Editor’s Introduction

We can’t be certain whether a physicist first made the following pronouncement, but the words express the physics of scholarship in this issue of Mediterranean Studies. “Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen at once and,” the saying continues, “space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.”¹ Time with its sequence of events and space with its distance between scholars and the object of their scholarship are the driving forces behind the articles you are about to read. By interrogating the past in the context of issues that concern us in the present, the authors of these articles are engaging in the work of the humanities and the social sciences with regard to the Mediterranean region: to home in ever more closely on the truth of what has happened, when it happened, and where it happened, with the hope of determining why it happened.

The purpose of this persistent reading of what has happened in the Mediterranean is to guarantee that the past has a future. Two rereadings of works of history lead off this issue, each work known to have been instrumental in shaping accepted views of Italy’s past, but both works destined to be catalysts in transforming those views in the future. In her study of Tommaso Fazello, the cleric known as the Father of Sicilian history, Anne Maltempi argues that this Renaissance intellectual, long overlooked by historians of Sicily, is a harbinger of Sicilianità, a voice of the future that spoke about Sicily’s past from the perspective of the author’s present. A similar future awaited Gabriele Pepe, author of Il Medio Evo barbarico d’Italia (Italy’s Barbarian Middle Ages), published in 1941 during the nation’s Fascist regime. Luigi Andrea Berto enhances his close reading of this classic with rich documentation of secondary sources to deflate the common assumption that the date of the book’s publication is sufficient evidence of the author’s political convictions. Pepe was no Fascist. But how does a historian tell the story of his country’s barbaric past without calling down the wrath of the barbarians of his own time? Once again, a book about the past serves to narrate the author’s present, and to project his present into the future, where it forces us to reconsider our received ideas about Italy’s history.

These two articles are followed by a pair of studies on processes that foster identity in the Mediterranean. The first of these traces the course of hybrid identity formation among Palestinians remaining in Israel after 1948. Maysoun Ershead Shehadeh turns to narrative analysis to examine the impact of war on shaping this identity, and the role the Israeli Communist Party played in the process. Beyond the historical record, and the burden of the past that record places on the present, the article presents a deeply felt sociology of agency, a recognition that the future of a people is of their making.

The second article in this set is a work of great imagination. Coauthors Eleonora Bedin and Gil Gambash take us on a fictional voyage through the Mediterranean during the Hellenistic period, visiting ancient ports of call along a route from Alexandria to Byblos aboard a make-believe ship appropriately named “Soteira,” Savior, one of several marine appellations of Isis. Linking together shrines and monuments found at these ports, ancient inscriptions carved into their stone, references to Herodotus and Pausanias, port records, even artifacts recovered from the seabed, the authors construct the context for circumstances and beliefs that would have galvanized Soteira’s imaginary sailors around a shared sense of identity. In addition to shedding light on possible instances when this identification might emerge, the article is a treasure trove of information on the seagoing experience in the Hellenistic Mediterranean. Perhaps the commonality of that experience will generate a Mediterranean identity of the future.

Two book reviews round out this issue. Susan Shapiro leads readers on a tour through Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture. The author, Liz Gloyn, asks why these figures have proliferated in the popular culture of the modern world, then answers her...