Legendary Landscapes, Seas of Memories

Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 1994 ISSN: 1016-3476 Vol. 4, No. 2:167-169 LEGENDARY LANDSCAPES, SEAS OF MEMORIES Nicholas de Lange Faculty ofDivinity, Cambridge The Jews and the Mediterranean: what sense can one make of the conjunction? That is the basic question thatthearticlein this special issueofJournaloftheMediterraneanStudiesare, in different fashions, trying to answer. The Jews are indubitably a partofthe history and human geography of the Mediterranean region. But is the Mediterranean region by the same token a part of the Jewish historical experience and consciousness? There is a first sense in which the answer is definitely no: this expanse of water does not occupy the centre of the world in the Jewish mental geography, as it does in the Roman. The Romans, whose own history began with the conquest of their own sea-girt peninsula, soon discovered thatItaly was the centre ofan almost land-lockedsea. As natural as it was for them to think of the world as bounded by water—by the greatrivers and the tidal ocean, they made a special place in their map for their own sea. The Hebrews’ geography was different. Their name might mean, in popular etymology, ‘those from beyond’, but their origin lay beyond more modesttracts ofwater: theRiverJordan or the SeaofReeds. TheGreatSea wasthe fixed boundary of their land. To cross the sea was tantamount to journeying into space (Deuter­ onomy 30:12-13; Psalm 139:8-9). No one in the Bible ever managed to cross it. One tried, and his story is instructive. The prophet Jonah, fleeing from God’s imperative, went down to Joppa and found a ship bound for Tarshish. He paid his fare and went on board, meaning to escape beyond God’s reach. But the Lord let loose a great storm, and Jonah was thrown overboard, to be broughtback to dry land by a legendary fish. It matters little where Tarshish is: the point is that it is beyond the sea, and so represents escape. The sea is the end of the world: an impassable barrier. It conjured up only horror and danger for the Land-loving Israelites, whose history bound them to overland Syria, Egypt and Mesopotamia, not to the lands beyond the sea. As time went on, however, the Jews were obliged to look westwards, and the Mediter­ ranean lands perforcebecamepart oftheirworld. By the dawn ofthe Christian era there were already communities ofJews, some very large, all round the eastern Mediterranean, and as far away as Italy and Spain. Some say that Christianity spread along the routes already established by the Jews. From that time on the Mediterranean basin has bulked large on the ' map of the Jewish world. Its coast is dotted with cities whose names loom large in the story of Jewish religion and culture; Alexandria, Tunis, Oran, Barcelona, Narbonne, Leghorn (Livorno), Rome, Naples, Ragusa (Dubrovnik), Valona, Thebes, Salonica, Smyrna (Izmir), and so many others, to say nothing of the hinterland and the islands. The documents of the Cairo Genizah lay bare the trading routes linking Egypt in the Middle Ages to the Maghrib and Spain, to Sicily, to Byzantium and to Syria. Mediterranean Jewish history is a story of massacres and ghettos and banishments, but there is an underlying continuity too, and the various expulsions (Crete in 116, Spain, Sardinia and Sicily in 1492, Naples in 1510.. .)led Copyright © 1994 Mediterranean Institute. Univ. of Malta 168 Nicholas de Lange to new Jewish settlements elsewhere in the region. The great expulsion from Spain in 1492 brought newJewish life to the formerByzantinelandsprofoundly disturbed by the upheavals of the Ottoman conquest, and inaugurated the extraordinary prosperity of Salonica, the’Jerusalem of the Balkans’ (though we should not be lulled into forgetting that, as Greek Thessalonike, the city had a history of continuous Jewish settlement going back to St. Paul and beyond). And in modem times the waves of emigration resulting from Arab nationalism in the countries of the4southern coast replenished the depleted Jewish population of France (and, to a lesserextent, Spain and Italy), and imported a massive Mediterranean element into the population of Israel, decisively affecting the character of Jewish society in these countries. So much, in bare outline, for the positive side of the balance sheet...