jews 403
who sought the local bulk goods of western Anatolia, much to the displeasure of the
Ottomans who preferred to preserve the region as a hinterland for the supply of
Istanbul (Goffman, 2002).
Also fanning out across the Mediterranean after 1492, and accompanying the
European global reconnaissance, were conversos, those baptized Jews of Iberia and
their descendants who had converted to Roman Catholicism. Since many of these
cristianos nuevos had been converted under duress, their identities could be con-
sidered suspect and ambiguous. However, this ambiguity assisted Ottoman
Sephardic merchants in their relationships with Europeans, who in their own
countries would not tolerate Jews. More importantly, it helped re-establish Jewish
communities in western Europe after the expulsions and massacres of the late
Middle Ages. Among these were “port Jews” of the Mediterranean and Atlantic,
so many of whom were descendants of conversos, and who lived under beneficial
conditions granted by the European powers that were both more favorable than
those conferred on other Jews and anticipated nineteenth-century Jewish emanci-
pation in Europe (Cesarani, 2002). It has even been suggested that the ambiguity
of such mixed identities might foreshadow the alienation and multiple identities
that characterize modernity (Faur, 1992).
After the sixteenth century, Ottoman Jewish decline paralleled the decline of the
empire, while at the same time massive demographic growth began among the Jewish
communities of Poland–Lithuania. With the worldwide dominance of European
imperialism, the Mediterranean lost its centrality in the global economy. Its Jewish
merchants, some of whom might do spectacularly well, represented one among many
elements of an eastern Mediterranean “Levantine culture” in which Italian, Greek,
French, Armenian, and other languages were used in commerce and spoken on the
street in addition to, and supplanting, the native Arabic. For Jews, the rise of modern
Jewish nationalism in the form of Zionism in central and eastern Europe returned
Jewish attention concretely to ancient Mediterranean sites, while the rise of Arab
nationalism accompanied a decline in many Mediterranean Jewish communities.
In the twentieth century, the re-establishment of a major Jewish presence in the
Mediterranean, followed by the creation of the State of Israel, initiated a
re-imagining of the Holy Land and the Mediterranean on the part of Jews. On the
ground, the working port of Haifa relegated Acre to the status of a “museum
port,” while Jaffa is now a part of Tel-Aviv’s urban sprawl, whose Mediterranean
character is more pronounced in cafes, nightclubs, and the beach than through
more venerable connections to the sea. Israel’s presence in the region, often
characterized by conflict and dissociation from its Arab and Muslim neighbors,
and the multi- cultural makeup of its society, does not permit easy imagining of
Israel as either a Middle-Eastern or European place. This conundrum has led
some Israelis to embrace a Mediterraneanism (yam tikhoniyut) that permits
conceptualizing their society and its space as “Mediterranean,” neither of east nor
west but encompassing both (Nocke, 2010). The Israeli novelist and writer Amos
Oz makes plain this latest of Mediterranean Jewish identities: “Today and most
probably tomorrow and the day after, Israelis are and will be a Mediterranean
people, with warm hearts and temperaments: hedonistic, life-loving and senti-
mental. This is not an ethnic caricature but an outline of a national profile, one
that is becoming clearer each day” (Oz, 1986–87: 13).