MAIMONIDES AND MEDITERRANEAN CULTURE 5
nerable to misuse.” As noted by Harris, “for many scholars Mediterra-
nean unity has meant... primarily or indeed exclusively cultural unity.”^15
These scholars, he says, were looking for “the basic homogeneity of
Mediterranean civilization,” a homogeneity the existence of which Har-
ris then proceeds to disprove.
From various angles scholars now question not only the existence of
enough unifying criteria for either the coastland or the deeper littoral
countries, but also the existence of criteria suffi cient to distinguish these
countries from others. Even those who continue to use the term “Medi-
terranean” do so with an acute awareness of its shortcomings. The Ara-
bist Gerhard Endress, for instance, seems to be addressing the above-
mentioned questions when he asserts that, in the Mediterranean world of
the Islamic middle ages, “Business interactions, the exchange of goods
and books, practical science and intellectual disputes, come together to
make a multi- faceted picture; a picture which is in no way that unifi ed,
but in which one can recognize many surprising aspects of unity.”^16 For
Rémi Brague, “The Mediterranean played a role only when there was a
single culture around its shores. This was achieved only with the Roman
empire.” Reluctant to abandon the concept altogether, however, Brague
counts the world of medieval Islam as an expansion (“une sortie”) of the
Mediterranean toward the Indian Ocean.^17
Regarding the place of the religious minorities in the Islamic world,
adherence to “Mediterraneanism” introduces yet another set of problems:
that of anachronistic value judgments. In his attempt to capture the place
of the Jewish community within the fabric of the wider Mediterranean
society, Goitein used the term “symbiosis,” which he borrowed from the
fi eld of biology, to illustrate the separate identity that Jews managed to
preserve within the dominant Muslim culture, while still being full par-
ticipants in it.^18 Subsequent discussions of this topic, however, tend to
highlight the comfortable, irenic aspects of symbiosis. This tendency is
particularly pronounced regarding Maimonides’ birthplace, al- Andalus
(Islamic Spain) where the relations between the religious communities are
(^15) Ibid., 26 (italics in the original). Cf. also Brague, Au moyen du Moyen Age, 240.
(^16) G. Endress, “Der Islam und die Einheit des mediterraneen Kulturraums in Mittelalter,” in
Claus Rozen, ed., Das Mittelmeer— die Wiege der europaeischen Kultur (Bonn, 1998),
270.
(^17) Brague,Au moyen du Moyen Age, 240– 41. Brague’s perception of the Mediterranean
informs also S. Guguenheim, Aristote au mont Saint- Michel: Les racines greques de l’Eu-
rope chrétienne (Paris, 2008), 170– 72.
(^18) S. D. Goitein, Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts Through the Ages (New York, 1964), 11,
- Goitein’s magisterial Mediterranean Society dealt mostly with social and economic
aspects of this symbiosis, and less with the history of ideas; cf. S. M. Wasserstrom, Between
Muslim and Jew: the Problem of Symbiosis under Early Islam (Princeton, 1995), 3– 12.