hybridity 347
an interpreter, missionary, or broker, appear in every era of the Mediterranean’s
history, because no lingua franca ever prevailed (Mallette, this volume). Bilingual or
multilingual people, as well as those whose specialty was trade or religion and not
necessarily any particular item of commerce or belief, thrived in occupations where
being a hybrid of some type and having an open mind were assets.
“Eclecticism” merits brief notice because it is easy to confuse with hybridity and
syncretism. Some people have eclectic tastes and collect things, styles, and habits from
other people and cultures, a kind of personal bricolage. Homogenous and eclectic are
the contrasts here, and along that spectrum hybridity intersects at the point where we
cross from people to tastes and things. For example, some aspects of Mediterranean
cuisine become eclectic where wealth and fashion make such behaviors possible—
consider the banquets of imperial Rome. Buildings in medieval Granada, early modern
Istanbul, and modern Tunis testify to eclectic architectural styles. A person is not
made up of eclectic parts like Frankenstein’s creature, not even in Sicily where so
many traditions were available to contribute (see also Hilsdale, this volume).
Cosmopolitanism raises two issues about hybridity. If we define cosmopolitanism
as a set of urban and urbane beliefs, a positive stance toward what we now label mul-
ticulturalism, then it becomes a superhybridity, building multiple rich traditions
(Ben-Yehoyada, this volume). A cosmopolitan person may be a “pure” type (ethnicity,
religion, gender) but has acquired rather than inherited traits drawing on many cul-
tures. Such a person is likely to be multilingual, always an asset in a Mediterranean
world with so many languages. If there is any truth to these assertions, then such a
person is likely to live in a cosmopolitan city (not all are), where strangers are likely to
meet, where one rubs up against and may acquire fresh habits and tastes. The poet
Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933) wrote elegant classicizing Greek verse in an English-
administered Egyptian port with strong Ottoman and Coptic influences. Cavafy was
a very rooted cosmopolitan; he was born and died in the same city. Alexandria had
been a multicultural city since its founding, and there was always a shifting cast of such
places across the centuries of Mediterranean history, from the great slave emporium
on Delos to classical Marseilles to modern Beirut. Many of the intervening centuries
have cities that were truly cosmopolitan; consider Caffa in the fourteenth century,
Smyrna in the seventeenth, Odessa (officially founded in 1796) in the nineteenth, and
Tel Aviv (founded in 1909) in the twentieth. What do these cities have to do with
hybridity? It may seem trite to observe that cities breed hybrids, but they do. They are
places where purity can be set aside (temporarily or not), though at times this would
be hard to do in “pure” phases like crusader Jerusalem. Before modern advances in
public health, cities ordinarily relied on steady migration from their healthier country-
sides to sustain population numbers. Some cities’ architecture even made them look
like hybrids—witness the Ottoman and Mamluk styles in Renaissance Venice. As the
examples veer into culture we should draw back and reiterate that the emphasis here
is on people rather than places or things, and so we will put cosmopolitanism into the
background of our concerns—but it is there.
The context for these people is the Mediterranean, and we will postpone consider-
ing whether or not this part of the planet has a distinctive hybridity making it a useful
category to explore. If it is accurate to describe the Minoan civilization on Bronze-
Age Crete as syncretic and perhaps its people as hybrids, then the story of Mediterranean
hybridity may go back 4000 years. What we know from Horden and Purcell (2000)