Project MUSE®: Mediterranean Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/561
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Mediterranean Studies.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 20 (2012) - vol. 31 (2023)Latest Articles: Mediterranean StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Mediterranean Studies2161-47411074-164XLatest articles in Mediterranean Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editor’s Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/912027
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This year, the MSA celebrated its twenty-fifth annual meeting. Executive Director Ben Taggie opens Mediterranean Studies 31.2 with a tribute to the host institution of the meeting, Masaryk University in the Czech Republic’s city of Brno. Holding the 2023 conference in Brno had everything to do with the association’s mission to promote the scholarly study of the many cultures of the Mediterranean in their interactions with greater forces in and beyond the region, a mission the articles and reviews in this issue assiduously carry out.In “War and Peace in the Elephant Mosaic from Huqoq: Synagogue Art, Classical Historiography and Roman Imperial Monuments,” Karen Britt and Ra‘anan Boustan bring to light an unparalleled
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/561/image/coversmallEditor’s Introduction2023-11-11text/htmlen-USEditor’s Introduction2023-11-112023TWOProject MUSE®55792026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-11-11Tribute to Masaryk University
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/912028
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By any measure, the 25th Annual Congress of the Mediterranean Studies Association at Masaryk University in Brno, the Czech Republic, was a resounding success. From the gracious welcome of Dr. Irena Radová, dean of the university’s Faculty of Arts, to the generous feeding of our minds and bodies, overseen for the five days of the event by Congress President Dr. Katarina Petrovićková, Professor of Classical Studies at Masaryk University, this milestone congress was a rich reward for the dedication of MSA scholars to the field of Mediterranean studies.His Excellency Mr. Athanassios Paressoglu, Ambassador from the Hellenic Republic to the Czech Republic, phrased it eloquently in his remarks at the opening session of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/561/image/coversmallTribute to Masaryk University2023-11-11text/htmlen-USTribute to Masaryk University2023-11-112023TWOProject MUSE®36522026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-11-11War and Peace in the Elephant Mosaic from Huqoq: Synagogue Art, Classical Historiography, and Roman Imperial Monuments
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/912029
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The ongoing excavations in the late Roman synagogue at Huqoq, a rural village in lower eastern Galilee (fig. 1), have revealed a mosaic depicting a subject that is unparalleled in ancient synagogue art.1 The panel displays an enigmatic narrative that unfolds over three registers of unequal size (fig. 2). Although there are no inscriptions identifying the episodes represented, the presence in the top register of battle elephants and a Greek king wearing a diadem and purple cloak sets the elephant panel apart in the corpus of ancient synagogue art. In all other synagogue mosaics from late antiquity, the subject matter depicted in narrative scenes derives from the Hebrew Bible. By contrast, the composition and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/561/image/coversmallWar and Peace in the Elephant Mosaic from Huqoq: Synagogue Art, Classical Historiography, and Roman Imperial Monuments2023-11-11text/htmlen-USWar and Peace in the Elephant Mosaic from Huqoq: Synagogue Art, Classical Historiography, and Roman Imperial Monuments2023-11-112023TWOProject MUSE®2046352026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-11-11Sectoral Realism at the Junction of the Partition Plan of Palestine
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/912030
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The current article was initiated thanks to a document from mid-April 1925 found in the Israel State Archives (ISA) in Jerusalem containing correspondence between two leaders of the Jewish settlement in Palestine, Moshe Sharet (Israel’s second prime minister) and Itzhak Ben-Zvi (Israel’s second president). The correspondence mentions two groups formed among the Arab members of the Palestine Communist Party (PCP), which had split along sectoral lines, one Muslim and the other Greek Orthodox Christian.1 This finding raised the issue of sectoral organization by Arab communist members of the PCP. Special attention was given to the Greek Orthodox group, which headed what support there was among the Palestinians for the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/561/image/coversmallSectoral Realism at the Junction of the Partition Plan of Palestine2023-11-11text/htmlen-USSectoral Realism at the Junction of the Partition Plan of Palestine2023-11-112023TWOProject MUSE®1045592026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-11-11Cosmopolitan Discourse in Amin Maalouf’s Les Échelles du Levant
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/912031
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But time is also a recuperation of all divergencies, through retention, memory, and history.Amin Maalouf has won global acclaim for his stories of mystics, outcasts, travelers, heretics, poets, and scientists. The Francophone writer of Levantine origin is an uprooted figure himself who left his native country during the Lebanese Civil War. In Revisioning French Culture, Andrew Sobanet (2019) points out the difficulty of classifying French writers of foreign origins such as Maalouf. The classifications of Francophone or simply “foreign” have “become increasingly uncomfortable for those Paris-based writers who are part of the cosmopolitan scene in which the use of French suggests a renewed appreciation of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/561/image/coversmallCosmopolitan Discourse in Amin Maalouf’s Les Échelles du Levant2023-11-11text/htmlen-USCosmopolitan Discourse in Amin Maalouf’s Les Échelles du Levant2023-11-112023TWOProject MUSE®932472026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-11-11Performing Mediterraneanness: Mediterranean Diaspora and Solidarity Politics in Chapel Hill, NC
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/912032
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During a discussion with a musician who performs at Chapel Hill’s Greek tavernas and festivals, I learned that when they worked at a downtown Greek taverna located right across from a Turkish restaurant, the Turkish owners crossed the street and asked them to play songs shared in both Greek and Turkish cultures. In the beginning, neither the Greek nor the Turkish people who worked or visited the restaurants knew that the songs were shared. As these street crossings progressed, they transformed into acts of exploring and celebrating the Mediterranean commons. They also involved the exchange of recipes and customers. According to the same musician, during these crossings, the street was often associated with the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/561/image/coversmallPerforming Mediterraneanness: Mediterranean Diaspora and Solidarity Politics in Chapel Hill, NC2023-11-11text/htmlen-USPerforming Mediterraneanness: Mediterranean Diaspora and Solidarity Politics in Chapel Hill, NC2023-11-112023TWOProject MUSE®720792026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-11-11Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean by Carolina López-Ruiz (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/912033
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The past two decades have seen a marked increase in the number of monographs relating specifically to Phoenician identity and material culture. Even in such a context, the work under review stands apart for its ambitious, comprehensive scope that advances both a critique of persistent disciplinary Hellenocentrism and a synthesis of archaeological data. Together those objectives prompt a revision of persistent narratives about Phoenician colonial presence, influence, and agency in the first-millennium-BCE Mediterranean.The volume is divided into two parts, with an introduction that lays out the study’s approach, which is (part 1) a critical examination and diagnosis of the historiographic problems confronting the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/561/image/coversmallPhoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean by Carolina López-Ruiz (review)2023-11-11text/htmlen-USPhoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean by Carolina López-Ruiz (review)2023-11-112023TWOProject MUSE®106922026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-11-11The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/912034
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Roderick Beaton’s book The Greeks: A Global History provides a great synthesis of a complex history of three and half millennia written by an “outsider,” that is, not a native of Greece. Beaton, a (literary) historian of Byzantium and modern Greece, makes use of current scholarship in areas outside his own academic expertise to offer a global history not of Greece (a place) but of the Greeks. In addition to the longue durée, this global view encompasses both the classic achievements of the Greeks (intellectual, technological, and scientific) and their physical diaspora around the globe.Shedding light on major literary works, the book is a tribute to the longevity of the Greek language, spoken continuously from 1500
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/561/image/coversmallThe Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton (review)2023-11-11text/htmlen-USThe Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton (review)2023-11-112023TWOProject MUSE®81082026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-11-11Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance by Emily Michelson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/912035
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The Jews of Rome, like Jews everywhere in early modern Europe, faced tremendous legal and social constraints, endemic violence, and expulsion, ghettoization, and forced conversions. Most of these practices were rooted in anti-Jewish polemics dating to the Middle Ages. Yet, for Rome, two of these, the ghetto and systematic efforts to convert Jews through sermons at the Oratory of Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini, were innovations of the sixteenth century. In Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews, Emily Michelson offers the first monograph in English to examine these sermons and their impact both on the Jewish community and on the religious life of Rome. Sifting through a plethora of sources, including papal bulls
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/561/image/coversmallCatholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance by Emily Michelson (review)2023-11-11text/htmlen-USCatholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance by Emily Michelson (review)2023-11-112023TWOProject MUSE®106342026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-11-11Women’s Lives, Women’s Voices: Roman Material Culture and Female Agency in the Bay of Naples ed. by Brenda Longfellow and Molly Swetnam-Burland (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/912036
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This volume offers a bold and creative approach to recovering the experiences of women in the Roman world. The collection includes thirteen papers that were originally presented at the Third Annual Symposium Campanum at the Villa Vergiliana in October 2018. The authors demolish long-standing assumptions about the limitations of the material record, casting women as active participants in their communities. Following a brief introduction by the editors, Lauren Hackworth Petersen (chapter 1) argues that modern scholars have contributed to “silencing” Roman women by privileging certain kinds of sources and adopting the perspective of upper-class men. She calls on scholars to reevaluate what counts as a reliable source
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/561/image/coversmallWomen’s Lives, Women’s Voices: Roman Material Culture and Female Agency in the Bay of Naples ed. by Brenda Longfellow and Molly Swetnam-Burland (review)2023-11-11text/htmlen-USWomen’s Lives, Women’s Voices: Roman Material Culture and Female Agency in the Bay of Naples ed. by Brenda Longfellow and Molly Swetnam-Burland (review)2023-11-112023TWOProject MUSE®100072026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002023-11-11