International Journal
Euro-Mediterranean
Studies
VOLUME I I 2008 I NUMBER I
Mediterraneans or Crusaders?
Israel Geopolitical Images between East and West
David Ohana
Crossing Boundaries in Late Medieval Mediterranean Iberia: Historical Glimpses of Christian-Islamic Intercultural Dialogue Roser Salicru i Lluch
The Challenges of Intercultural Legal Communication Alenka Kocbek
Soft Social Infrastructure as a Multicultural System Alexi Danchev
Staging Cultural Interaction: New Concepts of Representing Arab Music in the Israeli Cultural Arena Essica Marks
Elizabethan Orientalism and its Contexts: The Representation of the Orient in Early Modern English Drama Tahar Bayouli
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International Journal of Euro-Mediterranean Studies
ISSN 1855-3362 EDITORS
Ana Hofman, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Slovenia Klemen Klun, University Center for Euro-Mediterranean Studies, Slovenia
EDITORIAL BOARD
Nadia Al-Bagdadi, Central European
University, Hungary Pamela Ballinger, Bowdoin College,
United States ofAmerica Klemen Bergant, University of Nova
Gorica, Slovenia Rémi Brague, Panthéon-Sorbonne
University, France Donna Buchanan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States ofAmerica Julia Elyachar Mastnak, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Slovenia Carlos Fraenkel, McGill University, Canada
Rune Gulev, University of Primorska, Slovenia
Hassan Hanafi, Cairo University, Egypt Joaquina Labajo Valdés, Autonomous
University of Madrid, Spain Binshan Lin, Louisiana State University in Shreveport, United States ofAmerica David Ohana, Ben-Gurion University
of the Negev, Israel Stefania Panebianco, University
of Catania, Italy Carmen Popescu, Paris-Sorbonne
University, France Georges Prevelakis, Panthéon-Sorbonne University, France
Andrej Rahten, University of Maribor, Slovenia
Anthony Spiteri, University of Malta, Malta
Ivan Sprajc, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Slovenia
Greg Woolf, University of St Andrews, United Kingdom
MANAGING EDITOR
Alen Ježovnik, University of Primorska, Slovenia
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International Journal of Euro-Mediterranean Studies
3 Preface Ana Hofman
7 Mediterraneans or Crusaders?
Israel Geopolitical Images between East and West David Ohana
33 Crossing Boundaries in Late Medieval Mediterranean Iberia: Historical Glimpses of Christian-Islamic Intercultural Dialogue Roser Salicru i Lluch
53 The Challenges of Intercultural Legal Communication Alenka Kocbek
73 Soft Social Infrastructure as a Multicultural System Alexi Danchev
91 Staging Cultural Interaction: New Concepts of
Representing Arab Music in the Israeli Cultural Arena Essica Marks
109 Elizabethan Orientalism and its Contexts: The Representation of the Orient in Early Modern English Drama Tahar Bayouli
129 Résumés 133 Povzetki
Preface
fascination with the HYBRiDiTY of the Mediterranean cultures has a long history in the scholarly narratives. At the same time, many misrecognitions, misunderstandings and stereotypes are produced about this region. Scholars have emphasized the problematic notion of the Mediterranean and the very field of Mediterranean studies as the product of orientalistic discourses of Western scholarship (Herzfeld 1980; Llobera 1986). They also criticized the binaries present in the dominant scholarly discourses such as the North/South, Christianity/Islam, honor/shame, masculinity/femininity, and tradition/modernity. Michael Herzfeld has asserted the problematic concept of the Mediterranean culture as one unified entity, challenging the ambiguous discourses on Mediterranean, which is recognized at the same time as the centre of European culture and the 'incomplete European space'. By the concept of Euro-Mediterranean, this ambiguity seems to be challenged, although it does not offer essentially new approaches in avoiding colonialist premises.
The main idea of the Journal is to present the Euro-Mediterranean as an imagined space, a performative category constantly re-constructed though the dominant discourses. It proposes a scholarly response to the current political actions of making a new 'biopolitical' region. One of the main goals of the Journal is to examine the very discourses and practices that shape the concept of Euro-Mediterranean and also to provide a critical stance toward the official narratives associated with this idea. The Journal aims to challenge fixed representations of this area, with an intention to show that the 'natural' cultural unity or cohesion is constructed through official cultures and dominant politics. The main attempt is to avoid the concepts of homogeneous cultures or historical traditions, and their 'univocal' representations. In this respect, the general approach we suggest here avoids a reductionist approach, an essentialized idea of culture as the property of an ethnic group. In order to present the 'polyvocality' of the Mediterranean societies and cultures, the general orientation of the Journal supports the studies focused on dynamic and transgressive cultural productions and performances of identities.
We enthusiastically present this inaugurational issue not as a complete product, but rather as a basis for a further rethinking of the acute questions concerning this area, such as hegemonic discourses of cultural interaction and multiculturalism, issues of Eurocentrism and [4] new colonialism, illegal migration, conflicted or divided regions. The first issue focuses on intercultural exchange and dialog in the Euro-Mediterranean, with the main intention of giving an insight in the complexity of intercultural dialog as a social reality itself. The leading idea was to show that intercultural dialog is not just a result of dominant politics and political strategies of multiculturalism, but a real, unavoidable phenomenon. As Seyla Benhabib points out, 'the cultures are formed through complex dialogs and interactions with other cultures, as an inseparable part of the constant creations, recreations and negotiations of imaginary boundaries between self and others' (Benhabib 2002, 8). At this point, it is important to emphasize that dialog is only possible when the concepts of coherent and pure cultures are abandoned and when alternative voices and narratives are included along with the dominant ones. Therefore, this issue does not reflect only on the official cultures and dominant politics, but also brings to the fore unofficial public sphere and alternative voices.
The main questions tackled in this issue are the strategies of construction of East and West in connection to the concept of Otherness, as well as minority-majority relations and their role in cultural interaction in the Euro-Mediterranean. All this questions refer to the pivotal issues related to the field of Mediterranean studies, pointing out its association with ethnocentrism, colonialism and imperial domination. Thus the contributions also challenge the idea of knowledge produced beyond the dominant politics, and 'neutrality' and 'detachment' associated with the academic work.
The issue is divided into three micro-thematic blocs. The first one is dedicated to rethinking the concepts of Mediterreneaness and the intercultural dialog in historical perspective. David Ohana addresses the dynamics in conceptualization of East and West and the notion of Mediterranean in connection with the Zionist movement in Israel. By looking into these two geopolitical concepts the article seeks to examine the genealogy of the cultural discourse, tracing the political
development of the crusader myth in creation of the image of Israel as a Western country. Roser Salicru i Lluch's article is focused on the transversal figures that were able to cross religious and cultural boundaries in Medieval Mediterranean Iberia. In the same way as Ohana, she examines discourses of constructing and understanding the Other, [5] showing how the concepts of intercultural dialog are very often exclusively led by the pragmatic reasons.
Next two papers are more applicative, exploring the ways the various concepts of culture can be employed in intercultural legal communication and in creating soft social infrastructure. Alenka Kocbek's paper proposes a strategy suitable to the specific requirements of intercultural legal communication, while Alexi Danchev provides a study of the role of soft social infrastructure in the strategies of inclusion of Roma community into the dominant culture in Bulgaria.
The last part of the issue is dedicated to the role of art in articulation of cultural interactions. Essica Marks's contribution takes a critical stance toward the official culture policy toward Arab minority in Israel, examining the alternative voices in establishing new bridges between minority and majority cultures. By examining the Orientalist tradition in the Elizabethan theatre, Tahar Bayouli intends to emphasize a multi-sided nature of the Orientalism and its role in construction of the image of the East.
Ana Hofman
Editor
REFERENCES
Benhabib, S. 2002. The claims of culture: Equality and diversity in the global era. Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press.
Herzfeld, M. 1986. Ours once more: Folklore, ideology, and the making of modern Greece. London: Pella.
Llobera, J. R. 1986. Fieldwork in Southwestern Europe: Anthropological panacea or epistemological straitjacket? Critique ofAnthropology 6 (2): 25 33.
Mediterraneans or Crusaders? Israel Geopolitical Images between East and West
DAVID O H ANA
Ben-Gurion University oftheNegev, Israel
MEDITERRANEANISM IS AN OLD - NEW IDEA which has reappeared in the last decade in connection with the politics of Israeli identity and the rise of multiculturalism in Israel. Israel as a Mediterranean society-in-the-making has emerged from Zionism, the liberation movement of the Jewish people in Europe, which supposed that a new Jew returning from exile in order to rebuild his nation-state as an immigrant would reconnect with his or her Biblical-Oriental roots. However, against these expectations, Israel began to be seen by its Arab neighbours as a national mutation of modern crusaders coming from the West to create a 'Europe overseas.' From the creation of the state, there has been a vital cultural discourse in Israel on its collective identity, a discourse which has moved between the open Mediterranean image and the alienated crusader-colonialist image. By looking into these two geopolitical concepts the article seeks to examine the genealogy of the cultural discourse, trace the political development of the crusader myth and consider a potential Mediterranean option in Israel both as a threat and as a hope.
CONFRONTATION OR DIALOGUE? One of the Crusader settlers in Jerusalem who came from Chartres in France described some tensions and conflicts involved in the formation of a new society in the Levant and the confrontation between East and West with an artistic touch (Hagenmeyer 1913, 748—49):
Consider how in our days God has brought us westerners to the East, for we who were westerners have become easterners. Someone who was a Roman or a Frank is now a Galilean or a Palestinian. A man from Rheims or Chartres is now an inhabitant of Tyre or An-
tioch. We have already forgotten our places of birth; many of us are no longer familiar with them or no longer remember them. There are some here who have taken themselves wives not only from their own people but also from the women of Syria and Armenia, and [8] even of the Circassians who have received the grace of baptism. In some cases their father-in-law is with them together with their bride or bridegroom, and in some cases their stepson or stepfather is with them. And there are grandchildren and great-grandchildren [...] A variety of languages have been exchanged for a single one which is known to both races, and faith unites people whose forebears were foreign to one another [...] Foreigners have become natives here, and converts have become like residents. Every day our parents and relatives join us, hesitantly leaving behind what they possess [... ] They have seen that a great miracle has taken place here, a miracle that astounds the whole world. Has one ever heard of such a thing?
Is this the realized utopia of the East-West synthesis, a kind of fusion or symbiosis? Whatever the case, this is an extraordinary description which illustrates the point that the Crusades have generally been viewed as a confrontation between East and West and have further on grown into a confrontation between Western and Eastern Christians. Linked to this there is a rumor that it was precisely Eastern Christians who invited Saladin to conquer Jerusalem (p. 29). If this be the case with the regard to Eastern Christians, how much greater was the tension between the European West and the Islamic East! (Prawer 1972; 1980; 1988). The image of medieval Christians in the Levant was of a foreign element in the Oriental sphere. The image has survived until the modern times: just like in the Middle Ages 'the West in the East' took the form of the Crusaders in the nineteenth century 'the East in the West' took the form of the Ottomans, and at the beginning of the twenty-first century Osama bin Laden called for Jihad against the 'Crusader-Jewish Alliance'. In this way, with the 'crusader' responsibility for the foundation of the 'Western' State of Israel in the Middle East, Osama managed to build the necessary motivation for his people to commit world terrors.
In contrast with the contentious image of the Crusades, 'Mediter-
raneanism' had the reputation of being a source of dialogue between the East and West. It is true that the Annals of the Mediterranean Basin recount of an ongoing conflict for political hegemony, cultural control and economic imperialism but these tensions go back to the struggles between the North and South in the Mediterranean, for ex- [9] ample, the Persian War, Peloponnesian War, Macedonian Wars and Punic Wars. These wars were later succeeded by a struggle between East and West, between Hellenists and Romans, the result of which was the first political and cultural union, created by the Romans, embracing the entire coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Nevertheless the Muslim conquest managed to shatter this unity. From the eighth to the eighteenth century the Sea was split in two, to its northern (Christian) part against its southern (Muslim) part. Historical events such as the Crusades, the Ottoman conquest in the East and the Spanish Reconquista in the West, the campaigns of Napoleon, modern colonial settlements and the World Wars in the twentieth century — all these events were tense encounters pitting nations, cultures and religions against one another (Braudel 1949).
Yet, despite these historical confrontations, the Mediterranean includes both the Levant and the West, and out of this synthesis the European space and Western culture were created. The Mediterranean did not give rise to a hegemonic and all-inclusive culture with a single, homogeneous character. Instead it created a variety of historical models of cultural meetings and exchanges of intellectual goods, such as the Italian Renaissance or Christian-Muslim-Jewish Andalusia. As the French historian Fernand Braudel put it: 'To sail in the Mediterranean is to discover the Greek world in Lebanon, prehistory in Sardinia, the cities of Greece in Sicily, the Arab presence in Spain and Turkish Islam in Yugoslavia' (Braudel 1985,1). The Mediterranean, although not representing a homogeneous cultural unity, has historically been a space with an intense mixture of Eastern and Western cultures. The historian Shlomo Dov Goitein claimed that Jews were Mediterranean people — open, free, mobile, not isolated in their space in Southern Asia but dwelling in countries which inherited classical culture and assimilated it to Islamic culture (Goitein 1967—1988; 1960, 29—42). In his monumental five-volume study, A Mediterranean Society, Goitein de-
scribed the medieval Jewish society living within the Mediterranean geographical and cultural framework.
ISRAEL: A MEDITERRANEAN SOCIETY
[10]	in the making
In order to understand the geopolitics of any country it is crucial to understand its cultural context in a historical perspective (Newman 1988, 1—16). The claim that Israel is 'a Mediterranean society in the making' was encouraged by three historical processes. The first process is represented by frequent oscillations during the peace process between Israel and its neighbors in the last decade, and further by the state of confrontation culminating in the current conflict with the Palestinians, which erupted in October 2000. The conflict raised questions with regard to the dynamics of Israeli collective identity and to what I call 'Israeli spatial identity'.1 Many Israelis have thus started to think in terms of 'Mediterraneanism' rather than in terms of 'Middle Eastern' culture. Such thinking was spurred in view of Israeli accessibility to the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea — i. e., Turkey and the Maghreb in the 1990s (Ohana 2003).
The second process is the transition of Israeli society from a mobilized society with a Zionist ideology to a civil, sectorial society: one which is in constant search for its own identity while it tries to maintain an internal dialogue among its various sociological components, and in addition to this, an external dialogue with other people and cultures in the Mediterranean geopolitical region (Wistrich and Ohana 1995). The ideology of a 'new man' gave way to the old-new idea of a non-ideological Mediterranean melting pot blending together immigrants from east and west, from the Christian countries and the Muslim countries (Ohana 1995, 38—60; Ohana 2003, 59—75; Ohana 2006, 239—63). This new identity was not ideologically based; it was created by geography and culture.
The third process is the revolutionary opening for dialogue at the Oslo Accords (1993), Barcelona Process (1995) and Sarkozy's Union for the Mediterranean (2008). The Oslo Accords were in principle based on two parallel channels: the immediate bilateral channel which focused on resolving the disputes from the past and ending the war
between Israel and its Arab neighbors; and the multilateral channel. The latter provided a basis for (and strengthened) the bilateral channel by creating a safety net along with other actors and by developing common interests and coping with common problems such as water supply, economic growth, disarmament and environmental is- [11] sues (Peres 1993). The Barcelona Process mainly encouraged cultural and economic cooperation between the European Community and countries surrounding the Mediterranean Basin (Government of Israel 1995). The Barcelona Declaration proposed a plan of action to fix the framework and establish the priorities of Euro-Mediterranean dialogue. Among the latter the following are notable: the continuation of structural reforms for socio-economic changes, support for regional integration, investment and enhancement of co-operation between businesses (Institut Català de la Mediterrània 1996). The new initiative of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, based on a plan for a political, economic and cultural union of the coastal states of the Mediterranean, which was launched at the Paris Conference on July 14, 2008. The invitation to Israel to participate in the Mediterranean Union presents another chance for dialogue between Israel and its Arab neighbors, this time under the Mediterranean umbrella (Emerson 2008).
the 'new Hebrew' comes to the east Zionism sprang up against the background of the rise of nationalism, the spread of secularism and the dominance of Eurocentricity. One of the chief cultural ambitions of the Zionist movement was to create a 'new man'. The myth of a 'new Jew' came into being only when the idea of an independent Jewish nationality was accepted and realized in the State of Israel. It was believed that there was an affinity between people and the land; only in the East, in the land of the forefathers, would the desired change in the image of the Jews take place. The realization of Zionism in Israel linked ideology to geography, and history to spatial identity.
One of the paradoxes of the situation was that from the 1880s onwards one of the models for the creation of a 'new Jew' were the Arabs. The Arabs were seen by some of the Zionists as an exemplar of be-
longingness, of existential and natural connection with the land. The East was not only a place of refuge from the Jewish exile in Europe, but also a source of vitality and a place where individual and national personalities could be renewed (Zalmona 1998, ix—xv).
[12] Zionism was from its early days on characterized by a highly ambivalent approach to the East. One of those who rejected the eastern option was also Theodor Herzl and his book The Jewish State: 'For Europe we will constitute a bulwark against Asia, serving as guardians of culture against barbarism.' This approach was contested by some Zionist ideologues who discerned vital values in the East. That is why in 1925 Ben-Gurion stated that 'the significance of Zionism is that we are, once again, becoming Oriental people'. However, Ben Gurion's attitude could also be ambivalent, as can be seen in a letter he wrote to George Antonius:2
Although we are Eastern people we have become a European people, and we wish to return to the Land of Israel only in the geographical sense. Our aim is to create a European culture here, and we are at any rate linked to the major cultural force in the world as long as the cultural basis in this part of the world does not change.
But Ben-Gurion supported the Mediterranean option for Israel. Two years after the founding of the state of Israel he declared (BenGurion 1954,312—3):
Our forefathers, who had never sailed its length as their kinfolk of Sidon did, called the Mediterranean the Great Sea [...] there is nothing, nothing, like the sea to widen our worlds, to increase our sense of security, to develop our latent powers [...] the conquest of the sea is among man's most glorious and creative adventures: without it the story of civilization, of the spread and associations of the human race, could not have been written. Our small country will flourish and expand once we perceive that the coast-line is no boundary but a corridor, into a colossal empire [...]
The Zionist approach to the East is a particular instance of the
Orientalist outlook; that is, the way in which the West relates to the Eastern region of the Mediterranean (Said 1978). This kind of orien-talistic attitude can be seen in other volatile areas of the Mediterranean such as the Balkans (Bakic-Hayden and Hayden 1992; Herzfeld 1987; Todorova 1997). It is, however, a far more complex approach than that [13] of typical European Orientalism, since within this approach the East is seen not only as the locus of the ancient history of the Jewish people, but also as the supreme aim of the people's envisaged return to themselves. It is the source and the cure to the national plight of the Jewish people integral to its national identity. However, the approach to an equal extent also represents 'the other', fundamentally exterior to the Zionist Jew and identified as 'there' whether as an alien, even antagonistic, entity or as the object of an unquenchable aspiration. The increasing lure of the East in the eyes of the nineteenth-century European Romantics and the prevailing sense among the intelligentsia that the West was in a state of decline, together with a yearning for primordial 'true' and 'sound' foundations, prompted the Jews with Zionist inclinations to see in the East not only a cradle of their national identity or a safe haven, but also a source of values, strength and moral regeneration for their people.
Until the 1930s, the Zionists saw in the East an object of longing and desire, a source of power and an opportunity for redemption. At the same time, however, they also took the position of Western superiority, took over the attitude of fear and suspicion, a thing which made them see the East as a threat. In the wake of the 1929 Arab riots a rift was created between the Jews and Arabs, and the period of Jewish separatism began, during which all signs of Orientalism were suppressed. Since then the East has been perceived as a political reality, a place of 'otherness,' a sort of absence or gap, rather than an object of identification reflecting positive values. Thus, the perception of the East has been changed by the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The East has always seemed foreign to many Israelis — either to those who wanted to make sense of it, become a part of it and internalize it, or (all the more so) to those who wanted nothing to do with it. The Oriental tradition has never been adopted by the Zionist settlers in Palestine; instead it simply remained a spice in the new
national-popular recipé. The pioneering society remained essentially Eurocentric and regarded itself as an extension of the European culture and not a product of the Mediterranean culture and certainly not of the Arab culture. In practice, this represented the abandonment of [14] the Eastern culture in favor of Western values and modernity (Ohana 1999, 81—99).
THE 'NEW CRUSADERS' IN ARAB EYES Arab scholars, writers and politicians nurture the Crusader myth of Zionism and Israelism in order to prove that Israel is a Western-colonialist entity in the Eastern Arab area. The Zionist-crusader analogy seeks to find a common denominator between the Crusader colonialism of the Middle Ages, 'Zionist colonialism' and the Anglo-French variety of colonialism. Wadia Talhook's book A New Crusade in Palestine came to birth on the eve of the War of 1948, and compared the Zionist enterprise to the Crusades (Sivan 1998, 18). The conclusion is that 'we shall cleanse Palestine of the star of David just as we cleansed it of the Crusades.' The Arab anti-colonialism is represented as a war of Muslims against the Crusaders. Those who drove the Crusaders away, like Saladin, Beybars and Nureddin (they were actually Turks and Kurds), were regarded as Islamic heroes. The religious aspect of the conflict is played down and the national aspect is emphasized; a moral duality, generally structured on belligerent myths, is in this way created between barbaric Crusaders and chivalrous Muslims; and the mythological construction has been in this way made out of Zionist-crusader invasion, an ideological construction that serves the purposes of the present (Benvenisti 2000, 299—303).
Zionism is depicted as a religious movement, nationally oppressive towards the local population and economically exploitative towards the Arabs. This foreign régime, alien to the locals, is said to have no culture of its own and to lack all national authenticity; and thus represents the soldier-pioneer of degenerated Western civilization, which will collapse as soon as the United Front is presented against him.
Through the 'Crusader' prism we have opted to study, major crosscurrents in the Israeli thought may be detected. Although the crusader-Zionist analogy is not central to the Israeli discourse, the many treat-
ments the subject has been given show that the historical parallel which Arab circles have made between the medieval Christians in the Holy Land and the modern Jews in Israel has not been lost on Israeli intellectuals. Even when not dealing directly with the local conflict, the Israelis amongst themselves discuss the Crusader equation with an acute [15] sense of their own 'foreignness' in the area, and in this perspective, the 'other' in their discussions becomes 'us' (Israelis). The Israeli participants in the 'Crusader discourse' are engaged in a veiled dialogue in which the analogy is not the subject of a historical debate or of a factual investigation of the truth. The thing that is involved here are the origins, no less than the future, of the Jewish state at the heart of Arab-Muslim East. Has the analogy itself become a kind of mobilizing symbol? How are the principles, images and perceptions corresponding to its political viewpoint and general outlook selected? (Kedar 2000, i35-5o.)
A historical episode in the history of Palestine, not linked to the Jewish history of the Land of Israel, has become a fascinating episode in the clarification of the Israeli identity and self-image. It is as if a picture of a historical phenomenon has been created and those that look at it are asking themselves if they see themselves within it. The Arabs answer positively; the Israelis for the most part answer negatively. The analogy can serve as a pretext for posing the question 'Who are we?' except, this time, in its reverse form, 'Who aren't we?' The question 'Are we Crusaders?' proceeds from the question 'Are we colonialists?' In other words, Zionist-crusader analogy reflects a veiled debate, sometimes turning to alarm, in which the Colonialist question is broached without being called by its name. Until the advent of the post-Zionists, the interpretation of the Zionist enterprise as a colonialist project had only been hinted at. Post-Zionists renewed the open discussion of the question (Kimmerling 1983; Shafir 1987; Pappe 1992).
Before the outbreak of the Six-Day War, Nasser was compared to a legendary leader who had defeated foreign invaders in the distant past. The weekly journal El-Howdat informed its readers that since Salah ed-Din el-Iobi (Saladin), the Arabs had not had a leader like Abdul Nasser. Saladin continued to be a mobilizing symbol of Jerusalem liberation, 'of Muslim unity, religious sacrifice, selfless struggle, and the
victory of faith.' A brigade of the plo's Army for the Liberation of Jerusalem was called Hattin; section 15 of the Hamas Charter praised Saladin as their role model; the Yom Kippur War was described as the first Arab victory since Saladin; the civil war in Lebanon was called the [16] 'Tenth Crusade', in which the Maronites were compared to Franks. The 'Peace for Galilee' War was said to be the 'twelfth crusade', in which Beirut served as a feudal fief of the Crusader Iblin dynasty. In addition, during the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein proclaimed: 'Salah ed-Din el-Iobi can now loudly cry Allah Akbar (God is Great)!' From the day Yasser Arafat returned from Camp David talks in the summer 2000, Palestinian media never stopped praising him and comparing him to the legendary commander. From the beginning of the 'El Aqsa Intifada' Arafat, in his speeches, continually declared that 'We shall return to Jerusalem and El Aqsa, entered by Salah ed-Din el-Iobi.'
There has been the continuous presence of the myth of Saladin in Arab history. The myth was originally directed against European Colonialism and Western civilization, however, in the last fifty years the symbol has been applied to the Arab-Israeli conflict and directed mainly against the 'Zionist entity'. Even when Dr. Ziad J. Asali tried to make an objective evaluation of Israeli historical scholarship concerning the Crusades, he was unable to refrain from making a comparison, and under the subtitle 'Zionism Between East and West', wrote (Asali 1992 45—59):
Zionism is in fact the heir — albeit an illegitimate one — of the Crusader movement. It was born out of the depth of the Crusader residue in Western societies as it combined the dreams of the re-conquest of the Holy Land with the historical antipathy toward the Easterners, along with a solution of the Jewish problem in the West. The Zionist movement has interjected a factor that has contributed decisively to the reception of its ideology among modern Western societies.
In his book The Crusades Through Arab Eyes the Franco-Lebanese author Amin Maaluf managed to avoid drawing parallels between the Crusader past and the Arab-Zionist dispute. Maaluf saw the crusader
invasion mainly as an episode in the confrontation between the East and West. He also stressed the sensitivity that has to be shown towards the Arabs in depicting the past in the view of their sense of persecution and threats proceeding from the West (Maalouf 1984).
[17]
1	1
the israeli crusader discourse: east versus west It is hardly surprising that in Israeli 'Crusader discourse' an intellectual effort has been made in order to confront various images and parallels inherent in the Crusader myth. Against the background of the disturbances in 1929, Shemuel Ussishkin, a publicist and the son of Menahem Ussishkin, wrote his first book [in Hebrew] on the Crusades under the title The West in the East: The History of the Crusades in Palestine (1931). The book was not a rebuke or an apology but a lesson dealing with a test-case in which the past could serve the needs of the present by providing an instructive example of the Western culture situated in the heart of the East (Ussishkin 1931,3):
There can be nothing more dangerous than a historical analogy if overstated. The danger is to draw conclusions concerning the events of the day through a comparison with the past on the sole basis of an external resemblance, without taking into account all the differences in time and conditions. At the same time one should not rule out the possibility of learning about the situation through a study of similar situations. For that reason, the history of the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem has a special interest for the Zionists. Although the Latins of the Middle Ages who came to the country to set up a Christian state were Christians, not Jews by religion, Aryans, not Semites by race, lived in a different period and used totally different means from those used by the Zionists in our time, the problem they were confronted with was almost identical to that facing the children of Israel who seek to return to their land nowadays.
The main question faced by the Crusaders was how to set up in the midst of oriental Muslim states a Christian center which would be different from its neighbors in religion, origin, language and cul-
ture — one which would spring from the West and was nurtured by it. Zionists are confronted with the same question asking how one can set up in the midst of the Muslim states a Jewish center which would be different from the neighboring states in religion, [18] culture, origin and language — one which would be created by external forces coming from the West? The Zionists are nevertheless different from the Crusaders.
From the analogy made by the Muslims between the Christian past and the Jewish present it can be inferred that the Arabs had to learn from their heroic past to unite their ranks behind a historic leader who would expel the infidels. Ussishkin, on the other hand, does not see this as the main point. His interest in the analogy is different: he seeks to discover how to prevent the collapse of the Western civilization which has settled itself in the East. Where race and origins are concerned — he points out — the Jews are not part of the Western world, especially because their roots are in the East and they are closer to Muslims. However, it cannot be denied that the majority of Zionists and Jewish immigrants are Westerners and not Orientals, and the matter of their integration into the East raises questions similar to those which arose at the time of the Crusades in Palestine.
These questions also preoccupied the Israeli publicist Moshe Fo-gel, who claimed that the Crusades were a major link in the chain of the long historical duel between East and West. According to him the expressions 'East' and 'West' should not be understood only in the terms of geography and religion, but also in the terms of material and spiritual culture, and ideals of a civilization. The Jews played an important part in this confrontation and swung like a pendulum between East and West. In the Greco-Persian War, the Jews were in the eastern camp, but the West won and it seemed that Hellenism might conquer the world. The revolt of Maccabees against Hellenism was a continuation of the battle of Marathon but this time the East celebrated the victory. The West nevertheless reacted when the kingdom of Byzantium became so 'orientalized' that during the Crusades there was very little cultural difference between the Christian Constantinople and Muslim Damascus or Baghdad. Western Europe freed
itself from any Eastern influence, and during the Crusader period there was a cultural abyss between Rome and Paris on one hand and Constantinople on the other. The Crusades were a reaction of the West and a continuation of the battle of Marathon disguised as a Christian-Catholic offensive against the Muslim East. Fogel concluded that the [19] confrontation between the West under the leadership of America and the East under the leadership of Russia represented one phase in the battle between civilizations (Fogel 1952):
With the establishment of the State of Israel the story of the Crusades opens up new perspectives of immeasurable importance to us. Our position in the Middle East is similar in many ways to that of the Crusaders, and accordingly some manifestations of the Crusader kingdom can serve us as a historical precedent. This precedent is of a very great value in the political sphere.
In 1949, a year after the founding of the State of Israel, the biblical scholar Professor Menahem Haran enumerated three factors which worked to the disadvantage of the Crusader state and which were also relevant in the case of Israel. The first factor maintained that the Crusader State was thrust outwards towards the sea by a unified and powerful Muslim Arab East. Secondly, the Crusaders mainly settled in towns but left most (rural) areas of the state to local Muslims. That is why Crusaders represented overlords and conquerors. Thirdly, there was little immigration from Europe and Crusader settlement in the country was sparse (Haran 1949, 55—9).
With regard to this one might ask what the relevance of all this was for the State of Israel. Haran sought to explain: firstly, the Arab demographic advantage is not a situation which the Israelis can change; they can only make sure they obtain a sufficiently large territorial rear. Secondly, the Israeli Jews continued to maintain the ethnic character of the Israeli settlement in the three generations preceding the founding of the state. Thirdly, in regard to the amount of immigration and the number of the Zionist settlers in the country, Haran (1949, 59) concluded: 'All evidence is in our favor. Our development will inevitably move us towards a different fate.' Haran, in effect, fired the opening
shot of the 'Crusader' discourse soon after the War of Independence. For the first time, a man of academic stature took a stand and initiated an open debate without the fear of historical parallel.
One year later, in 1950, the writer and poet Aharon Amir, writ-[20] ing from an entirely different ideological viewpoint, warned the young Jewish State against pursuing a 'Crusader' policy. In his article, 'The Crusader Kingdom of Israel', which appeared in the journal The Young [Hebrews], Amir cautioned against the policy aiming at total separate-ness of Israel which would mean that Jewish theocracy is preoccupied with building up its strength against its neighbors. Such a state would be perpetually dependent on external factors like the world Jewry and foreign powers. 'A policy of this kind,' Amir said, 'is definitely "Crusader" policy. The State of Israel is in such a way placed in the situation of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem in the Middle Ages, a military-theocratic kingdom. Such a state perhaps provides a vision (real or fake) for communities overseas on which it depends economically and from which it receives human reinforcements and moral and political assistance, however, such a state has nothing to give and no vision for the people living in the region. What is more there is no common denominator between such Israel and nations surrounding it.' Amir considered that although the idea of comparing the fate of Crusaders with that of the Israelis was not a popular one, the comparison represented the most serious element in the ideological thinking of the Arabs. Thus, he believed that 'a "Crusader" State of Israel, a Zionist State of Israel, could not maintain its power for a longer period of time. Any unexpected gust of wind signifying a sudden change in the balance of world forces would portend disaster. The seal of perdition would be on its brow.' (Amir 1986, 26.)
It should be remembered that the 'crusader syndrome', representing an importation of the Western culture to the East, contradicted the Canaanite ideology to which Amir subscribed; the contradiction was further on discordant with its native ideal of [Hebrew] nationhood in the Mesopotamian region. It is ironic that this fact did not prevent the Canaanites from fostering the Phoenician myth and from trying to prove that the Jews were an Eastern export to the West. In the words of Dan Laor, 'The Canaanites expected the new nation of Israeli
natives (whom they preferred to call "Hebrews") to become the avantgarde, the melting-pot of all the ethnic groups in the west-Semitic world, creating a massive, homogeneous Middle-Eastern nation similar to that of the ancient [Hebrews] who had been the dominant national, cultural and political force in the region in biblical times' [21] (Laor 2000, 287—300). Whatever the case, Amir's outlook reflected a kind of 'Hebraic' policy, cut off from the Jewish umbilical cord and liberated from alien ideologies, which gave the Jewish immigrant no preference to the non-Jewish resident of the land and which opened the gates of [Hebrew] society to anyone who desired it. It will not be difficult for a reader to detect the idea of a 'state of all its citizens', a state based on geography rather than history, an idea which is basically Canaanite.
In 1953, in a critical review of The History of the Crusades by the Scottish historian Steven Runciman, the editor of the Ha'aretz newspaper, Gershon Schocken, claimed that the Israelis had been becoming increasingly interested in the history of the Land of Israel as distinct from the history of the Jewish people. 'The very fact of exile', he said, 'meant that the history of the Jewish people was something different from the history of the Land of Israel.' (Schocken 1953) For nearly two thousand years before, various powers had ruled over the land and had been influenced by the geographical circumstances and political situation. When the Israelis started to function as an independent political factor within their country once more, it was only natural that they wanted to know how other political elements in periods before their settlement had attempted to deal with the problems with which the land confronted all those who wished to rule it. Schocken came to a conclusion that 'Those who wish to draw a parallel between the fate of the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the situation of the State of Israel in our time must take into account that the episode of the rise of Sal-adin [...] does not give one the impression that an inevitable historical development took place here.' (Schocken 1953.)
A year before the Sinai Campaign in 1956, the Israeli journalist Uri Avneri interviewed the English historian Arnold Toynbee. The interview appeared under the title, 'Don't repeat the mistakes of the Philistines and the Crusaders.' Toynbee, who in the tenth volume of
his Study of History marked Zionism as modern colonialism, in 1955 turned to Israelis and addressed them as follows: 'Reliance on the rifle and the bayonet will never give you the assurance that your country belongs to you. Only a deep soul-identification with the country, its [22] past and its future will bring you this certainty. You have to understand that everything connected with your country, even if it does not relate to the Jews, is connected with you directly. You have to learn the history of the country and even that of the Crusaders, for example, for it belongs to you.' (Toynbee 1965, 210—3; Avneri 1955.)
Stephen Runciman repeated the same advice in his answer to Avneri when he asked him whether he had ever thought about the similarity between the Crusaders and the Zionists. 'Not only have I thought about it,' he said, 'but I wanted to add a subtitle: "A Practical Guide for Zionists on How not to Do It." However, my Jewish friends advised me against it.'3 When Runciman and Avneri met, they constantly found Zionist parallels to Crusader figures and events. Avneri wrote: 'I was fascinated by the following hypothetical question which preoccupied Runciman: Did the Crusaders have any real chance of making peace with the Arab world and "becoming a part of the region", as Raymond, the ruler of Tripoli, proposed or were their tries doomed to failure from the start considering the nature of the Crusader (or, with all due allowances, Zionist) ideology?' (Avneri 1999.)
THE POLITICS OF THE 'CRUSADER MYTH' Israelis' curiosity about the Crusaders resulted from their growing interest in the history of the land as distinct from that of the people (Kedar 1987). The Zionist educational network, which emphasized the First and Second Temple periods of the nation's history, neglected the periods in which there was no marked Jewish presence in the Land of Israel. People without a land implied a land without people, and a land that was not settled was obviously a land without history. For a long time, the whole period from Bar Kochba until the beginning of Zionist settlement was neglected. The history of the country, as opposed to the history of the Jews within it, was of interest to few. In the second decade after the foundation of the State a new attitude was developed towards the Christian and Muslim periods in the history of
the country. The question of sovereignty was in this way settled and suppression concerning the non-Jewish past of the country therefore diminished.
Joshua Prawer, the outstanding Israeli historian of the Crusader Kingdom in Palestine, lay bare in his studies of an instructive two- [23] hundred-year-long chapter in the history of the Christian West and the Muslim East, a period in which Europeans set up a 'Europe overseas' in Palestine. Some people have seen this as a link in the chain of the ancient traditional hostility between the East and West, Persia and Greece, Hannibal and Rome — a chapter which became eventually known as the 'Orient problem' in European history. Prawer focused on 'a description of the vivid life of the Crusaders, whose ideal was not one of harmony or integration but of continual confrontation on the battlefield, as in the spheres of religion and culture' (Prawer 1984). European victory established a Western society in the East, alien in its culture, religion and customs, in a world whose material and cultural achievements were greater than those of the European conquerors. A confrontation between East and West was thus inevitable.
Only occasionally did Prawer relate specifically to the Zionist-crusader analogy. Like many Israelis, Prawer was worried by the security problems of Israel within its narrow borders. At various academic conferences at which he lectured, he often hinted at present-day security matters while speaking about the history of the Crusader Kingdom.
About two months after the 1967 war, Prawer touched on the central point in the Jews' attachment to their land: 'Throughout the period of exile of the people of Israel, no other people succeeded in striking roots in the land and making it its country.' Prawer repeatedly emphasized the special connection of the people of Israel to its land, in contrast to the Crusaders: 'In the thirteenth century the country lay desolate, and the Crusaders, despite their immense effort for two hundred years to hold onto it, failed, as the Muslims and Mongols also failed' (Prawer 1967).
In March 1973, about half a year before the Yom Kippur War, in the symposium 'Conquerors and Conquered — the Crusader State as a Colonialist State', held in honor of publishing the English edition of
his book on the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, Prawer said that the Crusader State was a society based on a legitimate claim to ownership of the land. The historian Shlomo Avineri claimed that the true parallel to the Crusader society was not to be found in our part of the [24] world but in South Africa, whose Apartheid régime was also based on ideological Biblical principles and on the analogy between the Blacks and Canaanites in the Bible. The sociologist Moshe Lissac asserted that unlike modern colonialist movements, the Crusaders did not have a metropolis. The right-wing intellectual Israel Eldad observed that although the Crusaders could claim a hereditary title to the country, they had no sense of returning to their homeland. In two hundred years they spent in the country, the word 'homeland' appeared in their writings only once.
In a television program in July 1987, which marked the eight-hundredth anniversary of the battle of Hattin, Prawer spoke of a different attachment to the country of Crusaders and Israelis (Kedar 1992, 27-37):
I find my roots here, and not in some shtetl in Eastern Europe [...] The Crusaders could not have made such a claim. Our roots are here, in this country [...] For us it means returning to the land of our forefathers. This is a concept that doesn't apply to Western Christianity [...] We are a part of the East, for two thousand years we have been returning to the Land of Israel; the Bible is a product of the Land of Israel, and from that point of view to speak of us as being foreign to the place is of course ridiculous.
In Prawer's opinion, partial orientalisation of the Crusaders in the country did not bring them any closer to Muslims but distanced them from their kinsmen and co-religionists in Europe. The estrangement and withdrawal brought them 'to a situation very common in the world of modern colonialism: they grew distant from the mother country but did not reach the natives.' The Crusaders failed because they were finally unable to build a stable colonialist civilization like the Boers in South Africa or the French in Quebec. When Prawer's book on the Crusaders appeared, it gave rise to a lively debate on the significance of
the Zionist-crusader analogy and on Israel's spatial identity between East and West.
In his book David's Sling, published in 1970, in the chapter 'The Similar Is Also Dissimilar', Shimon Peres maintained that the Arabs looked for historical precedents to justify their positions, and that [25] their propaganda therefore in a great deal relied on the precedent of the Crusades (Peres 1970, 205—12). According to Peres, the Crusades and the Zionist movement both originated in Europe, were ideologically motivated and sailed across the sea from the West to the Holy Land while contending with superior forces. But the differences were of course greater than the similarities, since the twelfth century is not the same as the twentieth. The Crusades were more religious than political, Crusaders did not seek permanent sovereignty but came for a limited purpose — to protect the Holy Places. They did not come to settle the land, nor did they seek a homeland for homeless people. The Zionist movement, on the other hand, was political despite the fact that it drew from religious cultural sources. The movement was intended to rescue the entire population by gathering it together and resettling it on the soil of its historical homeland. The return to Israel was not a purely religious act but a living experience and a national necessity. The Crusaders started out as an army which came to conquer a relatively populated country; the Zionists did not begin as a movement of military conquest but as a movement of settlers who came to a relatively desolate country. It was the settlers who needed protection and not the other way round; the ploughshare preceded the sword both in theory and practice. The settler movement sought to shape a new form of life, and in this respect Zionism was not only a movement of national liberation but also a movement of social redemption. The crusader army apparently did not number more than 50,000 men, whereas the number of the Jews living in the Land of Israel long ago reached the milestone of two and a half million from which there was no returning. The Crusades received directions from various European centers, while the immigrants to Israel struck roots in the country. These people were not sent by Europe but abandoned it.
Uri Avneri, for his part, also claimed that the Crusaders and Zionists both came from the West (Avneri 1968, 63). Although the Zionists
imagined that they were following the footsteps of the conquerors of Canaan or the 'captives of Zion' (those who returned from Babylon), they, in his opinion, resembled the Philistines and Crusaders who did not speak the language of the country, and were different from the in-[26] habitants in their culture and appearance and first gained a foothold in the coastal plain before penetrating the mountain region which is the heart of the Land of Israel. Just as the Zionists saw themselves as the vanguard of the Jewish people, so the Crusaders regarded themselves as the envoys of Christianity. In both states there was a problem of ethnic hierarchy in which the ruling class came from Europe; in both states there was a dependence on wealth from overseas. Kibbutzim were a unique Zionist creation resembling the great military orders of the Crusades. The Knights Templars or the Knights Hospitallers would set up fortresses deep within Arab areas in the same way as Kibbutzim. Some of these settlements were even built on the ruins of crusader fortresses.
The Crusades have served the purposes both of hawks seeking defence-lines with strategic depth, and of doves demanding territorial compromise and peace-treaties. Yossi Raanan, in his article 'The idf and the Crusaders', related that during his reserve duty in the Gaza Strip he could not help thinking of the similarity between the convoys of settlers with their military escorts and the convoys of Crusaders: 'It was very difficult for me to shake off the rather depressing feeling that the idf in the Strip at the present day resembles the crusader army which once ruled in the Land of Israel. This phenomenon is one of the most striking illustrations of the crusader-like character of the government in the Strip.' (Ra'anan 1990.)
The ideas that the settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip see themselves as 'holy emissaries' who have gone out in order to realize a national-religious ideal based on a strong and solid political base which serves them as an available rear, and that these settlers are a kind of modern crusader colonialists were both rejected by Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, one of the leading moderate spokesmen for the Jewish settlers in the occupied territories. 'Yesha (Judea and Samaria),' he said, 'is not "Israel overseas" [...] The Crusaders were imitators of the people of Israel, which explains their success and also the partial nature of that
success' (Melzer 2000—2001, 58). Rabbi Menahem Froman, likewise a settler, also thinks that the Zionists do not need to fear any resemblance to the crusader model, although he believes there is some truth in the comparison when it comes to a feeling of foreignness. Thus he proposes an original solution for the Israelis' sense of foreignness in [27] the area,: 'Returning to the Land of Israel means returning to forefathers. Returning to the land is returning to the fellah, to the Arab.'
Close to the time of the outbreak of the El Aqsa Intifada in the autumn of 2000, and even more while it was taking place, the Israeli and Palestinian relationship to the Crusaders once more became a topic for discussion. Binyamin Netanyahu's vision of a 'cold peace' raised the specter of the Crusader myth, this time from an unexpected quarter. In his article 'In the Crusader State', the journalist Guy Behor wrote: 'Netanyahu's idea of a "cold peace" means that Israel deliberately isolates itself from its surroundings and becomes a kind of crusader fortress surrounded by ramparts, and those within it care only about one thing: how to defend the walls [...] Throughout the years, Israel fought against its representation as a foreign implant and sought to normalize the relations with its neighbors, until the word "normalization" (in Arabic, tatvia) became a dirty word among its opponents. And now, look and behold, according to Netanyahu's vision Israel is about to turn by its own free will into an isolated crusader fortress and in this way demonstrates its alien character, without an attempt to integrate or receive true legitimation in the area!' (Behor 2000) Whereas on the other side, from the day Arafat returned from the Camp David discussions, the Arab media has never stopped praising him as the modern Saladin, and from that time on the Zionist-crusader analogy has not ceased to be on the Palestinian agenda.
At the beginning of the disturbances, Amos Oz, in his article in the New York Times, put his finger on the salient point: the choice was between images and myths on one hand and political recognition and historical reconciliation on the other. Oz (2000) described Arafat's return from the failed Camp David summit as follows:
The whole Gaza Strip is covered in flags and slogans proclaiming
the Palestinian Saladin. Welcome home, Saladin of our era! is writ-
ten on the walls. In silence, astounded, I watch, and I can't help reminding myself that the original Saladin promised the Arab people that he would not make pacts with the infidels; he would massacre them and throw them in the ocean. I see Mr. Arafat dressed [28] in his gray-green combat uniform. It's an Arafat clothed like Che Guevara and treated like Saladin: my heart breaks [...] The Palestinians must choose if they want a new Saladin, or to really work for peace.
mediterraneanism: threat or hope? We have seen how the Crusader parallel runs like a thread through all levels of the Israeli discourse. This preoccupation came to the fore especially in the following three periods: around the time of the 1948 war, before the 1967 war and during the El Aqsa Intifada at present. The apprehension of the Israelis marked with this parallel are a consequence both of external factors, like the Palestinian threat internalized as a future which resembles the past, and of internal factors, like the political controversy between right and left or the post-Zionist questioning which has renewed the colonialist-crusader discourse about the beginnings of Zionism. But above all the parallel has been concerned with the 'alien' Western character of the State of Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin.
It seems that the words of the archaeologist Adrian Boaz are like a voice crying in the wilderness: 'A more realistic approach to the Crusader period might free us from the temptation to see it as a parallel to the Zionist settlement of the Land of Israel, a thing the Jews and Arabs have both done for their own reasons. Such comparisons help us understand neither the Crusades nor the Zionist movement' (1999).
Indeed, when Alexandra Nocke came from the banks of the Rhine to the Eastern Mediterranean in order to investigate the living reality of the Mediterranean Israeli society for her doctoral dissertation (as opposed to society's image as seen from outside) she wrote (2001):
My thesis is that life between these two worlds (East and West) in the Mediterranean region offers many chances for Israel to become integrated within the Middle East without being cut off from the
West. The Mediterranean option, which still appears unfocussed today, is based on common cultural roots, on consensus instead of divergence, on dialogue instead of cultural conflict. As a foreign observer of Israel's quest for identity and consensus — I believe that Israel's future is linked to the Mediterranean dimension that [29] embraces the East and the West, while offering a chance for acculturation and dialogue and mutual nurturing.
And similarly, the eminent Israeli poet Meir Wieseltier (2001) concluded his lecture entitled 'Being Mediterranean — A Threat, A Hope or A Refuge?' as follows:
Our geopolitical and geocultural location governs the nature of our attachments. Israel was never the fifty-somethingth state of the United States of America, as the old dream of some fools in the Israeli élites would have it. And woe be unto us if we see ourselves as the carrier of American aircraft stationed in the eastern Mediterranean! The constant development of Israel's Mediterranean identity from all points of view — economic, political and cultural — is a vital necessity for the future of this state. And first of all, we have to accept our affinity with the region and with the Mediterranean wholeheartedly. We must treat it seriously. And until this miracle occurs, we have much work to do in the sphere of culture and cultural dialogue.
The appearance of the Mediterranean option in the Israeli discourse in the 1990's was not new. Already in the late 1950's the essayist and writer Jacqueline Kahanoff (1917—1979) was the forerunner of the Mediterranean identity in Israel. Her early polyphonic voice, Levantine option and multicultural vision were a unique example of a woman providing an avant-garde declaration in the Israeli public sphere. Ka-hanoff captured the essence of Israel's Mediterranean option in symbiotic terms: 'Israel's situation is unique, because this process of cross-influence and cross-mutation takes place in the same country which is Levantine with regard to its geographical position between East and West, and because of the mixture of its population.' (Ohana 2006,243.)
notes
1 Spatial Identity: Israeli Culture in the Mediterranean Basin; An international conference held at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 4 April 2001.
[30]	2 David Ben-Gurion in a letter to George Antonius (Ben-Ami 1998, 331).
3 Ha'aretz, 11 August 1999; see also the advice of Runciman (1951—1954).
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Crossing Boundaries in Late Medieval Mediterranean Iberia: Historical Glimpses of Christian-Islamic Intercultural Dialogue
ROSER SALICRU I LLUCH
Institucio Milà i Fontanals — csic, Spain
although many of the terms and concepts we use to define processes and phenomena in contemporary society can be applied to past situations, a mere mechanical transposition without any necessary contextualization, can easily lead to analytical and interpretative anachronisms. In late medieval Mediterranean Iberia, the internal connections between Christians and Muslims generated transverse figures who were able to cross religious and cultural boundaries in order to facilitate contacts and exchanges, and these people may also be considered as examples of historical intercultural dialogue. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, they approached the 'Other' for intellectual reasons and with true convictions or a predisposition to dialogue. They did it merely on a pragmatic level. Hence, inter-cultural contacts and the crossing of boundaries did not necessarily entail understanding or dialogue. However, these people represented the first step toward getting to know and being able to understand and accept the 'Other'.1
introduction Although many of the terms and concepts we use to define processes and phenomena in contemporary society may be applied to past situations, their mere mechanical transposition, without any contextual-ization, can easily lead to the slippery ground of false presentism, and even to analytical and interpretative anachronisms.
During the mediaeval times the Mediterranean was, just as it is now, a privileged place where meetings and exchange, contacts and interaction between cultures, languages and religions took place. Yet, at the same time, the Mediterranean was, and almost consubstantially,
a place of conflict and hostilities. Indeed, in the mediaeval Mediterranean, conflict and confrontation versus coexistence and communication have to be seen as two complementary realities, inseparable and in no way exclusive: sides of the same coin.
[34] As regards relations between the Christian Mediterranean and the Islamic Mediterranean in the Middle Ages, it is obvious that, traditionally, historians have always placed more emphasis on the negative aspect of the contact and not on its positive derivations. And indeed we have to admit that the evidence of contact that has remained through documents in archives is in the main fundamentally negative. However, we must bear in mind that even nowadays, with respect to any area or aspect of contemporary life, what generates news, concerns and information in the media are above all reports on incidents and disruptions and not on the (supposed) regular and peaceful flow of everyday life.
Thus, to give one example, sources of a marked political-diplomatic nature, like those from the chancellery of the old Crown of Aragon, present us with a number of examples of acts of piracy perpetrated by the Muslims from North Africa and Granada towards Christian subjects. At first sight and without a proper interpretation, they may hide from us the regular pattern of shipping marked precisely by commercial exchanges that, in spite of suffering interference, were assiduous and sustained. However, regardless of whether the complaints were made by Christians or Muslims, close inspection of this negative evidence — the accusations of piracy — may in fact turn out to be extremely valuable examples of positive contacts, such as mercantile relations (clear examples in Sanchez Martinez 1988; Salicru i Lluch 2002—2003).
And so it is that in study of any kind of boundary and any type of relationship between disparate realities, and, consequently, between Christians and Muslims in the late mediaeval Mediterranean, what often defines the nature of contacts that come to light may owe more to the wishes of a researcher and to the objectives he or she is pursuing when questioning, interpreting and weighing up the sources, than to the sources themselves. In other words, seeing the bottle half full or half empty depends, almost always, on the point of view an individual has taken.
PARALLEL SOCIETIES, TRANSVERSE FIGURES The so called 'Three culture myth' that has been claimed, above all, for Andalusia and Castile in the Middle Ages, refers to a view as idyllic as it is unreal, of the supposed internal harmonic coexistence of Christians, Jews and Muslims (Fanjul 2000). In some cases tolerance, [35] cooperation and friendship may have been apt descriptions but although spaces of social intersection between these worlds in supposed coexistence might have existed, it is more suitable to talk of 'parallel societies' (Burns 1996, 17—22)2 and of possible shared spaces, in any case interstitial.
In both the Crown of Aragon and in Castile and Portugal, the Mudejars were, collectively, a segregated and discriminated minority (Ferrer i Mallol 1987; Barros 1998; 2007; Echevarria Arsuaga 2000). Nevertheless, there did exist a Mudejar elite — although this has been disputed (Molénat 2001) —, an elite that came into being due to its position within the bosom of the Islamic community and as a result of its privileged contacts with the dominant Christian society.
Despite the fact that the roles of the rulers and the ruled were always clearly defined, the parallel societies were also, at the same time, frontier societies, though in this case the frontiers were not external frontiers between countries but internal Christian-Islamic and/or Islamic-Christian boundaries.
Like any frontier situation, this internal hinge generated transverse or even trans-frontier figures. Figures who, in short, though they may have come from, belonged to and even been active in one of the two realities, they were nevertheless ambidextrous and, therefore, able to do well in both worlds.
Nowadays a cultural mediator has become an almost inescapable figure in trying to guarantee a correct understanding of immigrants and their suitable relationship as individuals with the institutions and realities of their host country. Yet in the past the groups that, in a more generalised way, moved between neighbouring worlds (such as diplomats, merchants or pilgrims) also needed to be helped by or resort to mediators in order to be able to shape these contacts.
It is these transverse figures, often almost anonymous, that I would like to mention here as an example of what we might without doubt
consider as an important part of true cultural dialogue in history. Practical, not theoretical dialogue, active not philosophical, a dialogue carried out day after day by figures who filter through in the small print, almost invisible and who went virtually unnoticed in the past [36] endeavours of real contacts between Christians and Muslims that are reflected in the documentary sources kept in archives and who, on the other hand, barely poke their heads out among the narrative, literary and philosophical tracts.
They are therefore figures whose reality and everyday life we can only see by reading the archival documents, and which are therefore barely taken into account when one writes about intercultural dialogue in historical periods on the basis of philosophical and intellectual texts.
mediators of the word, mediators
of inter-cultural contacts The large print of the Middle Ages, and most particularly the large print of mediaeval Mediterranean Iberia, allows us to point to some emblematic figures who were characterised by an approach to the 'Other' with the wish to understand him; or, at least, to be able to talk to him, possessing first-hand knowledge of his arguments and his intellectual wherewithal. These figures demonstrate that, in thought or in practice, Christian views of Islam were not monolithic. Moreover, in some cases, they reveal that there was a true desire for inter-religious dialogue, although, in the final analysis an eagerness to preach and convert prevailed in that desire for dialogue and understanding.
At the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, the Florentine Dominican friar Riccoldo de Monte Croce, while resident in Baghdad, learnt Arabic to be able to gain direct access to the Qur'an (Monte Croce 1986; 1997). Some decades before, Ramon Llull, the self-proclaimed Christianus Arabicus and a clear example of the meeting of cultures (Raimundus 2007), who has even been considered by some to be the greatest representative of inter-religious dialogue in the Middle Ages (Fidora 2003, 232), learnt the language without leaving his native Majorca from one of previously mentioned anonymous transverse figures, a Muslim slave held captive on the island. Some decades later, another 'Catalan of Majorca', the Franciscan Anselm Turmeda, crossed the line
of no return when he converted to Islam in Tunis, becoming Abdallah al-Taryuman. In his case, he mastered Arabic perfectly in just one year, as a result of the many and continual occasions he had working as an interpreter between Christians and Muslims at the Hafsid customs post (Epalza 1971; 2004).	[37]
Monte Croce, in the Middle East, and Llull and Turmeda, in the Western Mediterranean are extraordinary examples and singular figures of inter-cultural and inter-religious dialogue. They in one way or another, out of their own free will, learnt Arabic and were thus able to get on with or relate to the 'Other' autonomously. Nevertheless, most of the people who came into contact with the 'Other', with any 'Other', needed (at least initially) to resort to interpreters.
The chief advice given in the 14th century by Francesco Balducci Pegolotti's Pratica della mercatura to merchants wishing to travel to Cathay following the land route that started from the Black Sea was that they should equip themselves in Tana with a good interpreter regardless of the expense, since the difference in price between a good interpreter and a bad one was more than compensated for by the quality of his services (Pegolotti 1970, 21—2). Similarly, at the end of the 15th century the account of the Flemish merchant Anselmo Adorno's pilgrimage to the Holy Land points out that the greatest precaution that had to be taken before crossing the desert was to have a good guide and interpreter, loyal and prudent, and that for such services it was necessary to pay whatever the price asked for (Heers and de Groer, 1978, 211-3).
Whether or not the interpreter was trustworthy or deceitful in his dealings, not having a good one was a cause of inconvenience and problems. At times, it was a case 'only' of problems with communication and comprehension. Thus, while in the middle of the 13th century in Tartary, William of Rubruck had to interrupt a theological debate about divinity he had begun with some Mongolian Buddhists because the interpreter was unable to translate their reasoning and, weary, he told him to be quiet (Gil 1993, 348), two hundred years later, in Florence, an Armenian interpreter's ignorance prevented Poggio Bracci-olini from asking a Nestorian from Upper India the right questions. The Armenian interpreter knew Turkish and Latin, however, about
customs, rites, plants and animals - the things Poggio Bracciolini was interested in — the interpreter was able to speak only in his own language. Nor could Poggio Bracciolini make himself understood to some Ethiopians, as his interpreter knew only Arabic (Poggio Bracciolini [38] 2004, 164—5; Le Voyage 2004, 121). In similar fashion, at the beginning of the 15th century, Gadifer de la Salle regretted not having available a good interpreter when he disembarked at the island of El Hierro, in the Canaries, since, according to him if he had had one, he would have been able to obtain what he wanted from the natives (Pico, Aznar and Corbella 2003, 77).
Elsewhere, on the other hand, the lack of linguistic ability had real side effects. The Egyptian traveller Abd al-Basit tells of an example in Tunis at the beginning of the 15th century, in which, following the arrival of a Christian ship loaded with Muslim captives, all of whom were ransomed except one. This prisoner turned out to be a good Muslim of Turkish stock, originally from Astrakhan, who spoke Turkish and had mastered 'the language of the Franks' to perfection since he had been a captive among them for over twenty-five years. But, as he knew not a single word of Arabic, upon being interrogated, he was unable to make himself understood and was therefore taken for a Christian (Brunschvig 1936, 73).
The acquisition of a good mastery of languages that in the main might facilitate communication with the Muslims, and the mastery of Arabic in particular,3 was not within everyone's grasp, so that the groups who had most dealings with them inevitably had to resort to interpreters. Interpreters who were habitually transverse figures, and acted not only as mediators of the word but, if they carried out their duties properly, also acted as cultural mediators (Salicru i Lluch 2005a).
Those who acted as linguistic mediators and at the same time as mediators in all kinds of inter-cultural contacts were usually a part, in one way or another, of the reality of the frontier or areas where people speaking different languages lived. For the frontier lands were 'the natural home of interpreters and translators' (Bischoff 1961, 211), as it was easier for people to be polyglot. Specially, of course, those who belonged to ethnic, religious and/or cultural minorities placed within other realities, namely, in parallel societies like the Jews or Catalan-Aragonese Mudejars.4
However, linguistic ability was not enough nor did it guarantee, by any means, good mediation. First and foremost it had to be backed by a complete belief in the mediator by all sides.
Rubruck, who was already suspicious of a certain Mongolian interpreter, especially after realising that in the interpreter's mouth, a [39] long digression was reduced to a few words, upon learning a little of the language later discovered that the Mongolian was translating exactly the opposite of what he was saying (Gil 1993,311,315). In the early decades of the 16th century, two Canadian Indians who had been taken to France to be acculturated so they could act as interpreters ended up exploiting the cultural codes they had acquired for their own benefit (Gomez-Geraud 1987,328).
Therefore, both Islamic and Iberian Christian powers tried to make the agents mediating in political and diplomatic relations generate the same trust in the receiver that the transmitter was conveying to them. Hence, they chose their messengers and ambassadors conscientiously and deliberately.
From the Crown of Aragon, the diplomatic agents bound for Granada and North Africa were recruited firstly from among the royal officials with posts linked to the frontier and who, as a result, were used to making contacts with Muslims or Mudejars, a practice that, everything seems to indicate, the authorities of Granada also adopted in some cases (Salicru i Lluch 2005a, 428—30). Secondly agents were also chosen from among merchants with interests in the Islamic countries or those established in them. These people therefore already knew the ways, customs and possibly the language of Muslims, and were in addition to this in good relations with the authorities (Salicru i Lluch 2005a, 430—2). Thirdly, interpreters were also at first Jews, because of their proximity to power and their linguistic skills (Assis 1997; Salicru i Lluch 2005a, 433), and then Mudejars (Salicru i Lluch 2005a, 432— 6; Salicru i Lluch, forthcoming a) — that is, they were chosen from among the people of the same religion as those the embassies were sent to. Bearing in mind that the interpreters had to deal with people of the same religion for whom they undoubtedly felt emotional ties, the issuing authorities had to know their emissaries well enough to be certain of their loyalty and not run the risk of betrayals like those of Rubruck and of the Canadian Indian interpreters in relation to
the French. In the same way, the Islamic powers on numerous occasions chose Christian merchants and mercenaries established in their domains as emissaries. (Salicru i Lluch 2005a, 436—8). They chose Christians worthy of their own trust and who, due to their religious [40] identity, also earned the trust among Christian authorities.
Cultural proximity with the interlocutor and the trust of the sender in the mediator's ability to arouse and appeal to the complicity and empathy of the receiver were thus determining factors in the choice of translators, messengers and ambassadors. And, therefore, in order to try to get more out of the negotiations, the tendency was always to look for affinity and cultural mediation over capability and linguistic mediation proper — although both very often went hand in hand (Salicru i Lluch 2005a).5
CROSSING boundaries: HISTORICAL GLIMPSES
of intercultural dialogue Whether Christians or Muslims, many of these transverse figures may be considered perfect historical examples of intercultural dialogue. Because, apart from the consideration of what unhampered contact with the 'Other' might represent, or what might be ground-breaking and extraordinary about such a contact, they experienced it and almost naturally made it come easy, as part of their being and their reality, without this causing them any problems.
The micro-societies of Christian merchants and mercenaries established in North Africa must have been at least minimally acculturated. Grouped together in Tunis, and in the words of Anselmo Adorno, under the name of 'Christians of the rabat' or area outside the walls, in the second half of the 15th century, 'they could not be distinguished in any way from the Moors, either by the language, or by the customs and ways of life, [...] despite the fact they observed the Christian faith' (Heers and de Groer 1978, 108—9). Although we know that the Christian mercenaries established in Islamic countries took with them Christian women from their own place of origin (Salicru i Lluch 2002a, 427—33), we may also attest to the fact that, at least in Tunis, halfway through the 15th century, the Christians living there used to marry Muslim women as well in order to escape from in-breeding (Salicru
i Lluch 2005b, 189—90). And possibly due to this, whether across the internal boundary or across the external, we can find Christian interpreters like Manuel de Atienza, for whom we are sure that 'the African language was virtually their mother tongue' (Salicru i Lluch 2005a, 424), or like the Arabic-speaking Christian trusted by the Haf- [41] sid monarch who was, upon a visit to Tunis in 1477, asked by the ambassador of Ferdinand of Naples to translate the Neapolitan Peace Proposals (Cerone 1913, 76).
Obviously, neither the internal nor the external boundaries with the 'Other' were completely watertight sealed compartments — they were clearly permeable. However, at the same time, it is also evident that in the Middle Ages neither the reality nor the perception of the contacts with the 'Other' were monolithic and that the view of them depended to a large extent on the proximity and the intensity of the presence of this 'Other' and, therefore, on the greater or lesser everyday nature and habit of relations.
In this respect, theory and practice could easily diverge. Being Aragonese, and therefore coming from lands populated with Mude-jars, where contact with them was continuous, it came as no surprise that Pope Benedict XIII, the last great protagonist of the Western Schism, employed Mudejar craftsmen, architects and builders as a matter of course, regularly and without the slightest qualms for building churches. Something that, despite being the most normal thing in the world in his country, would have been inconceivable in other parts of the Christian Western Mediterranean or even in other parts of the Iberian Peninsula itself. Moreover, Pope Benedict maintained diplomatic contacts with the Nasrid sultanate of Granada (Salicru i Lluch 2005c). None of this, however, prevented him, on an ideological level, from fully sharing the then-prevalent outlook of confrontation, traditional and underlying, inherent in relations between Christians and Muslims.
Although proximity did not necessarily lead to coexistence, it could contribute to tolerance of cohabitation and a minimal knowledge of the 'Other'. Yet distance undoubtedly distorted this knowledge. This can be well seen in the writings of Central and Northern European travellers who, upon visiting the Iberian Peninsula in the second half
of the 15th century, left us with a narrative account of their travels full of distorted reality. This distorted reality was incorporated into their writings which were full of pejorative elements and without the slightest knowledge of what they were talking about, highlighting the [42] point of view of the supposed Islamic influence over people, customs and traditions of all Christian kingdoms on the Peninsula (Salicru i Lluch, forthcoming B).
On the other hand, in the same Iberian ambit there may have been contrasting attitudes towards the contact with Islam (Salicru i Lluch 2006; Salicru i Lluch, forthcoming c), and although, once again, the theory and practice might have been ambivalent or even contradictory, proximity to the 'Other' brought by at least the acceptance of him as a part of the immediate reality.
Mudejar minstrels took an active part in the festivities at the coronation of Ferdinand of Antequera (as Ferdinand I) held in Zaragoza in 1414 (Salicru i Lluch 1995, 754—5), while, at the end of the 15th century, almost all musicians who attended the Corpus Christi procession in Tarazona were Muslims, and not only did they parade with the Christians, they also shared the food that was laid on after the procession with them (Sanz 1935, 66). In Madrid in 1481 were in the same way the Mudejars called upon to add a bit of sparkle to Corpus 'with their games and dances' (Torres Balbas 1954, 79; Echevarria Arsuaga 1999, 70). In Avila in 1474 they attended both the funeral of Henry IV and the proclamation of Isabella the Catholic in the cathedral (Torres Balbas 1954, 41). Further on, in Segovia in 1484, the articles of the confraternity of Saints Eligius and Anthony put down in writing that both Christian and Muslim builders and blacksmiths belonged to it, went to the burials of its members together and also ate there together (Asenjo Gonzales 1984,1—330; Echevarria Arsuaga 1999, 61).
Moreover, it was quite usual, if the occasion so permitted, for Muslim ambassadors from Islamic countries to attend as spectators or to take an active part in all kinds of social and festive events. Once again in 1414 in Zaragoza several ambassadors from Granada were present at the festivities for the coronation of Ferdinand of Antequera, and they even took part, along with the monarch's sons, in the tournaments and jousting that had been organized (Salicru i Lluch 1995,
756; Salicru i Lluch 1998b, 86 ff.). In 1428 in Valencia, other ambassadors from Granada witnessed from a grandstand in the city market jousting and bullfights (Salicru i Lluch 1999, 181). And also on several occasions Muslim ambassadors joined in chivalrous amusements in Castile (Iranzo 1940,109; Arié 1997, 9), while their arrival was often [43] celebrated with banquets in their honour (Iranzo 1940,109; Diez Jorge 2000, 225—6).
In addition, during the 15th century, quite a few Castilian and Catalan-Aragonese knights chose a Muslim monarch, the king of Granada, to be the judge of their duels or pitched battles (Salicru i Lluch 2007, 95—6), a clear example of the lack of prejudice in Christian knightly circles and, at the same time, a patent demonstration of the knowledge the Granadans had of the customs and ways of Christian knights. In this respect, we should also point out the many Central and Northern European nobles and knights-errant who from the last quarter of the 14th century throughout the 15th paid purely courtesy visits 'to exercise chivalry' towards the kings of Granada and towards the monarchs of North African states (Salicru i Lluch 2004; 2007).
Nor should we forget the evident influence that Islamic customs and practices had on knights and on the dress of Iberian knights in general and the Castilians in particular. Similarly to horses, the best adornments and trappings came from Islamic countries, and Christian monarchs did not hesitate to ask for them or order them from their Muslim counterparts. And, just as the Muslim states until the beginning of the 15th century trusted the Christian militias in their service (Salicru i Lluch 2002a), the Castilian kings also trusted Muslim knights: their 'Moorish Guard' in the 15th century being a perfect example (Echevarria Arsuaga 2006).
Although, on and around the frontier, raids and incursions may have been frequent, peace was invariably associated with wealth and prosperity. This was understood by both the Islamic authorities (Peinado Santaella 2005, 466) and the Christian population on the frontier who went so far as to refuse to resume hostilities against Granada, offering the excuse of the damages that war had caused them (Salicru i Lluch 2006, 685). Clearly, in times of peace, any exchange was feasible; from common use of pastureland (Argente del Castillo 1988;
1989; Rodriguez Molina 1996, 517—20) to buying food on the other side of the frontier in order to hold wedding banquets (Salicru i Lluch 1999,365), or even participation in them (Salicru i Lluch 1998b, 433).
However, the best examples of boundary-crossing are people who [44] voluntarily changed their faith. Apostasy, which was often practised among captives and slaves, Christian and Muslim, who tried to improve their living conditions and achieve better integration (Salicru i Lluch 2000), was condemned out of hand. Nevertheless, the examples of voluntary conversion are certainly not a rare sight and, on the Iberian frontiers with Granada, certain practices were even institutionalised in order to try to guarantee the free will of the apostates (Garcia Anton 1980; Rodriguez Molina 1998). For the renegade was a figure anathemised and considered, possibly, the worst thing about the frontier (Bennassar and Bennassar 1989). Yet, in exceptional cases like that of Anselm Turmeda, in charge of the customs post in Tunis, their former fellow Christians could appeal to them to try to get them to intercede on their behalf before the Islamic authorities (Calvet 1914, 52—3).
The conversion of Fra Anselm, which occurred after a profound theological and intellectual reflection, was as exceptional as it was transparent. On the other hand, we can barely sense the reasons for the majority of the conversions we know about, having been made by ordinary people with no formal training or education. Of course, even in the cases of initially forced apostasy, the convert could end up overtaken by conviction (Cabezuelo Pliego 1996). On other occasions, however, boundaries were also crossed without the need to abandon one's own faith. The example of Joana de Rubiols, a Valencian woman accused of having gone to live in Fez because of her love for a Muslim man, is paradigmatic of the grey areas that, in everyday life, arose from the practical echoes of possible intercultural dialogue between the Christians and Muslims in the mediaeval Mediterranean.6
Joana crossed those boundaries and, doubtlessly, got to know and accept the 'Other', but she encountered pressure from her former Christian acquaintances to return to the path of righteousness and from the Muslim ones to renege. People who did business with Islamic lands could establish companies with Mudejars, charter ships
to Muslims from Granada or North Africa, and share with them the confined space on the board of a ship as they sailed together. However, they harboured suspicions that easily came to the surface (Salicru i Lluch 2002b). Both the Muslim refugees from Granada (Salicru i Lluch 1998a) and the Christian European knights-errant (Salicru i [45] Lluch 2004) who wished to visit Islamic countries agreed to let Alfonso the Magnanimous recommend them to North African Islamic sovereigns. And this same king, from his court in Naples, could ask to be sent a craftsman from Granada or Cordoba, working in gold on leather, to be taken into his service, regardless whether the craftsman was a Muslim, Mudejar or Christian (Salicru i Lluch 1999,337).
conclusion
To speak of the existence of intercultural dialogue, in the contemporary sense, in the mediaeval Mediterranean would without doubt be excessive and even anachronistic, because, despite the existence of fluid inter-cultural contacts between Christians and Muslims, the majority of those who crossed boundaries and approached the 'Other' did not do so for intellectual reasons and with a true conviction or predisposition to dialogue but merely on a pragmatic level.
Intercultural contacts and crossing of boundaries — mental ones included — entail neither understanding nor dialogue. But, at least, they constitute, as they did in the Middle Ages, the first step towards getting to know and being able to understand and accept the 'Other'.
notes
1	This article is part of the research project approved and financed by the Spanish Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencia, entitled 'The Crown of Aragon in the Medieval Mediterranean: Bridge between Cultures, Mediator between Christendom and the Islamic World' (hum 200761131).
2	Robert Burns did not use the concept to characterize Christian and Islamic Mudejar societies, but Christian and Jewish societies. Nevertheless, applying it to the relations between Christians and Mudejars (i. e., the Muslims who remained in the Iberian Peninsula after the Christian conquest and who, as a result, were subject to Christian rule) is much more appropriate, seeing as the Mudejar population always far
outnumbered the comparatively small numbers of the Jewish population. For the Kingdom of Valencia, for example, it is calculated that, in the middle of the 15th century, the Muslim and Arabic-speaking population may still have constituted a third of the total and that, at the beginning of the 16th century, in some regions or places, the Muslims may have exceeded and even doubled the numbers of Christians (Barcelo Torres 1984, 68—9).
3	We must not forget, however, that similarly the Christian world, dar al-Islam was not monolingual, and a lack of comprehension was possible between Muslims, too. The captive in Tunis is a good example of this, but Abd al-Basit gives us another one, perhaps more significant: one night, sailing near Bugia on board a Genoese ship, he and other Muslim merchants went on land and came across a group of Berbers who lived in the area; the Berbers, upon seeing them, thought they were Christian pirates dressed as Muslims who wanted to capture them. In order to show them that they were good Muslims and to identify themselves, Abd al-Basit and his companions shouted at them in Arabic the double profession of Islamic faith, however, as the Berbers only knew their own language and were unable to tell Arabic apart from Latin languages they ran away frightened. On the following day, the news spread around that some Christians had landed in disguise and tried to capture Muslims (Brunschvig 1936, 135—6). The travels of Ibn Bat-tuta also offer various examples of linguistic communication problems and a need for translators between Muslims, for example, in Turkey (Ibn Battuta 1981, 401—2).
4	This minority accounts for some of the best examples of acculturation, inter-culturality or even trans-culturality. For example, a story of a Mudejar in Valencia who was arrested in 1418, and accused of breaking into a Mercedarian monastery and of taking the monstrance with seven consecrated wafers after killing two friars. Apparently, he was able to pass himself off as both a Muslim and a Christian. When he was arrested, he said he was a Christian, but there were witnesses who claimed that he had a house and two wives in the lands of the Nasrid sultanate of Granada and that, while he was there, he dressed like a Moor and said his prayers with the Muslims. In addition to that they said that when this same man entered Christian lands, he dressed as a Christian and used a Christian name, which made it easy for him to commit crimes with impunity (Salicru i Lluch 2005a, 425—6).
5	Diplomacy and embassies were undoubtedly, and in many ways, the expression and the structuring of intercultural contacts, for example,
even with regard to the exchange of presents and gifts (Salicru i Lluch
2007).
6 Archive of the Crown of Aragon, Chancellery, register 2387, folio 51r,
and register 2389, folios 12r—13r, 13r and 13% November 2 1414. Montblanc.
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The Challenges of Intercultural Legal Communication
ALENKA KOCBEK
University of Primorska, Slovenia
INTERCULTURAL LEGAL COMMUNICATION occurs among different legal systems using different languages and thus has to take into account the specific demands applying to legal translation. As this kind of communication generally follows a clearly defined purpose, it would certainly benefit from the application of the functionalist approaches to translation. Yet, an indiscriminate application of the principle of cultural embeddedness, i. e. linking the language to the corresponding culture, may prove questionable. In intercultural legal transactions, e. g. international contracts, where only one legal system is defined as the governing law, it may only be applied on the linguistic and not on the cultural (legal) level. Moreover, the level of translatability of legal concepts depends on the relatedness of the legal systems and not of the languages involved. This paper proposes a strategy addressed at the specific requirements of legal translation.
INTRODUCTION This paper addresses some specific problems arising in the area of intercultural legal communication. The international legal community is the meeting place for experts from different countries, who establish relationships and conduct legal operations. To enable communication across language and cultural barriers either the language of one of the communicating parties or a third neutral language alien to them, but adopted as a common means of communication — a lingua franca, has to be agreed upon. In any case, such communication will involve a certain extent of implicit or explicit translating and interpreting.
THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR TRANSLATION IN LEGAL SETTINGS Considering the specific character of legal translation, which according to the requirements of the legal environment generally follows a clearly
defined purpose, the functionalist approaches to translation, especially the skopos theory by H. Vermeer and K. Reiß (1984), seem to provide an adequate theoretical framework for this specific area of translation. In this respect, the sphere of legal translation would certainly benefit [54] from a consistent application of the guidelines of the skopos theory, such as the importance of a clearly stated purpose of the translation, which Vermeer terms skopos (Greek for aim or purpose), which in turn defines the translation techniques and strategies to be used for producing a functionally appropriate translation. Moreover, a precise and complete translation brief/commission could contribute considerably to raising the translation quality and functionality by indicating the intended target-text function, the receiver(s), the prospective time, place and motive of production and reception of the text, etc. (Nord 1997,137).
If according to Vermeer translation is seen as an intercultural transfer, where both the source and the target language are embedded in their corresponding cultures, it follows that the translator needs to be an intercultural expert, capable of following Nord's guideline that 'translating means comparing cultures' (1997,34), i. e. interpreting source culture phenomena in the light of one's own knowledge of both the source and target culture for target culture receivers. If we consider the legal system an essential part of a culture, which is confirmed by Vermeer's definition of culture, i. e. 'the entire setting of norms and conventions an individual as a member of his society must know in order to be "like everybody" — or to be able to be different from everybody' (1987, 28), which evokes several generally adopted definitions of law and legal systems, we see that a legal translator needs to be an interdisciplinary expert with thorough knowledge of the legal systems involved in translation.
However, given the specific nature of legal language and the requirements applying to legal communication, the functionalist guideline, according to which language has to be linked to, i. e. embedded in the corresponding culture, in this case in the corresponding legal system, may prove questionable. Legal systems exist independently from the legal languages they use and are created through social and political circumstances. There is no direct correlation between legal languages and legal systems. One legal system may use different legal languages
(Canada, Switzerland, bilingual areas in Slovenia, Austria, Italy, Belgium, etc.), while one language area may be divided into different legal systems, as is the case in the United Kingdom or in the USA (Kocbek 2006, 239). House distinguishes between languages for communication and languages for identification, i. e. languages used for interpersonal exchange [55] across cultures and for expressing one's identity as a member of a particular cultural community (House 2001). On this account it can be argued that the legal language used in expert legal communication illustrates the former of these two functions. In legal settings, professionals use legal language in order to become members of an international community of experts and to communicate with other members of such a community in the language (i. e. register) of that community about topics of common concern. The function of the languages for identification and their relationship to culture are fundamentally different and should be viewed in the light of other areas of expertise such as socio-anthropological and ethno-linguistics, which undoubtedly shed more light onto the complex interrelatedness of language and culture. However, dealing with these aspects does not fall into the scope of this research, which takes the perspective of legal linguistics and translation science applied to legal communication.
In legal communication, the legal systems involved will be considered as the decisive elements of culture affecting communicative practices. In some situations, e. g. when translating within a multilingual legal system (the Swiss, Canadian, or the Slovene legal system in force in bilingual regions) or in legal transactions, such as international contracts, where the parties agree upon the clause on the governing law, only one legal system is adopted as the communication framework. In this respect, when translating, the principle of cultural embeddedness may only be applied with respect to purely linguistic aspects of the text, whereas on a wider scale, i. e. considering the cultural foundation of the text (the legal system), the source and the target text will have the same cultural reference.
In this context, legal transactions conducted in a linguafranca present a specific problem, as in this case there is no direct correlation between the language used in the communication and the underlying culture(s) intended as legal system(s).
THE SPECIFIC NATURE OF LEGAL LANGUAGE Legal language is characterized by certain specific features. Unlike language in general use in its most obvious function, it does not merely convey knowledge and information but it directs, affects and modifies [56] people's behaviour (e. g. through statutes, court decisions, contracts) and as such contributes to creating and expressing the norms in force in different societies. Furthermore, it has an explicit performative character. No other sphere of language use better renders the idea first proposed by J. L. Austin (1962) in his speech acts theory that by speaking, i. e. using language, we achieve effects and generate consequences in the surrounding world. The legal language used to pronounce judgements in courts, impose obligations and confer rights, grant permission, express prohibition, etc. provides indisputable evidence of its performative power.
Law as a system of rules is bound to language for expressing and enforcing them and is, in a way, limited by it. Accordingly, legal language has to provide targeted linguistic instruments by means of which the specific requirements of legal communication can be met. Some of these linguistic features are common to most legal languages, whereas others are language- and culture-specific and thus have a decisive impact on legal translation.
As a technical language, every legal language has a specific vocabulary, which is marked by its complexity and particularity, as it is bound to a specific legal system. In contrast to other sciences and disciplines there is no universal legal language, describing and expressing universal concepts, such as e. g. in mathematics or medicine. Cao (2007, 23) argues that every legal language reflects the history, evolution and culture of the corresponding legal system. Each society has its own legal concepts, legal norms and ways of applying its laws. According to Sarcevic (1997, 13) each national law represents an independent system with its own terminological apparatus, the underlying conceptual basis, rules of classification, sources of law, methodological approaches and socioeconomic principles.
De Groot points out that the crucial issue to be taken into consideration when translating legal concepts is the fact that 'The language of the law is very much a system-bound language, i. e. a language re-
lated to a specific legal system. Translators of legal terminology are obliged therefore to practice comparative law.' (1998, 21 ff.)
Every state (sometimes even regions within a state) has developed independent legal terminologies, whereas a multilingual international legal terminology is only being created gradually within international [57] (such as the UN International Law) or supranational legal systems (such as the European Union, where it is being introduced in single areas of the eu as they undergo harmonisation).
Zweigert and Kötz (1992) group legal systems on the basis of their historical development, the distinctive mode of legal thinking, the distinctive legal institutions, the sources of law and their treatment, as well as the ideology. They thus distinguish eight major legal families: the Romanistic, Germanic, Nordic, Common Law, Socialist, Far Eastern Law, Islamic and Hindu Laws (1992, 68—72). The two most influential legal families nowadays are the Common Law ad the Civil Law (i. e. the Romano-Germanic) families, to which 80% of the countries of the world belong. The Common Law family includes England and Wales, the usa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, some of the former colonies of England in Africa and Asia such Nigeria, Kenya, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, while the Civil Law countries include France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Latin American countries, Turkey, some Arabic states, North African countries, Japan and South Korea. Some legal systems are hybrids created through the mixed influence of the Common Law and the Civil Law, e.g. Israel, South Africa, the Province of Quebec in Canada, Louisiana in the u S, Scotland, the Philippines and Greece. According to Cao the law of the eu is also to be classified as a mixed jurisdiction (2007, 25).
When translating between different legal systems or families, the re-latedness of legal systems, rather than the relatedness of the languages involved in translation, will determine the level of translatability of legal concepts. According to de Groot (1992, 293—7) the possible situations are: (1) the legal systems and the languages concerned are closely related, e. g. between Spain and France, or between Slovenia and Croatia, therefore translating will be relatively easy; (2) if the legal systems are closely related, but the languages are not, e. g. translating between Dutch laws in the Netherlands and French laws, this task will not in-
volve extreme difficulties; (3) if the legal systems are different but the languages are related, e. g. translating German legal texts into Dutch or vice versa, the difficulty will be considerable, especially as this related-ness of languages implies the risk offalse friends; (4) the most difficult [58] task is translating between unrelated legal systems, as well as languages, e. g. translating Common Law texts from English into Slovene.
I believe, however, that de Groot's categorization of translational situations fails to identify another possible scenario and would thus need to be expanded by adding a further possible situation, i. e. translating between legal systems which are relatively related (e. g. German and Slovene, both belonging to the Civil Law family), but using a linguafranca bound to a legal system, which is in fact not relevant to the communication and may even be fundamentally unrelated to the legal systems of the communicating parties, as it is often the case with English used as lingua franca. This situation involves specific problems and requires a selective application of the principle of cultural embedded-ness. The cultural specifics of the lingua franca may therefore be taken into consideration on the syntactical, pragmatic and stylistic levels, whereas on the lexical level there is a risk of introducing terms and thus concepts stemming from the culture/legal system underlying the lingua franca (in the case of English the Anglo-American, i. e. the Common Law legal system), which are alien to the communicating parties and their legal systems and may as such prejudice communication.
In this context Weisflog (1987) speaks of the 'system gap' existing between legal systems, which in turn results in the gap dividing legal languages. The wider the system gap, the higher the degree of transla-tional difficulty.
Apart from the (un)relatedness of the legal systems involved in translation, other aspects of the source and target languages will have to be considered, such as the specific syntax, pragmatics and style of the individual legal languages. Legal language is generally characterized by its formal and impersonal style, as well as by the complexity and length of sentences and structures, which reflect the complexity of the subject matters rendered. Bhatia (1997) argues that the extensive use of conditions, qualifications and exceptions for expressing complex contingencies creates barriers to effective understanding
for ordinary readers and thus makes the translator's task all the more difficult.
In addition to the universal features described above, each legal language has its own syntactical characteristics. German legal texts, for instance, are characterized by an extensive use of the passive voice and [59] impersonal verb forms, multiple attributive adjectives, etc., whereas legal English uses complex structures, multiple negations, prepositional phrases and passive voice as well (cf. Cao 2007, 21).
Due to its performative nature, legal language in general uses structures which enable the performing of specific speech acts — establishing obligations, conferring rights, granting permission, expressing prohibition, etc. Documents such as statutes, contracts, wills are speech acts per definitionem and one of their distinguishing linguistic features is the use of performative markers, such as the use of the modals 'shall' (to express obligation) and 'may' (to grant permission, express rights) in English and performative verbs such as 'declare', 'adjudge', 'pronounce', 'undertake', 'bind oneself', assume '(the obligation/liability)', 'grant', 'confer', etc., and their corresponding translations in other languages (cf. Cao 2007, 21—2).
A further feature of legal language is its predominantly impersonal style. More specifically, the style of an individual language reflects the corresponding legal culture and logic. De Cruz (1999, 91) states, for example, that the style of German legal texts reflects the systematic and logical development of German law using an abstract conceptual language, based on highly-abstract, system-oriented, deductive thinking, which is not intended to be comprehensible to the layperson, but is meant to be read by experts who can appreciate 'its precision and rigour of thought' (Zweigert and Kötz 1992, 150). With regard to the style of legislative drafting, Tetley (2000, 703) defines the style of Civil Law codes and statues as concise, while he describes the style of the Common Law statutes as precise. The legal English used in Common Law texts is based on inductive thinking and on an empirical approach to legal problems, which is intended to restrict interpretation possibilities to the minimum. For instance, the style of English/American contracts is characterized by wordy, lengthy sentences and the use of word strings, i. e. a number of words with similar meanings, such as 'null and
void', 'give, devise and bequeath', 'costs, charges and expenses', which often present problems when they have to be translated into a target language which may lack the exact corresponding synonyms and thus they are rendered by a single term or shorter structures. In this respect [60] Hill and King (2004) in their study 'How Do German Contracts Do as Much with Fewer Words', in which they compare German and American business contracts, argue that German agreements are usually only one-half or two-thirds the size of comparable u s agreements made for the same or similar purposes.
the gaps between legal systems and their
effect on translation When translating between legal systems, i. e. from one legal language into another, the gaps between the legal systems, as well as the characteristics of the legal languages on the lexical, syntactical, pragmatic and stylistic level have to be taken into account. The existing gaps between different legal systems certainly affect the lexical aspect of translation, i. e. the translatability of terms from/into different legal languages, as due to the differences between legal systems there might be no (complete) equivalence between legal concepts.
An example of the gap between legal systems, which in turn results in the lack of equivalence between the corresponding terms and concepts, is provided by the two major legal families of the contemporary world, i. e. continental and common law. The dichotomy between these two major legal systems mainly affects three terminological areas (cf. Cao 2007, 60 ff.), i. e. the terms used to define different types of legal professions, the terminology used to render different court structures and the specific terms referring to particular areas of law and institutions.
In the area of legal professions, the legal professional licensed by the state to advise clients in legal matters and represent them in the court of law, who is called Rechstanwalt in German, avvocato in Italian, odvetnik in Slovene and has a basic role in every continental legal system, has no direct equivalent in the Anglo-Saxon system, as it can be translated as lawyer, counsel, advocate, attorney, solicitor, barrister or counsellor. In the u s, lawyers are generally referred to as lawyer and attorney, or more
formally attorney-at-law and they may all plead cases in the courts of the states in which they are admitted. In the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and several other common law jurisdictions the lawyers are either barristers (authorized to appear in a superior court, i. e. to argue cases) or solicitors (who generally advise clients and may only appear in [61] an inferior court), while in Scottish law the term used is advocate. In England, some other Commonwealth countries and former colonies, barristers are further divided into senior and junior counsels, where senior counsels are barristers appointed to the British crown and, when the sovereign is a woman, they are conferred the title Queen's Counsel (q c).
Another area in which terminological problems occur due to differences in the legal system is the terminological sphere referring to judicial officers. In England and Australia the terms Judge and Justice, as well as Magistrate (for magistrate courts) are used. In Germany and Slovenia, however, there is a distinction between professional judges, who are trained as lawyers and are called Richter in German and sodnik in Slovene, and honorary judges, who are lay judges appointed to assist professional judges and are termed Schöffe in German and porotnik in Slovene and have no functional equivalent in the Anglo-American legal system.
A further important source of translational difficulties is represented by words used to describe the structure and hierarchy of courts. In English common law jurisdiction two words are used to refer to courts: the general term court and a narrower term tribunal, which refers to panels and bodies that exercise administrative or quasi-judicial functions with limited or special jurisdictions, whereas in German and Slovene only one term is used (i.e. Gericht/sodišce). In England, the court hierarchy comprises the House of Lords as the ultimate appellate court, the Supreme Court of Judicature, the Court of Appeal, the High Court of Justice, the Crown Court, the County Courts and the Magistrates Courts. This structure is hardly comparable with, for instance, the German court hierarchy which includes four hierarchical court levels: das Amtsgericht, das Landesgericht, das Oberlandesgericht and, as the ultimate appellate court, the Bundesgerichtshof. The Slovene court system is similar to the German one (the corresponding courts being okrajno, okrožno, višje and vrhovno sodišče), but as most court systems of continen-
tal law countries bears little resemblance to the common law court structure.
The last sphere where the lack of equivalence between the terms and concepts of various continental legal systems and those pertain-[62] ing to common law is strongly felt is represented by the terminology used to define various specialized fields of law and institutions. Within the continental legal family the same major branches of law are found in all countries: constitutional law, administrative law, public international law, criminal law, the law of procedure, civil law, commercial law and labour law. This division is also to be found at lower levels, referring to institutions and concepts. However, if these domains of law and the corresponding institutions are compared to those of the common law legal systems, many conceptual and structural differences are identified. For instance, there are institutions in continental law which are completely alien to common law, such as cause, abuse of right, the direct action, the oblique action, the extent of strict liability in tort, etc. On the other hand, there are common law concepts which do not exist in the continental legal systems, such as consideration or estoppel in contract law, or the notion of privity in different legal contexts. A significant example of a broad and extremely significant concept which is fundamental to continental law, especially to the Romano-Germanic legal systems, but has no equivalent in common law is the law of obligations, which has been developed over the centuries on the basis of Roman law elements. Similarly, a part of the English legal structure, i. e. equity, has no exact counterpart in continental law, as most of its concepts and legal rules are unique and have no parallels in any other legal system.
Company law is another field where the lack of equivalence between the two systems is strongly felt. The Anglo-American company law does not distinguish between the categories of Kapitalgesellschaften/società di capitali/kapitalske družbe and Personengesellschaften/società di persone/osebne družbe, but merely between incorporated, which have the status of legal persons, and unincorporated companies, which have no legal personality.
The terms public limited company and limited liability company can be used relatively safely when translating the company forms Aktienge-sellschaft/società per azioni/delniška družba and Gesellschaft mit beschränkter
Haftung/Società a responsabilità limitata/družba z omejeno odgovornostjo, but there are no equivalent terms in the English legal terminology for company forms such as Offene Handelsgesellschaft/società in nome collet-tivo/družba z neomejeno odgovornostjo or Kommanditgesellschaft/società in acco-mandita/komanditna družba.	[63]
Other cases of non-equivalence derive from the fact that two opposite governance systems are applied in public limited companies, namely the Anglo-Saxon one-tier and the continental European two-tier systems. The one-tier system has only one governing body, i. e. the board of directors, whereas in the two-tier system there are two governing bodies, i.e. the management board (Vorstand/consiglio d'amministrazione/uprava) and the supervisory board (Aufsichtsrat/collegio sindacale/nadzorni svet). The terms management board and supervisory board thus do not exist in the Anglo-American legal language and can be classified as neologisms according to de Groot. In practice, the executive (inside) directors have a function similar to the role of the members of the management board in the continental system and the non-executive directors to that of the members of the supervisory board. Similarly, the function of a Prokurist/procuratore commerciale/prokurist (a representative of a company holding a special power-of-attorney, i. e. a procura, authorizing him/her to act on behalf of the company) does not exist in British and American companies and to describe it either the source-language term or a paraphrase has to be used.
The problems deriving from the discrepancy between common law and continental law are also felt within the European Union where English is most often used as lingua franca (cf. Kjaer 1999, 72). When English is used to describe specific aspects and concepts of the European Law or of national legal systems belonging to the continental legal family within the eu, terms are often used, which are tainted by the meaning attributed to them within the Anglo-American legal system. Such terms, tainted by national law, often cause problems in interpreting international or supranational legal texts (cf. de Groot 1992, 283). When for instance the continental concept bona fides is translated into English, most frequently the expression good faith is used, which, however, does not fully render the continental notion. The English concept of good faith excludes negligence, while the continental under-
standing of bona fides often regards gross negligence as the equivalent of bad faith. Moreover, the continental concept covers a wider semantic field and includes confidential relationships and a minimal standard of conduct expected of the parties engaging in commercial transaction [64] (Cao 2007, 57—8).
Thus, according to de Groot, when translating terms/concepts between legal systems, the first stage will involve studying the meaning of the source-language legal term to be translated. Then, after having compared the legal systems involved, a term with the same content must be sought in the target-language legal system, i. e. equivalents for the source-language legal terms have to be found in the target legal language. If no acceptable equivalents can be found due to non-relatedness of the legal systems, one of the following subsidiary solutions can be applied: using the source-language term in its original or transcribed version, using a paraphrase or creating a neologism, i. e. using a term in the target-language that does not form part of the existing target-language terminology, if necessary with an explanatory footnote (cf. de Groot 1998, 25). Mattila (2006, 119 ff.) suggests another quite frequently used translation solution, namely the building of calques and/or borrowed meanings.
Finally, when deciding on the translational solution to be used, the context of the translation, its purpose (skopos) and the character of the text play an important role. A wide range of skopoi is possible: from mere information on the source text for a receiver who does not speak the target language to a translation which will have the status of an authentic text parallel to the source-text, as is the case with international contracts made in two or even more equivalent language versions.
TYPES OF LEGAL TRANSLATION These different purposes of translation are reflected in the type of translation to be produced. Nord classifies translation in two basic types: a documentary translation, i. e. a document in the target language of (certain aspects of) a communicative interaction in which a source-culture sender communicates with a source-culture audience via the source-text under source-culture conditions; or an instrumental translation which aims to produce in the target language an instru-
ment for a new communicative interaction between the source culture sender and the target language audience by using (certain aspects of) the source text as a model (Nord 1997, 47).
For translation in legal settings this classification needs to be further elaborated. Cao thus classifies legal translation into three cate- [65] gories: translation for normative purposes, translation for informative purposes and translation for general legal or judicial purposes (2007, 10—2).
Legal translation for normative purposes actually corresponds to Nord's instrumental translation, as it implies producing translations of domestic laws and international legal instruments in bilingual and multilingual jurisdictions, where the source and the target text have equal legal force. This kind of texts are often drafted in one language version and then translated into another language or languages, but the translation is nonetheless considered an authentic legal instrument and is equally binding as the source text. Examples of such translations are legal texts translated within bilingual/multilingual legislations (such as in Switzerland, bilingual areas of Slovenia, Italy, Belgium, etc.), as well as the multilingual legal instruments of the u N and the e u, but also translations of private documents, such as contracts, which are made in two or more equally authentic language versions, all legally binding.
Following Cao's classification, Nord's category of documentary translation needs to be subdivided into two further subcategories. The first is the legal translation for informative purposes, which has constative or descriptive functions and includes translations of different categories of legal texts (statutes, court decisions, scholarly texts), produced in order to provide information (in the form of a document) to target culture receivers, whereby the translations only have informative value and no legal force. Examples of such translations are often found in monolingual jurisdictions, where texts originating from other jurisdictions are translated in order to serve as a source of information on such jurisdictions (e. g. common law texts translated for continental legal experts or students for study purposes).
The second subcategory is the translation for general or judicial
purposes, where original source language texts are translated to be used in court proceedings as part of documentary evidence. These translations have an informative, as well as descriptive function and may include, apart from legal documents (pleadings, statements of claim, [66] contracts, etc.), ordinary texts such as business or personal correspondence, witness statements and expert reports, etc., which are often not written in legal language by legal professionals, but enter the sphere of legal translation due to the special requirements of legal communication. These translations are meant to be used by parties in proceedings who do not speak the language used in court or by lawyers and/or court officials who need to access the original documents written in a language different from the one used in court.
Experienced translators will usually be able to establish which kind of translation is required in a given legal setting, i. e. identify the skopos, while the relevant information may also be supplied in the translation brief. According to the Skopos theory, the translation brief, i. e. commission can contribute considerably to the quality and functionality of the translation by providing the translator with explicit or implicit information about the intended target-text functions, addressees, the prospective time, place and motive of production and reception of the text (Nord 1997,137). In the case of legal translation, this information should also indicate the legal system to be observed as the communication framework.
a seven stages strategy for translating legal texts
Taking into account the specifics of the above presented communicative situations in legal settings and my own experience, gathered over years of practice as court translator, I became aware of the pitfalls and risks involved in legal translation. I therefore decided to design a trans-lational approach addressing the specific challenges of legal translation. This translational strategy addresses the different aspects and potential problems of legal translation and is aimed at facilitating intercultural contacts in a legal environment. It consists of seven stages each addressing one specific aspect, i. e. problem intrinsic to legal translation and I believe that after due elaboration such a specific strategy could
effectively be incorporated in the training programmes for participants in intercultural legal communication.
Stage 1: Identify the Skopos /Function of the Translation In legal translation, a whole range of skopoi is possible. For instance, the [67] translation of the source text may serve as a basis for a new document to be used in a different (target) legal system, in which case it will have to be adapted to, i. e. embedded into the target legal system. Another possible and quite common situation is that the translation will represent one of two or more language versions of a document having equal value and legal force in a multilingual or international legal setting. The translation of a legal source text may also be made for didactic purposes, i. e. for target culture readers who do not speak the source language to enable them to study the characteristics of the source legal system and language.
Stage 2: Establish the Number of Legal Systems Involved in the Translation When translation occurs within the framework of a multilingual national legal system (as in Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia — into/from minority languages), within an international or supranational legal system such as the un or the eu, or within international legal transactions (such as international contracts, i. e. agreements), where one legal system is explicitly defined and adopted by the parties as the governing law, there is only one legal system involved, i. e. underlying both the source and the target text.
When texts are translated from a source language pertaining to a monolingual source legal system into a target language, i. e. legal system (e. g. Slovene — Croatian), two legal systems will be involved.
Stage 3: Establish the Degree of Relatedness of the Legal Systems Involved Identify the legal families to which the legal systems involved in translation belong and establish their degree of relatedness. Consider that the translatability of legal concepts depends directly on the relatedness of the legal systems and not of the languages involved in translation. In case of unrelated legal systems, you might have to cope with the lack
of equivalence between legal concepts, whereas in the case of related languages beware of the risk of using false friends.
Stage 4: Translate Legal Concepts [68] When translating legal concepts between legal languages and cultures first study the meaning of the source language term within the source legal system, then search for an equivalent in the target legal language by using any available translation tool: dictionaries, glossaries, terminology banks, corpora of related texts or parallel documents (similar to the source language text) in the target language. Sometimes equivalents can be found in the history of a legal language, which was the case with company law terminology in the socialist era in Slovenia. When concepts related to company law, which at that time did not exist in the Slovene legal system, had to be translated, the terminology was drawn from the Slovene legal lexicon used in the period during the wars.
If no equivalents can be found due to the unrelatedness of legal systems, either one of the following three solutions suggested by de Groot (1998, 25) should be applied: using the source-language term in its original or transcribed version, using a paraphrase or creating a neologism (possibly of Latin/Greek origin), i. e. using a term in the target-language that does not form part of the existing target-language terminology, if necessary with an explanatory footnote, or creating a calque or a word with borrowed meaning following Mattila's guidelines.
In this connection, it should be taken into account that when translating into a linguafranca, the terms used might be tainted by the meaning attributed to them in the legal system underlying the legal lingua franca, which might have no connection to the legal systems actually involved in translation.
Stage 5: Define the Terminology for a Specific Legal Operation In order to avoid the risk of introducing non-equivalent terms, 'termi-nologize' the words/phrases to be used in a legal operation. In the case of an agreement or contract, for instance, the meaning of the principle terms to be used in communication can be precisely determined by using the following wording:
For the purpose of this Agreement, the following words and phrases mean the following: Invention Rights means: (1) the discoveries, know-how, information and inventions created by the Inven-tor(s).
[69]
Stage 6: Apply the Culturally Specific Linguistic Features of Target Language Legal Texts In every legal culture there are specific text norms and conventions applying to legal texts on different linguistic levels. The target text should conform to them on the syntactical, pragmatic and stylistic level. For instance, to express an obligation in English legal texts 'shall' is extensively used. When translating an English text into German this structure should be substituted by other equivalent ones, which are typical of the German legal language ('haben + zu + infinitive', the modal verb 'müssen', lexical verbs such as 'sich verplichten', etc.) , whereas in Slovene the most widely used language means to express obligation in contracts are lexical verbs and expressions such as 'obvezati se', 'prevzeti obveznost' and similar.
Stage 7: Provide for the Legal Security of the Target Text Considering the performative nature of legal language, i. e. the fact that utterances in legal texts have a decisive impact on reality, a legal translator has to be aware of the risks implied in legal translation and assume the burden of responsibility for potential consequences of (in)adequate translation. In order to reduce this risk, Sandrini (1999, 39) suggests to follow two guidelines, that is to safeguard the legal security of the target text (by double-checking its legal foundations, consulting experts whenever this is necessary) and ensure the transparency of the translational decisions, i. e. account for the solutions adopted in accordance with the skopos of the translation.
conclusion
The area of legal translation is a highly specialized one, demanding from the translator an interdisciplinary approach which takes into consideration the specifics of legal science, especially the findings of comparative law, as well as the peculiarities of legal language. It thus has to unite translation science with comparative legal science and con-
trastive linguistics. In years of translation practice I became aware of the pitfalls and risks involved in international legal communication and therefore decided to attempt to design a targeted strategy addressing the special requirements of legal translation. In the light of [70] the increasing demand for legal translation, I believe that such specific strategies and techniques could effectively be incorporated in training programmes for legal translators and interpreters. However, given the fact that not only professional translators, but also experts involved in other disciplines related to international business and legal communication need to be able to effectively communicate in matters regarding international legal transactions, they would undoubtedly benefit from acquiring the relevant specialized language and translation skills and developing a higher awareness as to the potential problems of such communication. Therefore, targeted modules on legal translation and strategies could also find their place in non-linguistically oriented educational programmes.
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Cao, D. 2007. Translating law. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
De Cruz, P. 1999. Comparative law in a changing world. London: Cavendish.
Groot de, G.-R. 1992. Recht, Rechtssprache und Rechtssystem: Betrachtungen über die Problematik der Ubersetzung juristischer Texte. Terminologie et Traduction 3:279—316.
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Hill, C. A., and Ch. King. 2004. How do German contracts do as much with fewer words? Chicago-Kent Law Review 79:889—926.
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IATEFL.
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In Übersetzen von Rechtstexten: Fachkommunikation im Spannungsfeld zwischen Rechtsordnung und Sprache, ed. P. Sandrini, 63—79. Tübingen: Narr.
Kocbek, A. 2006. Language and culture in international legal communication. Managing Global Transitions 3 (4): 231—47.
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Nord, Ch. 1997. Translating as a purposeful activity: Functionalist approaches explained. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Reiß, K., and H. J. Vermeer. 1984. Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
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Sarčević, S. 1997. New approach to legal translation. The Hague: Kluwer.
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Weisflog, W. E. 1987. Problems of legal translation. In Swiss reports presented at the Twelfth International Congress of Comparative Law, 179—218. Zürich: Schulthess.
Zweigert, K., and H. Kötz. 1992. An introduction to comparative law. Oxford: Clarendon.
Soft Social Infrastructure as a Multicultural System
ALEXI DAN CHEV
Fatih University, Turkey
soft social infrastructure (ssi) is defined as'being born with the emergence of a social unit and subordinated to unwritten rules of human relations'. The core of this structure is social capital which gives power to ssi to operate and regulate the behaviour of a social unit. An attempt to outline the mechanism of basic ssi components formation in a multicultural setting is presented. It describes a complicated structure, the study of which requires a system approach integrating ssi within the whole social unit as a system. One of crucial problems in creating a contributive and adequately operating ssi is the cultural integration between majority and minority groups. This paper studies ways of integrating minorities with the rest of population and in this way turns them into an indivisible part of society. In order to complete the interaction successfully many conditions have to be fulfilled, including a change in social attitudes towards minorities, a rise in their standard of living, overcoming prejudices towards minorities, etc.
INTRODUCTION The paper is based on the assumption of the existence of two faces of the social unit management: the formal, called hard social infrastructure, set according to the legal rules, whereas the other — informal, which we call soft social infrastructure (ssi) is subordinated to the unwritten rules of human informal relations. The core of this structure is social capital1 which gives power to ssi to operate and regulate the state and behaviour of a social unit.
For this reason, we start with explaining the role of ssi for the development of a unit. We assume sustainability as a desirable element of behaviour and focus on the ways ssi helps it. Our next assumption is that while both infrastructures play the role of feedback steering management, the ssi role is more subtle since it functions as a homeostatic
mechanism that manages inherent stability of sustainable behaviour.
By including ssi in the analysis, we do not only receive a more accurate picture of reality but we have also gained a methodological instrument to reveal two facets of social unit management. One, for-[74] mal and legally determined, which steers the social unit's management in accordance with legal regulations, and the second, informal, based on mutual trust, which complements the formal structure and helps increasing the stability of a social unit. In the past many research papers devoted the major part of their attention to formal structures, therefore the studies on informal structures of management have just started to be made.
Next, we present the result of a study related to the formation of ssi in a multicultural setting, including minority and majority groups. As Seymen (2006) indicates: 'In order to be able to manage cultural diversity in organisations effectively, it is advisable to develop a "cultural diversity management model" peculiar to organisation by considering positive and negative aspects of different perspectives discussed in the study'. Such tasks are easier to realize if the influence of ssi is taken into account. For this reason, we need to first outline the mechanism behind the formation of basic ssi components. As this structure is very complicated, it requires a system approach integrating ssi with the whole social unit. A crucial task needed for the creation of a contributive and adequately operating ssi is cultural integration between majority and minority groups.
ssi as a multicultural structure The starting point is generalised upon the collective identity in Anderson's imagined political community, which permits us to avoid discussing features of real social units. According to Anderson, such a community is imaginary because 'not even the members of the smallest nation shall ever know, meet or hear of the majority of their fellow-members. Nevertheless the image of their close relationship is very much alive in their mind' (Anderson 1991, 5—7).
In cultural aspects, initially there is a homogeneous community. New members with other cultural identities are joining it. Over time this results in the formation of a minority group whose cultural values
differ from the cultural values of a majority group. This causes deformation in social capital and SSI. The way in which social capital is modified in this community defines the efficiency of SSI homeostatic mechanisms. It is reasonable to expect that the formation of minorities perturbs the quality of social capital and, due to cultural differences, [75] destroys the efficiency of SSI. The problem is how minority and majority groups could dynamically interact within the community to avoid distortive effects of cultural differences.
From this perspective, Balkan societies can be used as specific case studies. The multicultural variety of ethnic groups within the Balkans which were defined by Todorova as 'a culturally vibrant region' (Todor-ova 2003) reveals many cases of interaction within a varied multicultural setting. The mechanism behind the formation of social capital in the multicultural setting in the Balkans has very specific features and any attempt at its generalization may lead to the simplification of a complex social and cultural environment, all of which might result in a distorted picture of reality. As Todorova points out, generalizations based on reductionism and stereotyping the Balkans has a long tradition in dominant scholarly discourses (Todorova 1997).
By translating these remarks into the language of the dynamic model of multicultural SSI, and assuming sustainable behaviour as the criterion for optimality, our task is to reveal how minority and majority cultures affect the disturbance of optimal behaviour. Two extremes are possible: no disturbance of optimality within the community, or else a complete diversion from sustainability due to cultural differences.
The solution of a problem in dynamics means that SSI either stays in a sustainable state or moves towards it and cultural differences introducing disturbances are overcome by some terminal date. Cultural integration is used here not in a sense of full acceptance of cultural values by the minority but in an exchange of cultural values between majority and minority in which the system attains sustainability.
These remarks show that having a homogenous SSI is unrealistic in real life and it may not necessarily reach optimality. SSI as a multicultural system may, however, play its feedback role in some sub-optimal conditions, in the so called second-best solution. To explain this we need to introduce additional conditions, such as the change in the so-
cial attitude towards minorities, the rise in their standard of living, overcoming prejudices the society has against them, business ethics, etc. The accumulation of the knowledge of various aspects of these issues 'will reduce misunderstanding, aid in negotiation, and build trust [76] and respect' (Sims 2006) — conditions which are very important in the creation of effective ssi.
The experience of advances and rapidly growing economies indicates that both the creation of new jobs and also investments in areas and regions populated by minorities facilitate interaction between the majority and minority which represents the first step in minority cultural integration. Successful integration greatly depends on the quality of social capital generated in these communities. Social capital represents a precondition for establishing informal links with the rest of the population. The study of social capital is thus of the utmost importance to reveal the mechanisms by which the minority integrates with the rest of society.
basic prerequisites for cultural
integratio n
Culture plays an important role in realising the aims of economic and social development (Fukuyama 2001; Tabellini 2006). P. Bourdieu's category of cultural capital includes such indicators of knowledge as skills, level of education, advantages a person has and which give him or her higher status in the society, including higher expectations (Bour-dieu 2005). An attempt has been undertaken by some authors to outline the place of cultural capital in the implementation of sustainable development policy (Danchev 2006). It was indicated that social capital facilitates social systems to reach sustainability. However, social coherence is a crucial factor for establishing the sustainability of a society consisting of different cultures. The importance of this problem is indicated by Fontaine (2007), who introduces six perspectives, namely: the anthropological approach, the psychological approach, the stereotyping approach, the knowledge management (km) approach and the system thinking approach to explain the case of cultural diversity and social stability.
To shed light on the problem of cultural coherence there is a need to begin the analyses with the prerequisites for cultural integration.
Our starting point is the vision of culture as a system of dynamic reshaping of values in which some values are enriched with new connotations, whereas others lose their influence, and so on. Since this is a very complicated dynamic set difficult to formalize and to simplify the picture, the values related to sustainability are divided into two groups. [77] In one group, values that help to reach sustainability are included and they are called constructive values. In the other group, destructive values are put that drive the system away from sustainability. Next, there is a need for an exchange of values to reach cultural integration, which depends on the level of openness of a given culture. Openness in this case means the propensity to show interest and consequently to adapt the values of other cultures over a period of time.
Kuran and Sandholm (2007) present a model of cultural integration involving two mechanisms: behavioural adaptations motivated by coordination, and preference changes shaped by socialization and the need for self-consistency. This approach is, however, not applied as in this case the aim is not to reach cultural blending, but rather to preserve the identity of each culture over time and enrich it with the elements of other cultures. This procedure is a so-called preference adaptation.
The enrichment of individuals with elements of other cultures improves the quality of their human capital (Coleman 1988) which facilitates informal interrelations, that is social capital. It means that cultural integration is to result in protection and encouragement of local cultures and the enrichment of individual culture of the members of the community for reaching a sufficient level of self-esteem and self-consistency. This is important for the formation of such properties of human capital which facilitate the genesis of social capital. The ideas formulated by some psychologists on self-consistency as a fundamental human drive (Cialdini 2001; Aronson 1988) seem quite attractive for the aims of our analysis. The preference adaptation hypothesis is applied in this sense, which means reaching self-consistence by adapting cultural values from other population groups and enriching one's own value system. Thus, through dynamic interactions, cultures enrich their identities shifting the whole value system of the individuals upwards, that is enriching it with new elements.
To test this hypothesis there is a need to look for a setting in which
there are communities (majorities and minorities) that have lived together for a very long time. The change of socio-economic conditions creates a new setting to which they have to adjust in order to continue their path to sustainability. Analyzing such a specific case allows us [78] to formulate new theoretical conclusions and to enhance the theory of SSI. Very suitable for this aim is the case of the Roma population in the Republic of Bulgaria. Some considerations of Akerlof and Kranton (2002) are used to explain the presently observed social insecurity among the Bulgarian Roma. They are complemented with two basic sources of preference change proposed by Kuran and Sandholm (2007): socialization and the need for self-consistency.
For a wider view of the topic, and to ensure a better analysis of the effects of cultural integration between majority and minority groups, a model is constructed which includes three aggregations of strongly interconnected cultural value systems: (1) global culture — culture universe for all countries: classical literature, art, music, Internet, pop culture, etc.; (2) majority culture — the culture of the prevailing ethnos (Bulgarian in our case); (3) minority culture — the culture of local minorities.
These three cultural aggregations do not present isolated levels; rather there is an overlap among them. The problem of cultural integration can be reduced to a mutual transfer of cultural values among cultures. In our case the culture of minorities is not endangered by the culture of the majority; quite the contrary, it is further developing by adapting constructive values from it. However, this is a too restrictive assumption which should be removed in future studies.
During the process of interaction among various cultures there is a mutual exchange of constructive and destructive values among them. The effects of these interactions depend on many circumstances of which, in our opinion, the most decisive is the level of openness of interacting cultures. A rise in homogenization of both cultures can be observed provided that both cultures are equally open and accept values from one another. In this case homogenization is inevitable, and both cultures keep their identity in a new, specific way which calls for an additional study.
Cultural integration can be divided into several stages: (1) cultural
coexistence — in the beginning, the minority culture exists together with global and majority cultures, they do not interact, minorities are actually isolated from the society. (2) cultural exchange — the minority starts to accept some cultural values (goods) of global and majority cultures as, for example, celebrating basic national and religious holidays, par- [79] ticipating in national social and cultural initiatives, etc.; this exchange is normally selective, in the sense that a minority may accept or reject some values (goods) of the majority and of global cultures (in many cases there is a combination of both); (3) cultural integration — the minority accepts a sufficient number of values (goods) from other cultures and becomes an integrated part of society. Although there may be some loss of cultural identity of the minority, it is compensated by the enrichment of an individual culture and of its members with values from other cultures, which means an improvement in the terms of their human capital. The final effect on social capital and ssi is expected to be positive. Various authors offer different explanations of the case. Most studies assume the creation of a hybrid culture (for example in the North America situation), which is not the case here. The paper analyses the circumstances when minorities preserve their own culture, adding to it values from other cultures. In this model both cultures are preserved, in this way creating a mixed ssi. To reveal this structure a case study is prepared and analysed.
roma as a minority group To test the effect of cultural differences on ssi, the Balkan area has been chosen as a source for examples of multicultural systems. During its historic development this area has brought together many ethnic groups, part of which have been granted minority status. This has created a unique cultural diversity in the Balkans (Todorova 1997).
Many interesting studies have been carried out in this direction. Wright and Drewery (2006) show that 'individuals from different cultures experience the same behaviours in multicultural teams differently'. This study is among the first attempts to shed light on the problem in the Balkan area. The findings for multicultural interactions and ssi in this area with very specific features are expected to enrich both theory and practice with new nuances.
table 1 Ethnic structure of the Bulgarian population
Ethnic group
Number
Share of total
Bulgarian Turks
6655210 746664 370908
15595
84.32% 9.46% 4.70% 0.20% 0.13% 0.06% 0.04% 0.03% 0.02% 0.01% 0.24% 0.79%
[80] Roma
Russians
Armenians
Macedonians
Greeks
Ukrainians
Jews
Romanians Other
Not-identified
10566 5071 3408 2489 i363
1088 18792 62108
Total
7893262
i00.00%
SOURCE National Statistical Institute (http://www.nsi.bg/index_e.htm).
The structure of ethnic diversity in Bulgaria according to the last census is presented in table 1. Roma, called also Gypsies, as a dominating minority group are used as our case study of ethnic diversity in Bulgaria.2
There are no exact statistics for the actual Roma population in Bulgaria. Part of them identify themselves as Bulgarians or ethnic Turks. According to Tomova's representative study (Tomova 1995) about 46 percent of the Roma identify themselves as Turks, while the others indicate they are either Bulgarians or Gypsies (Roma). Nevertheless, according to some studies, the share of the Roma population dynamically increased from 2.2 percent of the total population at the beginning of the 1980s to 4.6 percent at the beginning of the 21st century (Kertikov 2006).
At present the minority of Roma represent a significant demographic, economic and social problem for the country. Most of them belong to the poorest segment of population and have the highest birth rates. According to the Bulgarian sociologist K. Kertikov, the percentage of children in Roma families is as follows: 1 child — 11.5 percent, 23.8 percent with two children, 26.8 percent with three children,
13 percent with 4 children, 6.8 percent with 5 children and 3—4 percent with more than 6 children (Kertikov 2006). Using the 2001 census data, Kertikov finds that 9.2 percent of the total Roma population lives in the area of Montata (9.2 percent), 7.4 percent in Dobrich, 7.3 percent in Sliven, 7.1 percent in Shumen, 6.8 percent in Pazardjik, 5.6 percent [81] in Stara Zagora, 4.8 percent in Yambol, 4.3 percent in Turgovishte, 4.1 percent in Haskovo, and 4.0 percent in Vidin. In all other Bulgaria regions the percentage of the Roma population in comparison to total Roma population is less than 4.0 percent (Kertikov 2006).
The social status of the Roma has deteriorated during the social transformation of Bulgarian society after 1989, when the policy of their integration changed dramatically (Verdery 1996). Despite open discussions of problems due to a drop in economic activity and strong income differentiation, there has been a rise in poverty among the Roma and the crimes linked to it. The increasing share of Roma in the total population, resulting from a rise in poverty and a drop in cultural and human capital, is of growing economic and social concern. The rising discrepancy of the income level among Roma and the rest of the population is a source of serious social tension which gives birth to various nationalist sentiments.
At the same time it must be noted that the problem of integration of Roma is not new and it has deep historic roots. Bulgarian writer Yordan Radichkov describes the gypsies as 'interesting people' (Radichkov 2006). D. Bojilov thinks that 'the behaviour of the predominant part of the Gypsies is such that if it is used by the rest of population, the state will simply collapse' (Bojilov 2006). He thinks that they cannot be integrated for many reasons. Commenting on the so-called 'Gypsy terror' promoted by the Bulgarian nationalists, Kanev (http://www.mediatimesreview.com/september05/ataka.php) indicates that 'There are not more neglected, isolated and discriminated people in Bulgaria than Roma [...] They the are object of selective choice by the legal system and state bureaucracy which in Bulgaria, like elsewhere, moves along the line of least resistance. Due to this the repression is not focused on the organised crimes and the crimes of the rich and those in power, instead the focus is on those who are helpless or have no money, links and access to qualified solicitors.'
Such extreme opinions are cited in order to show that the attitude towards Roma is not unambiguous and that the explanation of the features of cultural integration between minorities and the majority in the Balkans is a complex task.
[82]
KEY issues of SSI AS A multicultural SYSTEM Considerations presented above were tested by a study based on interviews with the Roma population in several places in Bulgaria: the capital Sofia, the district city of Burgas and the adjacent village of Gorno Ezerovo, as well as a small town near Sofia — Svoge where there are areas populated by Roma. These areas were accepted as representative communities.
The distribution of the respondents in the sample was 37 percent male and 63 percent female. Only 22 percent of all respondents have permanent employment, the other 78 percent are unemployed. 6 percent of the respondents are between 16 and 19 years old, 29 percent are between 20 and 29, 34 percent are between 30 and 39, 12 percent are between 40 and 45, 6 percent are between 46 and 49, and 3 percent are between 50 and 59. The respondents above the age of 59 account for 10 percent of the sample. Approximately a half of respondents (49 percent) are from the small village Gorno Ezerovo, 31 percent comes from the suburb Pobeda of Burgas, 8 percent from Svogue whereas the other 12 percent are from various places in Bulgaria. Although most of the respondents live in urban areas, their manner of residing is much closer to the rural than to the urban way of life.
The respondents participated actively in the interviews, showed understanding of the importance of the initiative, and supported it — although they did not believe that the initiative could contribute towards the solution for their problems. Altogether 145 households were interviewed; however, depending on the aim of the analysis, some observations have been omitted due to incomplete answers. The data gathered in our research were processed initially by factor analysis, followed by regression analysis. For technical reasons only the summary of results is included in the report.
The analysis of SSI as a multicultural system indicates that the cultural integration of the Roma minority in Bulgaria is a process strongly
< Global culture Stages of cultural interaction
Majority culture
Integration
capital
~ ) ( Minority culture )
-v \ 1
\w
Interaction of cultures
Global culture	Minority culture
Majority culture
Level of openness to other cultures
/ Individual
cultural enrichment
Critical level of consumption of goods from other cultures
Loss of cultural identity
figure 1 A model of cultural integration in a multicultural setting
Moral Cultural
dependent on complex factors, the most important of which is the standard of living. At present, many reasons keep impeding this process. Among them we can single out poverty, discrimination, a need to overcome the prejudices toward Roma that still exist in the society, Roma's poor education, etc.
Data analysis and the construction of the model, an on-going process, follow the basic logic of the scheme presented in figure 1. Although the research shed light on various details, its comprehensive completion requires complex efforts of various social sciences.
The model is an attempt to describe how cultural interaction can help the community to reach a sustainable state in a multicultural setting. It is based on the assumption that ssi is a homeostatic mechanism to support sustainability and that social capital is the basic driving force behind it. In the search of 'deep parameters' of mechanisms generating social capital, moral and cultural capitals are used as the deepest foundations of human behaviour. For this reason the quality of social capital of all ethnic groups in the community appears as an
important precondition for effective cultural interaction. Moral and cultural capitals in a society directly and indirectly affect social capital creating such personality in the individuals which can facilitate or, on the contrary, impede social capital from generating. Correspondingly, [84] it also affects the quality of ssi.
the social trust Studying the features of social capital in various ethnic groups shows that there are various preconditions for generating social capital. In short they can be presented by two mental qualities of individuals which are regarded as basic characteristics: the marginal propensity to help each other and the marginal propensity to recognize the leader (Danchev 2006). The first is needed for outlining horizontal aspects of informal association, the second for its hierarchy. Several questions were formulated in order to pin down various aspects of these characteristics in the respondents.
How the respondents were prone to ask for help when they found themselves in a difficult situation (what we sincerely did not want to happen) was a question revealing horizontal aspects of social capital characteristics. Not all respondents answered this question, in fact only 23 did. The prevailing opinion is that probably somebody will help (39.1 percent), while 17.4 percent hope friends will help and 13.0 percent believe that their friends would help if they could. Two extreme answers (nobody will help or everybody will help) are supported by few respondents. Although according to Samers (2005, 880), 'trust is not generalized throughout informal economies' our study shows that this expression of social trust is a significant precondition for horizontal association within the community.
The propensity to enter into social engagements is another reflection of the preconditions to generate social capital. As Lee, Barnowe and McNabb (2005) show 'the differences in cultural and political contexts result in variation in the way societies perceive environmental issues and social concerns'. To test the propensity to enter into social engagement we asked the respondents how they solve their everyday problems. As an example we chose a fallen tree on the street and how they intend to remove it from there. With all respondents answering
this question, only 3.5 percent declare they do not care about it, 34.5 percent do not react as they think they cannot do anything, 34.5 percent wonder what they should do and 13.8 percent first consult their family and friends.
A complement to this question is the query concerning whom the [85] problems are discussed with. The respondents discuss their problems in the following way: 20.7 percent discusses them with friends, 71.4 percent with their husband or wife and 7.1 percent with anybody, which is regarded as an indicator of moderate openness and concentration of social capital within a family.
The marginal propensity of trust reflects a normal reaction to the expectations from the others and the obligations deriving from it. It follows the assumption that trust normally exists when there is equilibrium between expectations and obligations. Only 3.4 percent of respondents do not believe in anybody, 34.5 percent doubt in everybody, 10.3 percent are prone to believe sometimes, 37.9 percent believe in people in majority of the cases and no one believes in everybody. These answers are regarded as evidence of a moderate level of openness.
The marginal propensity to associate with others is reflected by the willingness of the respondents to participate in civil society for protection of their interests. Civil society is a new phenomenon for Bulgarians and there are many abuses with various NGOs and therefore strong scepticism toward them is present in society, often regarding N G Os, as a kind of mafia or money-laundering structures. This is the reason why only 17.2 percent of the respondents definitely do not want to participate in any NGO, while 13.8 percent would participate if they find any sense in it. On the other hand 20.7 percent of the respondents would participate from time to time and 31.0 percent would definitely participate.
There are several reasons why the respondents would or would not participate in NGOs. As a rule few respondents specify reasons for their reaction towards n g os. Among those who would participate in a civil society, two thirds think that in this way they could protect each other whereas one third trust that NGOs will protect them well. The scepticism in NGOs is reflected by several reasons. The preference to protect themselves alone is expressed by one fourth of respondents,
while three-fourths think that too much is spoken and nothing is done for their protection. Despite the relatively small number of observations, the information gathered gives sufficient background to formulate a hypothesis of the social capital quality among the Roma popula-[86] tion. It is of a quality that creates positive predispositions for cultural interactions and integration with the rest of population. ssi as a main steering instrument in this community plays its homeostatic role adequately, allowing for Roma continuous adjustment to the changing conditions. The social status of Roma is getting worse due to the slow and controversial social as well as economic transformation.
socio-economic profile The collection of data related to the socio-economic characteristics of the sample indicated above is normally a traditional part of such studies. Several basic features are outlined.
Evidence of the level of poverty among the Roma minority is reflected in the fact that they spend on average 129bgn per week on food. If we assume that an average Roma household has 4 people this accounts for 4.6 bgn per day or the equivalent of 2.4c (exchange rate on 8 August, 2008 1.95 bgn = r€). For comparison, the price of a city transport ticket is about 50 cents in Bulgaria, the price of one kg of bread is approximately 60 cents and one kg of meat costs about 4.5c. This shows that the Roma live near the poverty line. Their monthly income is also very low (about 100—200 bgn or 50—100c). Most of them are unemployed and social aid is the only source of their income, which in many cases creates the effect of adverse selection (Greenwald 1986). Others have temporary jobs and irregular sources of income.
This situation defines the general setting of the Roma's life as very difficult. They were the first to be fired at the start of the transformation of Bulgarian society. 62.1 percent think life is going bad, 17.2 percent think life is not as good as it used to be, 3.5 percent think that there is no change in the quality of life and the same is the percentage of whose who think life conditions are improving.
The basic reason for the drop in the standard of living of the Roma minority is explained by the lack of the necessary level of education which would allow them to find a suitable job. The average level of ed-
ucation of respondents is low — the years of schooling are on average 7—8 years, which means primary and secondary school — mandatory according to the Bulgarian legislation. Bulgarian researcher Vladislav Georgiev (2006) indicates that only 0.2 percent of the Roma graduate with higher education, 4.6 percent finish secondary schools, 32 [87] percent finish primary schools and the rest remain illiterate. 'The inability of socially excluded families to access crucial social goods such as education on the same terms as others' (Warrington 2005, 798) is a phenomenon observed even in industrial countries. In addition the Roma minority due to rising poverty keep losing even the access to such public goods as education, a thing quite affordable in the past.
This creates preconditions for change in the number of children in households — a problem broadly discussed in Bulgaria recently, and the problem is linked to the so-called 'disappearance' of the Bulgarian nation due to a strong drop in natural birth rates among the Bulgarian population. Our survey indicated that even the number of children in Roma households is not as big as it used to be. An average household number among Roma is 4—5 people, with no more than 3 children. The very Roma confess that the number of children is in decline due to the difficult life. On the contrary, 61.1 percent of respondents admit that the difficulties do not confuse them — they have as many children as they want, while only 16.7 percent of respondents think they have fewer children because of the difficult life. However, 5.6 percent think that the difficulties stimulate them to have more children to help the family survive. Although controversial, a drop in the numbers of children in Roma households is distinctly observed.
Only few answers were provided for the question of how they would prefer to plan their future life. Most respondents prefer to find a good job, work a lot and live 'as white people do' — a popular saying in Bulgaria. Only 10 percent prefer to stay in the same position, and the same is the share of those who prefer to receive social benefits and to live with them as they do at present — hardly making both ends meet.
CONCLUSION
The analysis of the SSI behaviour as a multicultural system unambiguously indicates that, even limited within the majority — minority
setting, it is a complicated problem to study. These complications are exacerbated in a society undergoing the process of social transformation that includes many distortions and controversies (Creed 1998). While SSI changes in these new conditions, the deterioration in the [88] social status of minorities draws its quality down, impeding strongly the homeostatic nature of SSI. Many factors influence the majority-minority controversy in a negative way. The results of the study presented above show discrimination, the need to overcome prejudices toward Roma existing in Bulgarian society, Roma poor education, etc. Important economic and political conclusions derive from this fact. The creation of new jobs and proper financial investments in the areas and regions populated by Roma would facilitate not only their cultural integration but also the process of homogenizing SSI necessary for adequate sustainable behaviour. Such homogeneity does not mean a loss of cultural identity, but reaching a higher level in the quality of social capital in which cultural differences do not move the system away from sustainability.
The results of our study in Roma communities indicate that most of them understand clearly their social status and are ready to contribute towards finding adequate solutions. Such important elements of social capital as the propensity to socialise among themselves and also with other communities are evidence of a good precondition for social communication. The study shows that these communities have specific social capital which is, as a whole, favourable for the normal functioning of SSI. Provided the economic conditions change, this would facilitate the Roma to overcome many negative elements in their behaviour and transform them into an integral part together with the rest of the population.
First of all there is a need to improve conditions for the rise in educational level of the Roma what would increase Roma opportunities to find a suitable job, and enable more adequate participation in political and economic life of the country. The present situation does not provide adequate opportunities for the poor to receive quality education. The very educational system suffered serious drawbacks during the transformation period. The rise of poverty and polarization in society stimulates the rise of nationalist and racist movements which draw the
process of cultural integration back to cultural isolation. The quality of social capital deteriorates drawing down the stability of ssi. As a result minorities might once again become a neglected and discriminated part of the society to which they naturally belong.
[89]
NOTES
1	Due to technical reasons we avoid the discussion of the genealogy of
this concept. For details see Grootaert (1998).
2	According to the u N classification since the 1990s the Gypsies have
been called Roma in order to avoid the discriminative and neglecting
elements from the past attitude to this ethnic group.
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Staging Cultural Interaction: New Concepts of Representing Arab Music in the Israeli Cultural Arena
EssiCA MARKs
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
this article examines the representation of arab music produced and played by the Arab minority in Israel, on the cultural stage of the Jewish Israeli Society. The article discusses the representation of Arab music in certain cultural institutions in two major cities in Israel: Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Institutions in these two cities are considered influential and important for the Israeli cultural arena as they represent a number of socio-cultural groups of the Jewish-Israeli majority. The central issue of this article deals with the changes in representation of Arab music in Israel during the 1990s and a significant change in the dialog between Arab music and Jewish Israeli society in the 21st century. The role of individuals in this development is further on presented as a significant factor in the process of change.
introduction The article examines the process of change in the place of Arab music in Israeli culture. The article focuses on the representation of Arab music as the musical culture of the Arab minority in Israel, on the cultural stage of the Jewish-Israeli majority. We examine the representation of Arab music in some central cultural institutions in two major cities in Israel: Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. These institutions are considered as influential and important in the Israeli cultural arena since they represent a number of socio-cultural groups of the Jewish-Israeli majority.
The Arab minority in Israel, whose music is the main topic of this article, accounts for approximately 20 percent of the Israeli popula-
tion and is located in three main geographic regions: the Galilee (60 percent), the East-Central rural area (20 percent), the South (10 percent) and in mixed cities (10 percent). This minority differs from the Jewish-Israeli majority in their mother tongue (Arabic) and in their [92] religion Islam, Christianity and the Druze religion. In this article we use the term 'Arab Israelis' to define members of the Arab minority in Israel. The term is a cultural definition and not a political one, having in mind the complexity of identities of Arab citizens in Israel.
The study described here is based on a theoretical framework of the qualitative research and the data was from 2000 on gathered from a number of sources like field-work, including the observation of musical events described in this article. Further on there were interviews and conversations with Arab-Israeli musicians, interviews with two central Jewish-Israeli figures involved in presenting Arab music to Jewish audiences; systematic collection of various data, for example, newspaper reports, performance reviews, concert programs, music materials such as cds, dvds and music scores.
the place of arab music in the state of
ISRAEL until THE twenty- FIRST century In the field of the national culture studies there is a general agreement that in the modern nation states hegemonic national cultures have developed which are based on the properties that provide the national collective self-definition. Here belong a shared national language and cultural practices, believed to represent the true (traditional and new) character of a nation (Ram 1995, 91—124; Regev and Seroussi 2004, 3). Thereafter some modern nation states have excluded the culture of other regional, ethnic or religious groups from their homogenized national culture, and nowadays in many cases these (now excluded) cultures struggle for inclusion, recognition and representation within the nation-state culture (Hall 1996, 441—49).
This theoretical framework enables us to explain the situation of Arab music in the State of Israel in the second half of the twentieth century. In the newly created State of Israel, a deliberate process of the creation of a new national Israeli culture based on the Hebrew language and a national ideology deriving from European culture took
place. From the 1950s on, Israeli popular music was written in the Hebrew language and its style definitely imitated that of the popular music of the West (Perlson 2006, 47—51; Regev and Seroussi 2004, 53—89). The aim was to create a homogeneous Israeli society with a uniform culture (Regev and Seroussi 2004, 15—25, 236—47).1 The culture of the [93] Arab minority in Israel did not represent a part of the new national Israeli culture, which means that Arab music was not included in the popular Israeli music of the Jewish majority. This was not a declared policy of the Israeli government but the decision of hegemonic Jewish-Israeli educational and cultural institutes; mainly media and recording companies and the Ministry of Education and Culture who did not grant access to the Arab culture of the Arab minority and of the Jews from Islamic countries (Perlson 2006,33—70; Regev 1995).
During the 1970s, Israel underwent social change in which groups whose cultural heritage was from Islamic countries began to demand social and cultural legitimization (Shitrit 2004, 119—95). As the result of this development, a musical style arose in the 1980s known as 'Mediterranean' or 'Mizrakhi' (meaning Eastern). The style was characterized by a mixture of Greek, Turkish, Arab, Jewish Yemenite, Persian, Moroccan, Kurdish, and other musical elements (Shiloah and Cohen, 1983). The genre was predominantly associated with the population originating from Islamic countries, a large number of which belonged to lower and lower-middle classes (Halper, Seroussi and Squires-Kidron 1989; Regev 1996; Regev and Seroussi 2004, 191—235). However, despite this change in Israeli-Jewish music, the Arab music of the Arab minority in Israel was still not present in the Jewish-Israeli cultural arena (Regev 1995,19—24).
THE CHANGES IN THE REPRESENTATION OF ARAB
MUSIC IN ISRAEL IN THE LATE TWENTIETH AND
EARLY TWENTY- FIRST CENTURY
Nowadays, the music listened to by the general public in the Arab minority in Israel consists mainly of the music from Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.2 Two major genres listened to by the Arabs in Israel are 'the great twentieth century Arab music' and new Arab pop music.3 A closer look into the research findings has shown that the music per-
formed by professional Arab musicians in Israel consists mainly of the Arab art music based on the Maqam system and improvisational forms, 'the great twentieth century Arab music', and new original Arab music created by Arab musicians in Israel.
[94] In the 1990s Arab music (mainly the above-mentioned 'great twentieth century Arab music') was recorded by Jewish-Israeli musicians who belonged to the above mentioned musical genre called 'Mediterranean Music' or 'Eastern Music'. An important point is that the audience of this Arab music genre were mainly the members of the so-called 'Eastern Jews' (Jews from Islamic countries and their descendants) and their music did not reach the mainstream Israeli culture and society.
During the 1990s, another change took place, when Jewish-Israeli musicians together with Arab-Israeli musicians created a new and distinctive style — a combination of Arab, Turkish, and other Near Eastern musical elements. A large part of this repertoire was instrumental and so this feature helped in overcoming the issue of language, the main distinction mark between the Arabs and Jews in Israel. The new style was identified by media and audience as 'ethnic music' or 'world ethnic music' and it represented a musical style that appealed to a wider audience in Jewish-Israeli society, including intellectuals and the members of the middle- and upper-classes. This was the first successful attempt to introduce Arab-Israeli musicians and a music style with Arab elements into the mainstream Jewish-Israeli cultural arena. The dominant figures in this genre were the Bustan Avraham Ensemble, Yair Dalal, East-West Ensemble, Ziriab Trio, and the singer Esthy Keinan-Ofri.
A significant change in the representation of the Arab music in Israel took place at the beginning of the new millennium. A surprising finding of this research was that the man responsible for the introduction of Arab music into the mainstream and elite Israeli culture was in fact an individual named Eli Grunfeld. Mr Grunfeld is neither a musician nor an artist; he is a producer and impresario. Mr. Grunfeld was born in Israel in the city of Haifa in 1955 into a Jewish religious family with European origin. Interviews and discussions with him revealed that before his thirties he did not have any contact with or knowledge of Arab music. As a producer he specialised only in popular Israeli music and Western popular music. Under the influence of the harsh
experiences of the first Lebanese War (in the early 1980s) he started to study Arab culture, particularly Arab music, which all together brought him to a personal ideological decision: 'I shall devote my knowledge of production and the provision of entertainment to promote peace and understanding by the help of Arab music' (Tel Aviv, 20 December [95] 2007). His decided to study Arab culture, particularly its music, and to devote his knowledge in productions and entertainment to introduce Arab music to Israeli-Jewish society as a way of promoting peace. In 1988 he successfully introduced to Israeli audiences the French-Jewish singer Sapho of Moroccan origin. The concert consisted entirely of a genre called 'Arab rock' music that had not been known in Israel at the time. At the same concert the singer also performed two songs of Umm Kulthum.4 The concert took place at the most important venue in Israel at that time: the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv. This was the first time that any kind of Arab music had been presented on the cultural stage of the Jewish-Israeli elite. Thereafter Grunfeld went to Morocco and France for two years where he studied Arab music from Arab musicians. On his return to Israel in 1990, in his role as a producer and member of official cultural establishments, he began to strive for the introduction of Arab culture — music, theater, and film — to the Jewish-Israeli cultural scene.
At this point we would like to refer to two institutions for culture and entertainment which have a significant role in the representation of Arab music in Israeli culture today. The first is the Tsavta Club (Together Club) in Tel Aviv, which is one of the cultural and artistic institutions in Israel with the longest tradition. It was established in 1958 under the name of the Club for Progressive Culture by a left-wing political movement in Israel (the Mapam Party). The management defines it as 'a center of progressive culture' and it represents a leading force in art and culture, and is at the same time also a form of political protest. The club represents a bridge between different sectors of Israeli society, and supports the cooperation between Jews and Arabs. The institution serves as a platform for entertainments, theatrical and musical productions, including other cultural and artistic activities that take place in it. Tsavta is considered to be the center of the Jewish cultural elite of Israeli-Jewish society.
The second cultural institution linked to the representation of
Arab music is the Confederation House: the Center for Ethnic Music and Poetry situated in Jerusalem, on the border between the Old and New City, between Jewish and Arab neighborhoods. It was founded in 1984 by Calman Soltnic, who was at the time the head of the In-[96] ternational Zionist Confederation. According to its founders and directors, The Confederation House aspires to initiate and promote a dialogue between cultures, traditions and people with the help of a written word, theater and music. This institution has attained a leading role in the sphere of ethnic music in Israel. It hosts leading artists from abroad, as well as local cultural groups. The major figure of this institute is Effi Benaya, the head and artistic manager who worked together with Grunfeld in promoting Arab music on the Israeli stage.
In 2000 Grunfeld succeeded in initiating and producing a concert of Arab music on the most prestigious stage in Israel: the Israel Festival in Jerusalem. The performers were Sapho, Lubna Salameh (an Arab-Israeli singer) and Zehava Ben (an Israeli-Jewish singer). They were accompanied by the Nazareth Orchestra, the members of which were all Arab Israelis. This concert, which was very successful, meant a breakthrough in the representation of Arab music in Israeli-Jewish culture; it included the repertoire of the above-mentioned 'great twentieth century Arab music'.
In the same year Mr Grunfeld initiated, produced, and took the role of artistic director for a project called the Oud Festival in the Confederation House in Jerusalem. The objective was to bring Arab music to Jewish-Israeli audiences by emphasizing the fact that the 'king of all instruments' in Arab music was once common to all Near East cultures. A group of musicians that represented the core of the first Oud Festival consisted of the same Jewish and Arab musicians that were a part of intercultural musical activity during the 1990s.
Thus the first cultural institution that regularly started presenting Arab music on the Israeli-Jewish stage was the Confederation House in Jerusalem. Grunfeld's partner in this enterprise was Effi Benaya. They worked together until 2002, however, ideological differences forced Mr Grunfeld to leave Jerusalem. Since 2002 Benaya has been the sole producer and manager of the two-week Oud Festival in the Confederation House in Jerusalem in November every year. The main theme of the
Jerusalem Oud Festival is the emphasis of the musical cultures of the Near East, combined with intercultural encounters. Arab music is included in the festival as one of the important musical cultures in this region.
Ever since 2002 the Tel Aviv Tsavta Club has also hosted another [97] Oud Festival where Arab music is one of the central elements. This festival originally took place once a year in November and lasted a week, however, since 2006 on it has been, due to public demand, held twice a year in November and August. In addition, as the introduction to the Tsavta Club, an event known as The Culture of Peace Festival is held in spring every year. Here, too, Arab music plays a central role.
There are certain differences between the ways in which Arab music is presented in the two cultural centers. In Jerusalem the festival is presented as one of the musical cultures of the Near East, and as a part of a complex of musical culture in the region. Another concept underlying the Jerusalem festival is the creation of a bridge between East and West. The declared ideology of the Tsavta Club is much more political than that of The Confederation House in Jerusalem. This was also the main reason for the differences of opinion between Benaya and Grunfeld mentioned before. The main aim of the Culture of Peace Festival is to promote peace and understanding between Jews and Arabs by representing Arab music to Jewish-Israeli audience. The differences between the two institutions lead to some differences between the two concepts of Arab music the festivals present on stage. We shall illustrate this by describing the repertoires of the most recent festivals: in Jerusalem in 2007 and in Tel Aviv in 2007/08.
The program of the Confederation House in Jerusalem in November 2007 included fourteen performances, six of which included Arab music. Two of the six concerts presented 'the great' Arab music (Um Kulthum and Mohamed Abdel Wahab), while three featured contemporary Arab music in Israel and one was a concert of Bedouin folk music. The other eight concerts were ethnic Jewish Rock, modern Sufi song and dance, music and Hebrew songs from Ottoman Lands, Ara Dinkjian and Friends, David Broza and Yair Dalal — ethnic Israeli music, mystical music of the Middle East, Bass and Oud, Ladino songs from Turkey.
The repertoire of the Tsavta Club Festival in 2007—2008 included the music of Farid el Atrash and Mohamed Abdel Wahab, a concert of Arab belly dance, a concert of Iraqi music performed by Jewish-Israeli musicians of Iraqi origin, a concert of Greek Rebetico Music, and a [98] concert of Bedouin, Jewish, and Israeli music performed by Jewish and Bedouin musicians. One of the principles of Tsavta Club and of Eli Grunfeld as the producer is that Arab music presented to Jewish-Israeli audiences should be performed by Arab musicians and not by Jews.5 In the most recent Festival of Peace and Culture in Tel Aviv (in May 2008), for the first time the audience was able to enjoy a performance of new compositions by Arab-Israeli composers Wassim Ouda and Sukeina Darwish.
Our research has shown that the inclusion of contemporary Arab-Israeli music in the two festivals was not a result of the initiative from the part of the organizers, who insisted on presenting 'the great' Arab music, but it was demanded by the Arab-Israeli musicians themselves. The change was first featured in the 2006 festival in Jerusalem, with the concert of the musician and composer Kamil Shajrawi (13 November 2006). At this concert Mr Shajrawi presented his original compositions, as well compositions of some well-known musicians of the 20th century like Abdel Wahab, Farid Al Atrash, Um Kulthum and others. When asked about the choice of musical material for his concerts he explained: 'This is the first time I present my music to an Israeli audience, and Effi Benaya, who did not know any of my original music at the beginning, was not sure how the audience would accept it, therefore he suggested to mix some Arab music people know well together with my own songs' (5 October 2006). In conversations with the Arab-Israeli musician Eimad Dalal, who performed at the 2007 festival devoted to his own Arab music, he told us that originally Mr Benaya had demanded that the concert consisted of mainly other great musicians like Umm Kulthum, Abdel Wahab and others. In Mr. Dalal's words: 'Effi approached me and invited me to give a concert at the Oud Festival in November 2007. When we met in Jerusalem he suggested that the concert should be based on the old music, he was not aware that I could play my own original music. When I told him that my own music was the material I wanted to present at the concert,
he refused. Finally Benaya agreed but at the same time expressed his opinion that people would come to the concert solely to hear well-known Arab music' (Zefat, 29 November 2007). The interviews with M. Dalal revealed that he felt frustrated with the situation of the new generation of Arab-Israeli musicians: 'We are people without faces. [99] Nobody really notices us, they see us as performers of other people's music, as if our own music was not as good as the old music' (Zefat, 2 December 2007). Our own observation at the concert of Imad Dalal in the 2007 Oud Festival (Jerusalem, 20 November 2007) showed that the hall was almost full, although conversations with people (Jewish Israelis) revealed that the audience indeed wondered why there were no well-known pieces of music, such as that of Umm Kulthum or Abdel Wahab, included in the program: 'I thought we were going to hear the old music, I was surprised that the program did not include songs of Abdel Wahab. I have many of his records and we sing his tunes even in the synagogue. Some of the music presented at this concert was too modern, I don't feel it as true Arab music' (Israel Levi, 43, a religious Jew who serves as a cantor in a Sephardi-Jerusalem synagogue).
Another important figure in the representation of Arab music in Israel is the female Arab-Israeli singer and composer Lubna Salame (37). She claims that she respects and loves the 'old' music: 'I love the music of some great musicians of the past, especially Um Kulthum's songs, since this music suits my voice, and I am always happy to perform it but I feel that we have so much more new music of our own and I cannot really bring it to the Israeli audience, since my producers insist on putting on a concert of the old music.' Ms Salame told me that she does not fight this tendency because she agrees with her producers that Israeli-Jewish audience still prefer the old music to the new.
In conversations two leading promoters of Arab music for the Jewish-Israeli stage, Eli Grunfeld (Tsavta Tel Aviv) and Effi Banaya (Confederation House, Jerusalem), claimed that the Israeli cultural establishment, whose patronage they need for financing their musical projects, does not have real knowledge of Arab music. In their opinion, the concept of Arab music remains within the framework of 'the great' Arab music and its famous representatives of the 20th century. Therefore, Grunfeld and Benaya feel obliged to offer these institu-
tions such programs where a significant part is dedicated to 'the great' Arab music, in order to receive financial support. Furthermore, they pointed out that the Jewish-Israeli audience has the same expectations and that the new Arab music is as not popular with the audience as [100] 'the great' Arab music is. Our research has shown that in the last two or three years, however, there has been a change in the perception of the new Arab-Israeli music. Today, contemporary Arab-Israeli music constitutes an important part of the Jerusalem festival, and has been presented at the festival in Tel Aviv as well.
Another transformation concerning the canon of Arab music in Israel includes performances of Arab music beyond the two Oud festivals and the two institutions described in detail above. Eli Grunfeld produces and manages performances of Arab music in areas other than Tel Aviv. However, the repertoire of these concerts continues to consist mainly of 'the great' old Arab music. The program of 2008 in The Confederation House in Jerusalem includes concerts of new Arab music by Arab-Israeli musicians and composers.
In addition to the musical activities of the two institutions mentioned here, there has been an additional expansion of the exposure to Arab music in the Jewish-Israeli audience. In 2005 a musical ensemble known as 'The Ensemble for Classical Arab Music' was created. Its members, who are between 20 and 30 years old, are all graduates of the Music Academy in Jerusalem. Nine artists are Arab Israelis, seven are Jewish Israelis, and one artist is from Turkey and another from Germany. The founder and conductor is Prof. Tayseer Elias, an Arab-Israeli musician, who was involved in the development of the musical cooperation between Jewish and Arab artists described above during the 1990s. The ensemble repertoire consists of classical Arab music from Turkey to Egypt, since the 19th century until today. Through follow-ups of the ensemble performances, it is evident that most of its concerts are attended by Jewish Israelis in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
THE AUDIENCE
The audience of the concerts of Arab music discussed here can be divided into three main groups.6 The first consists of Jews of the Islamic region that consider Arab music to be a part of their own cultural her-
itage. This music was once an integral part of the musical culture of the Jewish communities in the Middle East and it is still an important component of liturgical and paraliturgical music in Israel. From conversations and interviews with people who come from Islamic countries or whose parents held or regularly go to Arab music concerts, a [101] recurring feedback was that they finally feel a sense of legitimization to enjoy, publicly and officially, 'their' Arab music, since Arab music is nowadays performed in recognized cultural institutions of Israeli society. Conversations and interviews have also revealed that the majority of those who have left Islamic countries, including younger generations, strongly prefer 'the great' Arab music performed by famous musicians like Abdel Wahab, Umm Kulthum, Abdel Halim Hafaz, Farid al Atrash and others.
Another group of Israeli Jews is interested in Arab music as a part of their pluralistic world-outlook which results in an attempt to be acquainted with and to understand the culture of the Arab minority in Israel, and that of the Arab environment in the Middle East. This group of concertgoers, who also regularly attend performances of Arab music, consists of well-educated people, that put themselves to the left of the Israeli political map. Most of them are Israeli-born and Arab music has never formed a part of their culture or cultural heritage. They are usually active in social and cultural initiatives to promote Arab-Jewish understanding and peace.
The third group sees in Arab music part of the genre known as 'the world music' which is very popular among young members of Israeli-Jewish society who are interested in the music which is not 'Western'. This group includes young people in their twenties and thirties, and seasoned travelers to the Far East or South America who have discovered 'the other' non-Western musical cultures and have become enthusiasts of different forms of 'the world music'. The Arab music presented on the Jewish-Israeli stage is for them a genre of the world music as well: 'I spent two years abroad and discovered so many kinds of music that I had not even heard of before. When I came back in 2005, I searched for ethnic music and I found out about the Oud Festivals, especially the one in Jerusalem, and since then I have attended most concerts, including the Arab music ones because for me they are
a part of all "world music" of today' (Eran Katz, 26, Jerusalem, 13 November 2007). In interviews with young people it became clear that these young people travel the four corners of the country in search for 'non-Western' music, and Arab music, old and new alike, has become [102] an integral part of their cultural repertoire.
It must be noted that in Jerusalem and also in the Tel Aviv area there is a small group of Arab Israelis that has during the last two years more or less regularly attended the concerts of Arab music described above.
DISCUSSION
The research shows a significant change in the representation of Arab music on the mainstream Jewish-Israeli cultural stage. Originally, there was a complete lack of representation of Arab music on public cultural stages for most of Israeli Jews, that is to say, a total lack of cultural interaction between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority in Israel. The reason for this lies in the notion of a modern nationstate where the emphasis is on the dominant national culture. The Jewish majority and hegemonic institutions of the state created a national Israeli culture and popular music representing 'Israeliness', and in this way left no room for other musical cultures. Arab music was thus rejected by the cultural establishment. It is important to stress that this was a double rejection: for the first part it was a rejection of the Arab culture shared by the Arab minority and Jewish groups from Islamic countries. However, together with the consolidation of national Israeli-Jewish culture and with the consolidation of popular Israeli music, arose the socio-cultural demand of minority groups in Israel for recognition and representation (including the two groups of Arab-Israelis and the Jews from Islamic countries). The formation of the musical genre of Mediterranean (Mizrakhi) music that began in the 1980s was the first stage in the introduction of non-Western popular music into Jewish-Israeli culture. In my opinion, this was the first step in the shift of cultural attitudes in the Jewish-Israeli society, where a musical culture with an Eastern, non-Western flavor gained legitimate status with a large consumer audience, aided by the spread in electronic media.
Further to this socio-cultural process, during the 1990s changes that
took place at two levels occurred. The first was the rendition of Arab music by Jewish Israeli musicians of the Mediterranean genre. In our interpretation, this stage was more the expression of a need for le-gitimization by the socio-cultural Jewish groups coming from Islamic countries and their descendants, rather than an expression for intercul- [103] tural dialog with the Arab minority in Israel. The second change during this period was the process of cooperation between Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Israeli musicians, and the creation of a new style containing many elements of Arab and Turkish music and some other traits that bridge East and West musical cultures. One can undoubtedly find the aspiration for genuine dialog between Jewish and Arab artists in Israel and conscious and avowed attempts for dialog between Jewish and Arab sectors through musical cooperation. In our opinion, this was an important step in the socio-cultural dialog between the Jewish majority and Arab minority for two reasons: firstly, the Arab musicians have in this way become an integral part of the Jewish-Israeli cultural stage, and secondly, the repertoire containing Arab, Turkish and other non-Western musical traits has also become an element in the Jewish-Israeli cultural scene. A significant change in the status of Arab music in Israel occurred at the beginning of the 21st century, with a repertoire based exclusively on Arab music, where the performers of Arab music are professional Arab-Israeli musicians. This, in our opinion, expresses the process of change in the dialog between the two groups — the Jewish majority and Arab minority, in the notion that the Arab minority presents its music directly to the Jewish public.
An important point arising from the research is the central role of individuals as cultural agents and as promoters of the musical dialog between the Arab minority and Jewish majority in Israel. The initiative for a representation of Arab music in Jewish-Israeli culture did not stem from any activity of the official Israeli cultural establishment or any other cultural or political body but it was rather the initiative of an individual (whom other people later joined). The dominant figure designated in this article as the entrepreneur of Arab musical expression on the central stage of Jewish-Israeli culture (Grunfeld) acted out of ideology: he decided to use the Arab music as a means of discourse within the Israeli society between Jews and Arabs, and, of course, as an
instrument for promoting peace. However, one of our conclusions is that he and Mr Benaya from Jerusalem succeeded in generating change, since they both understood the official Israeli cultural establishment to which they were connected before, and both of them remained a part [104] of this establishment as its producers and advisers. This connection to the cultural establishment allowed them to understand how to succeed in their endeavor to link their initiative to an official cultural body, as well as to private funds. Their connections and knowledge enabled them to obtain the support of the establishment, a financial support without which these projects would not have come to fruition.
An interesting point uncovered by the research is that there are differences in the representation of Arab music between the two institutions in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv presented in this article. The ideological orientation of the Confederation House in Jerusalem today is the promotion of intercultural dialog in a broader sense, including that between the East and West, where Arab music is a part of this dialog. On the other hand, the declared ideology of the Tsavta Club in Tel Aviv sees its central purpose in the socio-political dialog between Jews and Arabs in Israel and the surrounding regions, which means that Arab music is seen as a major tool for the promotion of this dialog.
In our opinion, the issue of the style and repertoire of Arab music performed at the two cultural institutions presented in this paper is highly significant. Having examined the two festival programs, it is evident that both institutions place great emphasis on 'the great' Arab music and its central figures. In conversations with both festival directors, as well as in interviews and conversations with the members of regular concert audiences, it became evident that this is in fact a result of the essentialist concept of Arab music constructed during public discourse. The first such discourse is that people at the Ministry of Culture and those responsible for budgeting musical projects do not understand or discern Arab music and have minimal knowledge of'the great' Arab music, and the famous figures such as Umm Kulthum, Abdel Wahab, etc. In our opinion, the cultural-political establishment in Israel continues to promote a fixed idea of the concept of Arab music which does not include modern Arab-Israeli music. In that respect, the image of Arab music held by the regular Jewish-Israeli concert audi-
ence is similar to that held by the cultural establishment. The audience, too, expects to hear 'the great' Arab music of famous performers because it sees it (as many have also confirmed) as the 'authentic Arab music'.
On the other hand, we also have Arab-Israeli musicians and com- [105] posers who demand the recognition of their own local modern music and to be considered as Arab music as well. A detailed look into the festival programs reveals that in the last two or three years, mainly at the Confederation House in Jerusalem, there is a wider stage for new music of Arab Israeli composers.
CONCLUSION
The article deals with the representation of Arab music in Israel. It highlights the process of the slow change observable in the canon of Arab music in Israel during the last two decades. The changes primarily resulted from the activities of individuals adhering to the ideologies of intercultural dialog and to that of peace between the Arabs and Jews, and the activities of two central cultural institutions. Within the official culture policy changes are visible, predominantly in the gradual entry of Arab music onto Jewish-Israeli cultural stage, as a part of the culture interaction between the Jews and Arabs. An important point raised in this research is the emergence of new concepts in Arab music in Israel, and the struggle of Arab-Israeli musicians for the recognition in Israeli society and culture, claiming its distinctive position beside other Israeli musical cultures.
NOTES
1	Philip Bohlman addresses the issue of the Israeli tendency toward the West by explaining the importance Israel assigns to the Eurovision Song Contest: 'Winning the Eurosong Contest provides Israelis with a means of asserting their Westernness on the stage of world politics' (Bohlman 2002, 91).
2	Similar findings were published in the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s by Regev (1993).
3	The term 'the great twentieth century Arab music' is used by the researchers of Arab music in Israel, and by Arab-Israeli musicians. It refers to the musical oeuvre of a group of singers and musicians ac-
tive from the 1920s until the 1970s. The best known are the composer and singer Mohamed Abdel Wahab, the composer Zakaria Ahmed, the singer Umm Kulthum, the composer and singer Farid al Atrash, the singer Abdel Halim Hafez, and the singers Ismahan and Warda, all from Egypt. In Lebanon there are the singer Fairuz and the brothers Rahabani. The singers Sabah Fakhri from Syria and Wadi A-Safi from Lebanon can be added to this group. Even though many members of this group are no longer alive the group is still extremely prominent in Arab music. New Arab pop music is clearly based on Eastern musical rhythms and scales, and is, due to the electronic media, extremely widespread. Its center is in Lebanon and Egypt.
4	Sapho is considered as one of the most significant figures in the new Arab rock music in France.
5	This principle is usually honored, but our research found out that in the recent years, Grunfeld and Tsavta have produced a number of performances which included Jewish-Israeli artists. Grunfeld explained that he occasionally includes Jewish artists as a form of'embellishment' which serves to enhance the cooperation between Jews and Arabs, but in principle he preserves the rule that Arab music should be performed by Arab-Israeli musicians and not by the Jews.
6	The information and analysis of the audiences of these concerts was gathered through participation in most of the concerts since 2000 and informal discussions with people during the concerts. Part of the data came from the internet by gathering information from both institutions' online membership clubs.
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Elizabethan Orientalism and its Contexts:
The Representation of the Orient in Early Modern English Drama
TAHAR BAYOULI
University of 7th November at Carthage, Tunisia
THE ARTICLE EXAMINES THE TRADITION of Elizabethan Orientalism in relation to the political, historical, and cultural context ofthat time. By establishing diplomacy and economic link with the Middle-East countries, the interests of intellectuals and artists for Orient increased. The study is focused on the image of the Orient in the Elizabethan theatre, claiming that stereotypes, misconceptions and excesses in the portrait ofthe Orient seem to be challenged within the Elizabethan drama. It shows that the Orient was not only presented as a negative Other, backward, fanatic and barbarian — the antipode of civilized Europe — but also presents a number of plays which avoid a stereotyped treatment and show a real interest in exploring and understanding it. Examining the Orientalist tradition in the Elizabethan theatre, the author intends to emphasize the multi-sided nature of Orientalism, which significantly shaped the theatre as a dominant Elizabethan public art form.
The studies of scholars and critics investigating Orientalism in English literature have been centered on the 18th century as the golden age for the representation of Oriental character, life and history. In fact, before the 18th, the 16th century — that is the English Renaissance — knew a particular interest in the Eastern world. This interest can be seen in the publication of the first major books on Oriental history, the translation of certain Oriental books and most notably the recurrent production of plays with oriental settings or subjects.
In fact, the Oriental matter marked the very beginning of English Renaissance drama and was constantly present in all its phases of development until its decline with the closing of the theatres in 1648.
From the 1580s up to this date, about fifty plays were produced with plots or sub-plots involving Orientals. Indeed, an examination of the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama reveals that this literary tendency was not only present but also predominant. The fact that a major-[110] ity of the main Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights was concerned with this tendency, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Ford, Dekker, Marston, Greene, etc., is proof enough that the production of Oriental plays constituted a deep literary tradition which influenced the English drama of the period and English literature in general.
In this paper, this tradition of Elizabethan Orientalism is investigated, described and characterized in relation to the historical-cultural contexts that explain and underlie it. The development of relations with Oriental countries through commerce and diplomacy on the one hand, and the confrontation with the Ottomans on the other, constitute the main aspects of such a context. The representation of the Orient on the Elizabethan stage is also linked to and informed by a flourishing travel literature that increased the interest in and fascination with the Eastern world.
The development of relations with Oriental countries must itself be placed within the more general context of Elizabethan England's struggle to take part in the adventure of exploration and trade. The first twenty years of the reign of Elizabeth I were for England a period of intense activity of exploration of the world, and Elizabethan explorers and travelers began an adventure which was a necessary chapter to the ascension of England to international glory. This adventure is famously described by Richard Hakluyt in his three-volume book The Principal Navigations, Traffics and Discoveries of the English Nation published in 1589 (Hakluyt 1903—1905). The book particularly highlighted the attempts of the British to discover a northeast or northwest passage to the Orient.
The motivation of this adventure which involved geographers, scientists and navigators was to make of England a great trading country following the example of other European nations. Not aiming to rival with Spain in the New World, it was towards the East that the efforts of Elizabethans turned from the beginning. Even though the first activities of Elizabethan commerce were in countries such as Persia, Turkey
and Morocco, the great ambition of the Elizabethans was initially to discover a North-east passage to the sources of Oriental commerce, India and the Far East as a whole. For this, the Elizabethans had to pass round the Ottoman Empire which barred the way, and second to discover a new route which was not used by the Spanish or the [111] Portuguese. At the beginning of the century, the first English explorers believed in the existence of a North-West passage to India and it was with the Elizabethans that this conviction was changed to the North-East passage. In 1576, Humphrey Gilbert (quoted in Hakluyt 1903—1905) writes:
There lieth a great sea between it [America], Cathaia and Greenland by the which any man of our country that will give the attempt may with small danger pass to Cathaia, the Moluccae, India and all the other places in the east, in much shorter time than the Spaniard or Portugal doth.
The first expedition which took the North-East direction did not accomplish its initial objective but was the occasion of the first contacts with a Moslem country, Persia. Thenceforth, the Elizabethans abandoned the idea of finding a sea passage to India and chose to exploit this new rout to develop and establish strong bases for commerce with the Moslem Orient. The efforts were mainly turned to founding commercial relations with the Ottoman Empire. Anthony Jenkinson is the name most famously associated with this achievement. His long travel, described by Hakluyt (1903—1905), culminated in a meeting with Soliman the Magnificent in 1553. That meant the beginning of intense relations and exchanges between England and the immense regions of the East under the control of the Ottoman Empire.
Hakluyt's accounts of Elizabethan expeditions and travels translate the spirit that fuelled what was indeed a national enterprise. In the introduction to the book, he writes (1903—1905,1):
The English nation, in searching the most opposite corners and quarters of the world, and to speak plainly in compassing the vast globe of the earth, more than once had excelled all the nations and
peoples of the earth. For which of the kings of this land before her majesty had their banners ever seen in the Caspian Sea? Which of them hath ever dealt with the emperor of Persia as her Majesty hath done and obtained for her merchants large privileges? Who ever [112] saw before this regimen an English lieger in the stately porch of Grand signior at Constantinople? Who ever found English consuls and agents at Tripolis, in Syria, at Aleppo, at Babylon, at Basra and which is more who ever heard of Englishmen at Goa before now?
The names of explorers such as Hawkins, Frobisher, Davis, Raleigh meant for the Elizabethans heroes of their nation whose adventures in faraway regions of the world excited their fascination, wonder and patriotism. In The English Renaissance, Vivian de Sola Pinto (1951) sums up the mood of this age of exploration and travel: 'The achievements of the mariners and travelers set the whole of the latter part of Elizabeth's reign against a vast background of wonder and enchantment', such is the context of the emergence of Elizabethan Orientalism in the theatre, and this spirit of adventure, achievement and exploration animating this whole generation of Elizabethans found its echo in one of the earliest and most important plays of the period, Marlowe's Tamburlaine (written c. 1587; Marlowe 1969a) which is set in an Orient whose frontiers are pushed from the borders of Asia to the farthest end of Africa, and which shows it as a vast realm of dream and conquest.
Furthermore, the beginning and intensification of exchanges with the Orient through trade, travel, diplomacy, learning and the arts was productive of deep influences that placed Orientalism as one of the marking features of the Renaissance. The impact of these intense relations with the Orient on the culture of Europe is so great that many writers contest the conception of the Renaissance as the rebirth of European culture exclusively based on a return to Greek and Roman classical culture. Gerald MacLean (2002) for instance argues: 'The Renaissance can be fully understood only in the light of Christian Europe's relations with eastern and Islamic cultures.' MacLean highlights the connections and cultural influences that linked East with West in the Renaissance and showed how European life and thought were being changed by increasingly intense contact and exchange with the East. As
instances of such exchange are mentioned printing and gunpowder as well as the use of the Arabic decimal system and the translation from Arabic of works of astrology, mathematics, medicine, philosophy and logic. In the arts, the number of works that have an orientalist inspiration witness to an extremely developed interaction between European [113] and Oriental cultures. A striking instance is the famous painting The Seated Scribe attributed to Gentile Bellini which shows a Turkish figure and Arabic transcriptions. The Italian painting is then imitated by a Persian painter who produced his own version of the original painting which itself used oriental sources of inspiration. The Renaissance is also a period of the study of oriental languages other than Hebrew and Arabic, which were already known to scholars and the learned elite in the Middle Ages. In literature, the Oriental tales became the fashion after the translation of The Arabian Nights.
The Renaissance was then marked by an interest in the Orient at different levels. It was then quite natural that the Elizabethan theatre, following the general tendency, took the Orient as one of its first and main sources of inspiration. The pioneering work of Christopher Marlowe both in Tamburlaine (1969a) and in The Jew of Malta (written c. 1589; Marlowe 1969b), as indicative of the characteristic features of the whole tradition of Elizabethan Orientalism, shows that this tradition's use of the Orient is linked first to the context of travel, trade and exploration and second to the background of war against the Turk.
In fact, at the moment when the reign of Elizabeth I began, Soliman the Magnificent was launching terrible assaults at the heart of Europe, propagating general fear from the danger of Turkish invasion. This is widely reflected in Elizabethan drama, most famously in Shakespeare's Othello (written c. 1603; Shakespeare 1996) and its background of'Turk-ish wars'. The play is otherwise replete with other oriental aspects, not the least being the figure of its tragic hero, the Moor of Venice defending it against its enemies: 'Valiant Othello, we must straight employ you / Against the general enemy Ottoman' says the Duke to Othello (act 1, scene 3, line 48). If during the reign of Soliman the Turkish attacks were at their highest with attacks against Hungary and Malta, and the siege of Vienna (1529), it also knew the first important victory over the Ottomans in the sea battle of Lepanto in 1571. This victory
had a huge impact all over Europe and it is believed to have inspired Shakespeare's Othello. The Turkish invasion of Malta created a vivid concern in England. Certain Englishmen even took part in the defence of the island. For the Elizabethan drama, the interest of these historical [114] events was double. It was first a concern for a Christian land facing the danger of invasion by the Turks. Second, the Christian islands of the Mediterranean seemed to constitute a particularly interesting setting for the theatrical representation of the subject of the war against the Turk. Notable examples are The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe (1969b) and Soliman and Perseda by Thomas Kyd (1955), the latter being inspired by the attack on another Christian island, Rhodes, which was conquered by Soliman in 1522.
The impact of the war against the Turk may also be measured by the increasing effort of scholars to study that Empire, its history, its military and political systems. Thus, a large number of books were written, more than ever increasing the knowledge about the Turks. In England, the most important book on the subject is Richard Knolles's The General History of the Turks (1603) published the same year as the production of Othello and the publication of a poem by James the First entitled Lepanto. Before Knolle's book there were translations from Italian or Latin of a number of Histories about the Ottoman Empire and only some history books written by English historians but based on Italian sources: Notable Historie of the Saracens (Curio 1977) translated and revised by Thomas Newton in 1575, and The Mahumetane or Turkish Historie by Ralph Carr (1600). George Whetstone's book The English Myrror (1586) was also largely about oriental history. It is the main source of the first part of Tamburlaine (Marlowe 1969a) written in 1587.
It is obvious then that the Turk, and more generally the Moslem Orient, was the subject of study and reflection of scholars and intellectuals of the English Renaissance. For Elizabethan drama, the Oriental theme was encouraged by the availability of sources on the Orient. From travel narratives to the works of historians and geographers, the movement of study and writing about the Orient provided a wide and rich variety of sources to the Elizabethan playwrights. The interest of Elizabethans in history in particular was one of the factors of the success of the Oriental play. Marlowe's Tamburlaine (1969a) marks the
beginning of the Elizabethan history play and at the same time the beginning of the Orientalist tradition of Elizabethan drama. Oriental history offered for the new theatre rich potentialities. A Turkish Sultan, a Moorish prince or a Mongolian warrior made a particularly interesting stage hero. Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, written in 1587 [115] (Kyd 1987), a revenge play also called a tragedy of blood, gives a revealing instance of the Elizabethan playwright's use of the Oriental theme. The main plot of Kyd's play does not refer to the Orient, but the play-within-the-play included is an Oriental play showing an internal tragedy of blood involving Sultan Soliman. The hero Hieronimo's choice of performing an Oriental play is significant; he is an example of the Elizabethan playwright himself making such a choice. He says to the players (act 4, scene 1, lines 84—5):
Assure you it will prove most passing strange
And wondrous plausible to that assembly.
An Oriental blood tragedy was believed to succeed because it had the characteristics of strangeness and plausibility. Through his mere appearance on stage, the Oriental character is already physically prominent and strange. Hieronimo insists to his players (act 4, scene 1, lines
i44—5):
You must provide a Turkish cap
A black mustachio and a fauchion.
In terms of moral portrait, the conception that the Orient was a domain where violent passions were naturally unleashed explains the fact that the Orientalist tradition of Elizabethan drama was closely linked to the revenge play or the tragedy of blood. Marlowe's first play shows a first example of the bloody scenes which will so strongly mark all Elizabethan drama. The cruelty of the Turks is surpassed only by the bloody passion of Tamburlaine.
Still, exoticism and the fascination with exploring the world remains an important factor contributing to the popularity of the Oriental play in Elizabethan drama. This is manifest in the rich and elab-
orate portrait of the Orient depicted, showing its countries, peoples, ethnic groups, customs and religions.
The references to Turkey, quantitatively predominant, are not marked by the sense of exoticism that marks the evocation of other [ii6] Oriental countries. This is explained by the European past of the country, which is perceptible in the names of cities and places mentioned in the plays as part of the territories of the Ottoman Empire. The names of Magnesia, Iconium, Byzantium do not really give the sense of far away exotic lands. The description of Turkish places itself does not seek exoticism and remains vague and limited to adjectives that only refer to the might of the Great Turk, for instance in Selimus, written in i588 (Greene i96i), there are allusions to 'mightie Empire of great Trebizond' (line 23) 'great Samandria / Bordering on Belgrade of Hungaria' (line 506) and 'strong city of Iconium' (line 1159). When the description is more extensive, it is limited to the martial aspect that dominates in the play. Acomat addresses his threats to the imperial city in these terms (lines 1149—50):
Now fair Natolia, shall thy stately walles
Be overthrowne and beaten to the ground . . .
The references to Constantinople reflect the importance of the city and the special place it has in the collective conscience in the West: in Selimus it is called 'faire Byzantium' (Greene 1961, line 519, 802) and in Tamburlaine 'the famous Grecian Constantinople' (Marlowe i969a). Even when it is the capital of the Turk, the names given to it recall its Hellenistic past. Thus in The Raging Turke, first performed in 1618 (Goffe 1974), Bajazet calls it 'great city of proud Constantine' (line 405). It is recurrently associated with the name of the Turkish sultans to create the image of power and glory: In Soliman and Perseda (Kyd 1955) Erastus says 'the great Turke whose seat is Constantinople' (act 5, scene 3, line 83), and in Alphonsus, first published in 1599, Amurath pompously mentions the name of his imperial city after those of the numerous kingdoms under his control (Greene 1926, act 3, scene 2, lines 836—45):
Bajazet, go poste away apace
To Siria, Scythia, and Albania,
To Babylon, with Mesopotamia,
Asia, Armenia and all other lands
Which owe their homage to high Amurack;
Charge all their kings with expedition
To come and wait on Amurack their King,	[117]
At his chiefe citie Constantinople
After Turkey, 'Barbary' is the country in the Orient that attracted most the attention of the Elizabethan playwrights. In The Battle of Alcazar, written in 1593 (Peele 1961) in Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley, first published in 1605 (Heywood 2007) and in The Fair Maid of the West, written in 1610 (Heywood 1968), three plays that are set in Barbary and more precisely Morocco, the Oriental location of the action gets its full importance as it is part of the whole context, theme and local colour created. The main effect that the plays seek to produce is that of a contrast: the presence of English persons in the middle of spectacular events taking place in Barbary. The country is therefore presented to us from the point of view of these western characters living an adventure in an exotic land. Before dying, Stukeley (Peele 1961) recalls his strangely tragic destiny (act 5, lines 1460—2):
Thus Stukeley slaine with many a deadly stab
Dyes in these desert fields of Affrica.
The name Barbary is used to refer to North Africa. Yet from the earliest times, the name is also used to connote cruelty, the lack of civility and even paganism. In ancient European languages the term existed as a geographical concept together with the connotation of the Latin word 'barbaria'. In Elizabethan drama, it is first a geographical reference which is not accompanied by specific connotations. Situating the scene of action in Barbary refers first to its location in a region of Africa and of the Orient. The name tends to be associated in the minds of the Elizabethans with adventure and exoticism. One of the particularities seen in it as an Oriental place is that it is at the same time Africa and the Orient. Its inhabitants are referred to as Moors or Barbarians 'This brave Barbarian Lord' (Peele 1961, act 1, line 16). Yet the term Moor is not applied exclusively to the inhabitants of North
Africa. In The Jew of Malta (Marlowe 1969b, act 1, scene 1, line 21) for instance, the term is used to refer to a native of the East Indies:
. . . the wealthy Moor that in the Eastern rocks [118] Without control can pick his riches up
It is obvious then that we cannot think of Barbary each time we have characters called Moors. The men of colour in the plays of Shakespeare provide an interesting example. Aaron in Titus Andronicus, written in the early 1590s (Shakespeare 2006), the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice, written in the late 1590s (Shakespeare 1955) and Othello, written in 1603 (Shekespeare 1996) are all called by the same term Moor. Yet if the origin of the prince of Morocco is unambiguously precise, it is not the case with Othello and less so with Aaron. It is obvious that it is not the colour of the face attributed to these characters that may be taken as a criterion for associating them or not to Barbary or the Orient. From 'the men of Barbary' brought to the war by the Turks and 'whose black faces make the enemy flee' to the King of Fes Mullisheg, the natives of Barbary are represented as negroes that would not be distinct from any other people of Black Africa. The Elizabethan playwrights refer to characters as negroes while giving Barbary as their origin. Therefore the term Moor, meaning most of the time Moroccan, and the term negro are interchangeable. In The Fair Maid of the West (Heywood 1968), the King of Morocco's words give an indication: 'Perhaps to our good fate; she in a Negro / Hath sail'd thus to bosom with a Moor'(act 5, scene 1, line 8). In Lust's Dominion, written around 1600 (Dekker 1968) Eleazar is 'black as the night' and is called 'blackmoor' and frequently 'negro' but very early in the play he is associated with Barbary and towards the end Barbary is mentioned again, as the history of the wars of the King of Spain is evoked (act 5, scene 1, lines 90—5):
Queen Mother: Your deceast King made war in Barbarie
Won Great Abdela King of Fesse and father
To that Barbarian Prince.
Eleazar: I was but young,
But now methinks I see my father's wounds.
Poor barbaria! No more.
This play by Thomas Dekker shows how the appearance of this new stage character, the black-faced villain, was associated from the [119] start with Barbary and that the long occupation of Spain by the Moors, as a marking historical fact still present within the collective conscience in Europe, is an essential element that explains this association. The characters called Moors and given the darkest colour of skin because they are of a vicious nature, the incarnation of the devil itself, can only be connected to these memories and historical events that are so deeply anchored in the collective conscience of Europe. The appearance of The Prince of Morocco in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare 1955) shows that even when the intention is not to use the blackness of the face as a sign of the blackness of the soul, this physical trait remains the first distinctive aspect of these Oriental characters. Yet, the fact that the Prince of Morocco evokes with such beautiful poetry the sun of his country when speaking about his skin colour, the fact that he asks Portia not to judge him by what his dark face inspires in her, replaces this physical trait at its right place, and calls into question the dominant stereotypical tendency of systematically associating physical appearance with given moral characteristics as the tradition of the black villain perfectly exemplifies. The Prince of Morocco is described as 'tawny Moor', a term used to describe Eleazar, but unlike this latter, the Prince of Morocco is not in the role of villain and neither is Othello, who undeniably constitutes the continuation and the culmination of Shakespeare's calling into question of the sterotypes associated with the representation of Moors on the Elizabethan stage.
On the whole, Barbary and its people greatly fascinated the Elizabethans. It was primarily associated in their minds with adventure and exoticism. By contrast, the few plays situated in Persia depict a surprisingly vague image of the country and the people. Persia obviously had a secondary interest for the Elizabethans. To take the example of Tamburlaine (Marlowe 1969a) the author used a rich variety of sources to give a more or less accurate image of the Orient. As for the por-
trayal of Persia, he seems to have largely used his own imagination. It is the Persia of the Hellenistic epoch that seems to inspire most of this portrait. Nothing is there to recall the Chiite Persia of the 15th and the 16th centuries, which attracted the attention of Europeans [120] as the only Oriental power capable of resisting the Turks, and which the voyages of Elizabethan adventurers made known in England. We notice that the Persian characters in Marlowe's play are given pagan names (Cosroe, Menaphon, Ortygius, Ceneus ...). These characters strive to renew with the glory and the power of the Persian Empire of their ancestors Cyrus and Darius which are evoked as symbols of the Persian nation. The Persian provinces mentioned are also of the same nature: Media, Mesopotamia, Parthia, and Babylon. The references to the Caspian sea, made famous in the context of European commerce, are perhaps the only element that brings the portrait of Persia back to its real historical context. Tamburlaine speaks about 'the Christian merchants, that with Russian stems / Plough up huge furrows in the Caspian sea' (Marlowe 1969a, act 1, scene 2, line 194). Persia was an important country for European commerce and this has its effect on Elizabethan drama. It is noteworthy that the most important of the products of this commerce, silk, becomes — as gold does for Barbary — the symbol of the country and the typical element of local colour. In Tamburlaine, the king of Persia describes himself as 'embossed with silk as best beseems my state' (act 1, scene 1, line 99).
Of contemporary Egypt, the Elizabethan drama represents the period when the Mameloukes dominate the country and neglect the time when the Turks did. In the first, Egypt is presented as a sovereign prosperous nation. The 'mighty Soldan of Egyptia', who in the first part of Tamburlaine (Marlowe i969a) defends Damas against Tamburlaine, is according to the historical background of the play a sultan of the mamelouke dynasty. In the tragedy of Selimus, Bajazet refers to the sultan of Egypt using the historical name itself and referring to the Mam-malukes (Greene i96i, lines i854—8):
Had the strong unconquer'd Tonumbey
With his Egyptians took me prisoner,
And sent me with his valiant Mammalukes,
To be prey unto the Crocodilus,
It never would have griev'd me halfe so much.
If the reference to the legendary crocodile of the river Nile is here meant to add a local colour, in Tamburlaine it is done in a much more [121] original and fascinating way through description of majestuous monuments and marvelous landscapes. The Middle East obviously fascinated the playwright and this is reflected in the play's verse (Marlowe 1969a, act 4, scene 2, lines 102—4):
Now may we see Damascus' lofty towers,
Like to the shadows of Pyramides
That with their beauties graced the Memphian fields.
Egypt is also associated with commerce with the Orient. Hence, in The Jew of Malta, Barabas says (Marlowe 1969b, act 1, scene 1, lines 45—9):
I hope my ships
I sent for Egypt and the bordering isles
Are gotten up by Nilus winding banks;
Mine argosy from Alexandria,
Loaden with spice and silks.
In Friar Bacon, written c. 1589 (Greene 1973) there is an allusion to 'rich Alexandrian drugs / Fetch'd from carvels from Egypt's richest streights'. In fact the extremely developed commercial exchanges with all the region of the Middle East makes certain cities particularly famous and known in Europe and they are recurrently alluded to in Elizabethan plays. In Macbeth, written some time between 1603 and 1606 (Shakespeare 1967b, act 1, scene 3, line 8), there is a reference to 'A sailor's wife ... / Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master / O'the Tiger'. The cities of this region are depicted as opulent and fabulously rich. Hence in these words of Theridamas addressing his soldiers '. . . this is Balsera, their chiefest hold / Wherein is all the treasure of the land'. Babylon is also one of the cities described in Tamburlaine which retains the attention with its
majestic beauty (Marlowe 1969a, part 2, act 5, scene 1, lines 65—72):
... the stately buildings of fair Babylon, Whose lofty pillars, higher than the clouds, [122] Were wont to guide the seaman in the deep, Being carried thither by the cannon's force, Now fill the mouth of Limnasphaltis lake, And make a bridge unto the batter'd walls, Where Belus, Nenus, and great Alexander Have rode in triumph, triumphs Tamburlaine.
The representation of the relationship between Europe and the Orient in a number of plays takes the form of a union through marriage. The theme seems to have particularly interested Shakespeare since his three plays dealing with the Orient, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello and The Merchant of Venice, are all about stories of love and marriage between Europeans and Orientals. The theme does exist in other Elizabethan Oriental plays, but it is treated in quite a different way. In The Renegado, written in 1624 (Massinger 1976), placed within a context of war between Christians and Turks, the marriage between some Christian prince and an Oriental princess aims simply at extending the victory over the Turk to the moral level. The marriage is then accompanied by the confirmation of the superiority of the moral values represented by the Christian characters and a refutation of the Oriental values, culminating in the rejection of Mahomet and his religion as pure imposture. By contrast in the plays of Shakespeare the mixed marriage does not have the function of affirming the superiority of the western values but is motivated by a true desire of meeting the other. The separation between East and West that stands as an obstacle to the marriage is not resolved, as in The Renegado for instance, by means of a transformation of the Oriental, her own forsaking of her religion and her people. This separation rather becomes itself a subject of reflection and constitutes in Othello as in Antony and Cleopatra the very essence of the tragedy: why should East and West be so irreconcilable? In Antony and Cleopatra, the love story shows a far more positive image of the East than of its opposite the West even as a system of
values and in moral terms, which is unprecedented in the Elizabethan drama. The superiority of the western moral values, which is always the norm and the model, is totally absent and is thus put into question. Called a Roman tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra is undeniably placed within the Elizabethan drama's treatment of the theme of the East- [123] West dichotomy. In fact, Shakespeare gives freedom to his imagination to create a context for the treatment of this theme which is not the immediate context to which the very notion of the Orient refers in the mind of his contemporaries, that is basically the Turk. He chooses to show the Orient through Ancient Egypt and its queen Cleopatra and a poignant tragedy of love. After the accusations against Antony for degenerating into a valueless, effeminate life in Egypt, the first scenes show Antony's own position describing his Egyptian experience as the quest of an ideal he cannot find in Rome. He declares 'kingdoms are clay' and 'here is my space'. The play seems to invite its audience to identify with Antony and his beyond-the-Mediterranean experience. He is presented as having a capacity of discovering new truths about his human essence, outside his western horizon. Thus, in many ways, Shakespeare's tragedy should take a distinctive place within the orientalist tradition of the Elizabethan drama. It has the value of an adjustment. It suggests an alternative way of writing about the Orient, not with the antagonism and rejection that usually prevail. The relation of Antony with the East is a two-way relation.
In contrast to the sentimentality of the Egyptian life, the ardour and intensity of human feelings, Rome stands for measure and calculation even in sentiments. Octavia, the Roman equivalent of Cleopatra, is the typical example of this image. The repetitive movement of the action between Rome and Egypt, the tensions that the couple lives through, symbolize the reality that stands in front of the two lovers. In fact, they are tragically torn between irreconcilables. The play does not solve this tragic fact through the transformation of a character, as in the other plays. It is not possible for either of the two lovers to cease to be their own self. It is true that Antony rejects Rome and accuses the Romans but he never pretends to cease to be a Roman. With his present to Cleopatra, he sends her an eloquent message (Shakespeare 1967a, act 1, scene 5, lines 42—7):
Say the firm Roman to great Egypt sends This treasure of an oyster, at whose foot To mend the petty present, I will piece Her opulent throne with Kingdoms. All the East, [124] (Say thou) shall call her mistress.
The play clearly indicates that it is not Antony nor Cleopatra that should change, but the world in which they live. The love story therefore includes the theme of the conciliation of the two worlds and not the cancellation of the one by the other, or the affirmation of the superiority and victory of the one over the other. As the play ends tragically, the words of the two lovers express the idea that Rome and Egypt have been reconciled even as two opposite value systems. Within the couple the world has ceased to be divided. For Cleopatra, Antony is not emperor of Rome nor King of Egypt, he is 'the garland of the war', 'the demi-Atlas of the earth' and 'the arm and burgeonet of men'. In Cleopatra's dreams Antony reigns over the world (act 5, scene 2, lines 76, 79—80):
I dreamt there was an Emperor Antony ... His face was as the heavens, and therin stuck A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted The little O, the earth.
In the Merchant of Venice, and in Othello, it is to the Orient of his time that Shakespeare turns. Yet, the same characteristics that mark his evocation of the Orient in Antony and Cleopatra, where the Orient is represented by Cleopatra and ancient Egypt, are there. Involving a questioning of the pre-conceptions and stereotypes, this evocation envisages the Orient as a full-scale entity and fully recognizes to the Oriental persona his/her alterity. Thus the Oriental character is not superficially painted according to preconceived ideas. He has all the chance of reaching the depth that distinguishes the characters of Shakespeare, because his representation enables his soul to appear, as it is not limited to portraying him superficially according to certain stereotypes that in the mind of the audience recall certain preconceptions. Yet, we
notice that in this play there is no mention of or even allusion to the religion of the oriental character, an element which in the other plays appears systematically to determine the image of the character as nonChristian, and very often as the infidel and the enemy. Second, there is the fact that the Prince of Morocco is the enemy of the Turk. We [125] hear him boastfully praise his scimitar which fought sultan Soliman. These two elements of the characterization of the Prince of Morocco seem to be meant to gain him the full sympathy of the audience. The same can be said about the second Moorish character of Shakespeare, Othello.
In sum, even when it is focused on the war against the Turk, the Orientalism of the Elizabethan drama, being expressed in its particular contexts, seems only from the outset to be marked by the voice of the anti-Turkish passion perpetuating treatments that sometimes belong to traditions which mount back to the Medieval Ages. Based on these impressions, most commentators of the Orientalism of Elizabethan drama declare it as simply a continuation of the medieval treatments of the Orient. These judgments are far from giving an accurate image of the multiplicity and complexity of the Elizabethan theatre's treatment of the Orient. Jonathan Burton (2000) is right in contesting the applicability to Elizabethan drama of the seminal theory of Orientalism developed by Edward Said (1978). A profound examination of the multiple and extremely varied treatments of the Orient in Elizabethan drama shows its distinction both from medieval and from eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Orientalism. For instance, the anti-Turkish passion of the moment is most of the time, in one way or another, moderated by a certain detachment of the playwright. Thus, for example in Alphonsus (Greene i926), reconciliation after the battle and the fusion of a reconciling West and an approving Orient; in Soliman and Perseda (Kyd i955) friendship and chivalry between the Turks and the Christians and the love of the Turk for Christian beauty; and in The Battle of Alcazar (Peele i96i) the theme of the disillusion of the Christian holy war in Africa. The Renegado is the example of the rare cases in which the anti-Turkish passion is given an expression that dominates the description of the Turk all along. The evocation of the Orient is then no more than a scathing attack against the infidel enemy. The
image of the Orient as a fascinating exotic world is associated with a Turkish princess who is herself fighting against the tyranny of the Turks, and who is ultimately saved by the Christians whose religion and moral values she admires and adopts. Yet, such examples of the [126] hostile treatment of the Turk seem to dominate, repeating the same stereotypes; others seem to be there to replace them and to bring to the scene treatments of another dimension and a dramatic art of a different quality.
The evaluation of the images of the Orient portrayed in the Elizabethan drama, shows that, in spite of the stereotype that is linked and explained by a number of facts, the evocations of the Orient form an Orientalism of great interest and which is far from being univocal, or fixed on stereotyped treatments and images. New and original characters for the scene, situations and realities which offer new contexts for the illustration of important motifs and themes of the Elizabethan drama, images and colours which introduce imaginative evasion, the evocation of the Orient greatly enriched the Elizabethan theatre and was in turn affected by its depth and its richness.
The Orientalism of the Elizabethan drama is at its greatest in the treatments where the Oriental is placed in his own truth and alterity and is no longer merely a reference of the West or a catalyst for the vices or the demons within the Western society itself. A true sense of exoticism is perceptible in these plays as much as the willingness to illustrate human truths through Oriental truths which are seen as intrinsic values. The Western values are not necessarily introduced as a canceling superior truth. The evocation of the Orient in the plays of Marlowe (1969a; 1969b), Greville (1973) and Shakespeare (1955; 1967a; 1967b; 1996; 2006) shows a humanism in the sense that they comprehend a profound message on the unity of humanity beyond the divisions that must not necessarily separate and oppose.
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Dekker, T. 1968. Lust's Dominion. Vol. 4 of The dramatic works of Thomas Dekker, ed. F. Bowers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Résumés
Méditerranéens ou croisés ?
L'image géopolitique d'Israël entre l'Orient et l'Ouest
DAVID OHANA
Le Méditerranéen est une ancienne-nouvelle idée qui a réapparu la dernière décennie en rapport avec la politique d'identité israélienne et la hausse de multiculturalisme en Israël. L'Israël, comme une société méditerranéenne en création, est née du Sionisme, le mouvement de libération des Juifs en Europe, qui présumait que le nouveau Juif devait rentrer de l'exil pour reconstruire sa nation en tant qu'Etat et, étant immigrant, retrouver ses racines bibliques d'Orient. Contre toute attente, les voisins arabes se sont néanmoins mis à considérer Israël comme une mutation nationale des croisés modernes venant de l'Ouest pour créer « L'Europe d'outre mer ». Une fois l'état créé, un discours culturel vital a eu lieu en Israël sur l'identité collective, un discours qui a présenté une image ouverte de Méditerranée et l'autre étrangère, celle de colonialiste-croisé. En étudiant ces deux concepts géopolitiques l'article cherche à examiner la généologie de ce discours culturel, à suivre le développement politique du mythe de croisé et considérer l'option potentielle de la Méditerranée en Israël à la fois comme une menace et comme un espoir.
Croisement de frontières en Ibérie méditerranéenne au bas moyen âge : Flashes historiques sur le dialogue interculturel chrétien-islamique
ROsER sALICRU I LLUCH
Bien que beaucoup de termes et de concepts que nous utilisons pour définir des processus et des phénomènes dans la société contemporaine puissent être appliqués aux situations passées, une simple transposition mécanique, hors le contexte nécessaire, peut facilement mener aux anachronismes analytiques et interprétatifs. En Ibérie méditerranéenne du bas Moyen âge les relations internes entre des Chrétiens et des Musulmans ont produit les formes transversales qui étaient capables de franchir des frontières religieuses et culturelles pour faciliter des contacts et des échanges, ces gens-là peuvent ainsi
être considérés comme les exemples de dialogue interculturel historique. Toutefois, excepté quelques exceptions remarquables, ils ne se sont jamais approchés de « l'Autre » pour des raisons intellectuelles, ou avec de vraies convictions et des prédispositions au dialogue. Ils l'ont fait simplement sur un niveau pragmatique. Par conséquent, des contacts interculturels et le croisement de frontières n'ont pas nécessairement entraîné la compréhension ou le dialogue. Malgré tout, ces gens-là présentent le premier pas vers l'apprentissage à connaître et la capacité à comprendre et accepter « l'Autre ».
Les défis de la légale communication interculturelle
alenka kocbek
La légale communication interculturelle se produit parmi de légaux systèmes différents qui utilisent des langues différentes et doit ainsi prendre en compte des demandes spécifiques s'appliquant à la traduction légale. Comme cette sorte de communication suit généralement un but clairement défini, elle exigerait certainement une demande constante des approches fonctionnalistes à la traduction. Toutefois, une demande qui ne diffère pas du principe fonctionnaliste de l'intégration culturelle, c'est-à-dire la jonction de la langue à la culture correspondante, peut se montrer douteuse. Dans des transactions légales interculturelles, les contrats internationaux par exemple, où un seul système légal est défini comme la loi gouvernante, il peut être appliqué seulement sur le niveau linguistique et pas sur le niveau (légal) culturel. Ce papier propose une stratégie concernant les exigences spécifiques de traductions légales.
L'Infrastructure sociale faible comme un système multiculturel
alexi danchev
L'infrastructure sociale faible (ssi) est définie comme « étant née avec l'apparition d'une unité sociale et subordonnée aux règles non écrites des relations humaines ». Le cœur de cette structure est le capital social qui donne la puissance de la ssi afin qu'elle exploite et règle le comportement d'une unité sociale. On présente un essai de décrire le mécanisme de la formation de composants de base de la ssi dans un cadre multiculturel. Il décrit une structure complexe, dont l'étude
exige l'approche de système qui intègre la ssi dans toute unité sociale comme dans un système. Un de problèmes cruciaux dans la création contributive et adéquate de la ssi est l'intégration culturelle des groupes majoritaires et minoritaires. Ce papier étudie les manières de l'intégration des minorités avec le reste de la population et les tourne ainsi vers la partie indivisible de société. Afin de compléter avec succès cette interaction, plusieurs conditions doivent être accomplies, y compris le changement du comportement social vers des minorités, l'augmentation de leur niveau de vie, l'effort de dépasser des préjugés divers vers des minorités, etc.
Interprétation d'interaction culturelle : Nouveaux concepts de la représentation de la musique arabe dans l'arène culturelle d'Israël
ESSICA MARKS
Cet article examine la représentation de la musique arabe faite et jouée par la minorité arabe habitant Israël, et sur la scène culturelle de la société israëlienne juive. Dans cet article il s'agit de la représentation de la musique arabe dans des certaines institutions cuturelles des deux villes majeures en Israël : Jérusalem et Tel Aviv. Les institutions de ces deux villes sont considérées comme influentes et importantes pour les activités culturelles israëlienne puisqu'elles représentent plusieurs groupes socio-culturels de la majorité juive israëlienne. La question centrale de cet article est traiter des changements de la représentation de musique arabe en Israël au cours des années 90 ainsi qu' un important changement en dialogue entre la musique arabe et la société juive israëlienne au 21e siècle. Le rôle de l'individu dans ce développement est davantage présenté comme un facteur significatif dans le processus de changement.
Orientalisme élisabéthain et ses contextes : La représentation de l'Orient dans le premier drame moderne anglais
TAHAR BAYOULI
L'article examine la tradition d'Orientalisme Elisabéthain par rapport au contexte politique, historique et culturel de cette époque. En établissant la diplomatie et les relations économiques avec les pays
du Moyen-Orient, les intérêts des intellectuels et des artistes pour l'Orient ont augmenté. L'étude est concentrée sur l'image de l'Orient dans le théâtre Elisabéthain, prétendant que les stéréotypes, des idées fausses et des excès dans le portrait de l'Orient semblent être défiés dans le drame Elisabéthain. Il montre que l'Orient a été non seulement présenté comme un Autre négatif, arriéré, fanatique et barbare — l'antipode de l'Europe civilisée — mais qu'il y avait aussi un certain nombre de pièces qui évitaient un traitement stéréotypé et présentaient un intérêt réel dans l'exploration et la compréhension de l'Orient. En examinant la tradition orientaliste dans le théâtre Elisabéthain, l'auteur a l'intention de souligner plusieurs aspects de la nature d'Orientalisme, qui ont significativement formé le théâtre comme une dominante forme d'art public Elisabéthaine.
Povzetki
Sredozemci ali križarji?
Geopolitična podoba Izraela med zahodom in vzhodom
DAVID O H A NA
»Sredozemskost« je nova-stara ideja, ki se je ponovno pojavila proti koncu tisočletja, nanaša pa se na dojemanje identitete Izraela in vzpon veckulturnosti v tej državi. Izrael je nastal pod vplivom sionizma oziroma judovskega gibanja za neodvisnost. Sionizem je predvideval, da bodo Judje med vračanjem na rodno zemljo iz izgnanstva, kjer bodo kot priseljenci pomagali zgraditi novo državo, ponovno vzpostavljali stik z biblicčno-orientalskimi koreninami. V nasprotju s temi pricčako-vanji so Jude sosedi Arabci oznacčili za novodobno razlicčico križarjev z zahoda, ki želijo ustanoviti »cčezmorsko Evropo«. Vse od zacčetkov izraelske države v državi poteka živahna diskusija o skupni identiteti, ki ves cas niha med podobo odprtega Sredozemlja in večinoma tujo podobo Izraelca kot križarja in kolonista. Clanek raziskuje zgodovino diskusije povezane z obema geoploiticčnima konceptoma, preverja po-liticčni razvoj legende o križarjih in tehta možnosti »sredozemskosti« v Izraelu, tako njene pasti kot tudi pozitivne plati.
Prestopanje meja v sredozemskem delu Iberskega polotoka v poznem srednjem veku: nekaj ugotovitev o naravi medkulturnega dialoga med krščanstvom in islamom
ROSER SALICRU I LLÜCH
Cč eprav je mogočce za definicijo dogodkov iz zgodovine uporabiti popolnoma identične izraze in koncepte, ki jih uporabljamo za opisovanje naše stvarnosti, lahko sama uporaba terminov in konceptov brez umešcčanja v kontekst vodi v analiticčne in interpretativne ana-hronizme. V Sredozemlju so v poznem srednjem veku na Iberskem polotoku vzdrževali stike med kristjani in muslimani posamezniki, ki so bili sposobni preskocčiti kulturne in verske zapreke, ter na tak nacčin olajšati stike in izmenjavo. Te posameznike lahko smatramo kot primer zgodovinskega medkulturnega dialoga. Vendar se, z redkimi izjemami, ti ljudje niso nikoli približali »drugemu« zaradi intelektualnega interesa ter cčistega prepricčanja oziroma zaradi želje po dialogu.
Stike so navezovali zgolj iz pragmatičnosti in zaradi tega mednarodni stiki in prehajanje meja niso vedno vključevali medkulturnega razumevanja in dialoga. Kljub temu so ti posamezniki predstavljali prvi korak k spoznavanju, razumevanju ter sprejemanju »drugega«.
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Izzivi medkulturne pravne komunikacije
ALENKA KOCBEK
Z medkulturno pravno komunikacijo se srečujemo pri pravnih sistemih, ki uporabljajo različne jezike, zaradi cesar mora prevajalec upoštevati določene posebnosti in zahteve, ki jih prevod pravnega besedila narekuje. Ker ima tovrstna komunikacija tocčno dolocčen namen, jo je moč izboljšati že samo z dosledno rabo funkcijskih pristopov pri prevodu besedila. Vendar se nepremišljena raba funkcijskega pristopa kulturne vpletenosti jezika (povezave med kulturo in jezikom) lahko izkaže za nepravilno. V medkulturni pravni komunikaciji, na primer pri mednarodnih pogodbah, kjer imamo opravka samo z enim pravnim sistemom, lahko funkcijski pristop uporabljamo na jezikovni, ne pa tudi na kulturni (pravni) ravni. Še vec, strani, ki komunicirata, se morata zavedati, da je stopnja težavnosti prevoda odvisna od stopnje primerljivosti pravnih sistemov in ne od jezika. Clanek podaja pristope, ki se nanašajo na specificčne zahteve pravnih prevodov.
Mehka socialna infrastruktura kot multikulturni sistem
ALEXI DANCHEV
Mehka socialna infrastruktura se je pojavila z razvojem socialnih skupin in je zato podrejena nepisanim pravilom medčloveških odnosov. Njen osrednji del predstavlja socialni kapital, ki mehki socialni infrastrukturi omogoca delovanje in usmerjanje obnašanja socialnih skupin. Cč lanek skuša predstaviti mehanizme nastanka osnovnih enot socialne infrastrukture v multikulturnem okolju. Opisuje zapleteno infrastrukturo, katere študij zahteva sistemski pristop, ki vključuje integracijo mehke infrastrukture s socialno skupino kot sistemom. Enega izmed kljucčnih problemov pri vzpostavitvi kvalitetne mehke socialne infrastrukture predstavlja integracija manjšin. Cč la-nek proucčuje nacčine integracije manjšin z vecčinskim prebivalstvom. Manjšine tako postanejo nelocčljivi del družbe. Da bi bila integracija uspešno zakljucčena, je potrebno izpolniti številne pogoje, vkljucčno s
spremembo odnosa večinske družbe do manjšin, izboljšanje življenjskega standarda manjšin ter odpravo številnih predsodkov, prisotnih v družbi.
Kulturna interakcija na odru: novi koncepti predstavitve [^5] arabske glasbe v okviru večinske izraelske kulture EssiCA MARKs
Clanek raziskuje zastopanost arabske glasbe (ki jo izvaja arabska manjšina v Izraelu) v okviru vecčinske kulture judovsko-izraelske skupnosti. Vodilna tema članka je zastopanost glasbe arabske manjšine v dveh najvecčjih izraelskih mestih: v Jeruzalemu in Tel Avivu. Ustanove v obeh mestih imajo velik vpliv na kulturnem področju ter obenem predstavljajo številne socio-kulturne skupine judovsko-izraelske ve-cčine. Cč lanek obravnava spremembe v zastopanosti arabske glasbe v Izraelu v devetdesetih letih prejšnjega stoletja ter spremembo v odnosu judovsko-izraelske družbe do arabske glasbe, ki se je zgodila v 21. stoletju. K spremembam so v veliki meri pripomogli tudi številni posamezniki, ki jih clanek navaja.
Elizabetinski orientalizem in njegov kontekst: podoba Orienta v zgodnji angleški dramatiki
TAHAR BAYOULI
Avtor preucuje tradicijo elizabetinskega orientalizma v povezavi z zgodovinskim, političcnim in kulturnim kontekstom tedanjega cčasa. Začetki diplomacije in vzpostavitev gospodarskih povezav z državami Bližnjega vzhoda so pomenili tudi vecčje zanimanje intelektualcev in umetnikov za Orient. Cč lanek obravnava predstavitev Orienta oziroma Vzhoda v elizabetinski dramatiki, ki je ovrgla številne dotedanje stereotipe, pretiravanja in napacčne koncepte o Orientu. V cčlanku pokažemo, da se Vzhoda v preteklosti ni predstavljalo samo kot nazadnjaškega, fatalisticčnega in barbarskega, torej kot nasprotje civilizirani Evropi, ampak so se številne igre tistega cčasa skušale izogniti stereotipom o Orientu ter obenem izraziti resnicčno zanimanje za raziskovanje in razumevanje tega področja. Avtor skozi preuceva-nje orientalske tradicije v elizabetinski dramatiki poudarja razlicčne prikaze orientalizma, ki so v veliki meri oblikovali gledališcče in dramatiko kot prevladujocčo obliko javne umetnosti v elizabetinski dobi.
University
V^/EMUNI
The Euro-Mediterranean University (emuni University), with its seat in Piran — Portorož, Slovenia, was inaugurated on June 9, 2008. Its objective is to be an international, post-graduate, higher-education, and research institution, fully integrated in the Euro-Mediterranean area. emuni University was co-founded by universities and other higher-education and research institutions.
The Euro-Mediterranean University will operate as a 'university for universities'. It will strictly follow the academic standards and will react appropriately to the suggestions of its co-founders in the areas of education and research. Center emuni will act as a Secretariat of the University.
The University will be financed by different sources: public, private and state sources, and the European budget. Significant financial resources will also be obtained through the emuni Foundation.
The signing of the Charter represents one of the first steps toward the establishment of emuni University. The institutions that sign the Foundation Charter have the right to appoint a representative to the General Assembly which is going to adopt the Statute of the University. The Charter has so far been signed by 96 institutions from 29 countries.
Evro-sredozemska univerza Università Euro-Mediterranea Euro-Mediterranean University Université Euro-Méditerranéenne ^LiJauijlajjjVl ^jlaI^JI
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International Journal f Euro-Mediterranean Studies
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The International Journal of Euro-Mediterranean Studies
is an interdisciplinary forum dedicated to examining issues in the intersections of humanities and social studies in the Euro-Mediterranean area. It proposes a scholarly response to the current political actions of making a new 'biopolitical' region and provides further rethinking of the acute questions concerning this area. It does not reflect only on the official discourses and dominant politics, but also on the ambivalent and transgressive cultural production and the performances of identities in order to present the 'polyvocality' of the Mediterranean societies and cultures.
Revue internationale d'études euro-méditerranéennes
est un forum international consacré à examiner les questions dans les intersections d'humanités et des sciences sociales en euro-méditerranée. Il propose une réponse scientifique aux actions politiques actuelles de construire une nouvelle région « biopoliticale » et incite à repenser davantage aux questions sérieuses concernant ce domaine. Ses reflets ne sont pas seulement dans les discours officiels et dans les politiques dominantes, mais aussi dans la production culturelle ambivalente et transgressive et dans les fonctionnements d'identité. Tout cela dans le but de présenter la « polyvocalité » des cultures et sociétés méditerranéennes.
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je interdisciplinarna revija, ki raziskuje vprašanja na presečišču humanistike in družbenih ved v Sredozemlju. Revija predstavlja znanstveni odgovor na oblikovanje nove »biopolitične« regije in obenem prinaša nove poglede na ključna vprašanja, ki se zastavljajo na tem območju. Ne osredotoča se le na uradne diskurze in dominantne politike, ampak — z željo po predstavljanju »večglasnosti« mediteranskih družb in kultur — tudi na ambivalentne in transgre-sivne prakse v kulturni produkciji in oblikovanju identitet.
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