exaggerated, the Empire did develop an ideology of a common citizenship that
overrode local and regional ethnic identities, and, in theory, made its citizens subject
to the same civil laws. They used the same languages for high culture and administra-
tion (Greek and Latin), and practiced the same vaguely-defined religion. There was a
clear conceptual distinction made between those within the Empire and those with-
out (“barbarians”) and, while regional ethnicities were certainly recognized, they did
not manifest as distinct estates, or castes within the world of citizenship. And whereas
religious practices and beliefs across the empire were not uniform, they were compat-
ible, thanks to the fact that Roman religion was folkloric and magical in orientation,
and lent itself easily to the syncretism and co-option of neighboring religions. And
because those neighboring religions had emerged from the same cultural ferment,
and were essentially all city-state-orientated municipal cults, featuring polytheistic
pantheons of idealized anthropomorphs, and originating in the same broad Hellenistic-
Mesopotamian traditions, Romans were able to accommodate the religions of most of
the peoples they conquered once even a thin veneer of Romanization had been
applied.
The notable exception to this was the Hebrew people, whose monotheistic, scriptural
religious orientation and dogmatic opposition to both polytheism and idolatry did not
lend itself to Romanization. This can be discerned also in the experiences of the early
Hebrews, who came to conceive of themselves as religiously- and ethnically-distinct from