Mediterranean societies and cultures have long been the focus of scholars seeking to transcend national boundaries around the Mediterranean basin, and deconstruct the regional concepts of the Middle East and Europe. The Mediterranean framework offered the opportunity to demonstrate connections, exchanges, and shared culture between regions, while avoiding facile dichotomies that posited them in constant conflict. Historically too, various communities promoted a sense of "Mediterraneanism," to counter North European racial ideologies (in Italy), or create a larger framework of belonging (for Greeks, Maltese, or Jewish communities around the Mediterranean).
This panel examines the ways that different communities constructed, or interacted with, the idea of Mediterraneanism as a sociocultural framework. It will open with an in-depth look at the social developments within Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire from the early 17th to early 19th centuries, arguing that the weakening of communal leadership led to, and was influenced by, growing involvement in a robust Mediterranean trade that was gradually expanding into a global network spanning Western Europe and the New World. The second presentation explores how new cultural practices brought to Cairo by Mediterranean immigrants in the late 19th century transformed its coffeehouse scene. It argues that although a new social group (effendiyya) used them to distinguish and reproduce itself, they cannot be identified solely with it. The third paper continues to examine categories of "Mediterranean," "Foreign," and "Egyptian," focusing on owners, workers, and customers of the Egyptian beer industry between 1890 and 1961. By analyzing their class, national, or confessional identities it posits that Mediterranean is the most useful term to conceptualize the multi-ethnic and multi-national reality of the industry. The final presentation argues that Yemeni Jewish immigrants used cultural practice as part of a strategy of integration into Israeli society during the 1950s, at a time when a "Mediterranean identity" was promoted as a way to unify Jewish communities from the Middle East and Europe. This resulted in internalized orientalist attitudes, but also in a desire to make a specifically Yemeni contribution to modern Israeli identity.
Relying on a broad array of sources, from memoirs, print media, and photographic evidence, to archival documents about commerce and industry, this panel will ultimately investigate the manifestations of "Mediterraneanism" in the Middle East. It will therefore deepen our understanding of the integration of Middle Eastern communities into larger economic, cultural, and identity networks.
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Dr. Yaron Ayalon
It is fairly established in the scholarship that Jews and Christians were well integrated, socially and economically, into Ottoman Islamic society. But were they also part of a Mediterranean world that transcended the Ottoman Empire? In this paper, I will present social developments that took place within the Jewish community from the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, and link them to Jews’ involvement in the greater Mediterranean economy. Based on my ongoing research into Ottoman Jewish communities, I will argue that internal processes that had weakened communal and rabbinical leadership (and that had parallels in Orthodox Christian communities) led to, and were influenced by, an expanding involvement in the greater Mediterranean economy. Two significant such internal developments were the proliferation of private charitable societies; and a widening dissemination of texts accompanied by the appearance of schools sponsored by private individuals rather than the community or its rabbis. By the mid-eighteenth century, such initiatives had created a new class of educated Ottoman Jews who were less dependent on their communities, and more involved, directly or indirectly, in social and commercial networks with European Jews or non-Jews.
Furthermore, evidence from rabbinical responsa, archival Ottoman state documents, and shar‘i court records reveals that while Jews were indeed marginalized from some professions in the seventeenth century, the settlement of Jews from Livorno in the empire in the second half of that century eventually led to an economic expansion – one that was dramatically larger than what Jews had experienced in the empire in the early sixteenth century. This at first affected only the commercial elite who maintained business ties with traders in other countries; but by the mid-eighteenth century, it involved many Jews in middle and lower classes whose work supported a robust Mediterranean trade that was gradually expanding into a global network spanning Western Europe and the New World. By the turn of the nineteenth century, a significant stratum – perhaps a plurality – of Ottoman Jewry was indeed “Mediterranean” – in its ties with partners outside the empire, its involvement in or support of international trade, the several languages its members spoke (no longer only Ladino or Arabic), and its intellectual curiosity that transcended traditional Jewish topics.
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Dr. Alon Tam
Since the 1860s, and especially during the 1890s, hundreds of thousands of immigrants arrived in Egypt and settled mainly in its two biggest cities, Cairo and Alexandria. The largest groups among them were Mediterranean: Greeks, Italians, Levantines, Maltese, French, and North Africans, alongside smaller groups from around Europe and the Ottoman Empire. This migration was one of the drivers for exponential urban growth in Cairo (and other urban centers), and for the adoption of “European” styles and socio-cultural practices. Its larger context also involved such historical phenomena as modernization, the rise of new social groups, especially the effendiyya, and colonial intervention (first economic and political, and later military occupation).
This paper traces the urban and social history of the many coffeehouses that those Mediterranean immigrants established in Cairo. It discusses their numbers and spatial distribution across Cairo, their architecture and design, the new foodways and entertainment they introduced, and the social and gender dynamics among their clientele. This paper will then compare those new coffeehouses to the many that already existed in Cairo, and explore how and to what extent did the new coffeehouses influence the social and cultural dynamics of the older ones.
Based on a varied array of evidence, from photographs, to newspapers, memoirs, tour guides, statistical yearbooks, census data, and secret spy reports, this paper will use Cairo’s coffeehouse scene to argue that the effendiyya, as an emerging group in Egyptian society, construed Mediterranean culture as all-European, appropriated it as its own, and maintained sharp distinctions between it and other, closely related, urban socio-cultural forms in order to carve their own place on the social hierarchy. Thus, certain coffeehouses provided the effendiyya with the space to socially create and reproduce itself, but it will also be wrong to identify Mediterranean/European culture only with Egyptian elites or middle classes.
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Omar Foda
If there was any place or time where "Mediterranean" could mean something beyond a geographical designation, it would be in the Egyptian beer industry in the period from 1890 to 1961. From its beginnings in the late 1890s to its nationalization in 1961, its owners, workers, and customers were a heterogeneous mix of peoples from across the Mediterranean basin. Moreover, from the 1930s until the 1960s, the industry was a duopoly seemingly divided along non-Mediterranean vs. Mediterranean lines. The two companies that controlled the industry were the Dutch-controlled Pyramid Brewery and the Greek-controlled Crown Brewery. This paper, using Egyptian and Dutch archival records, attempts to find the "Mediterranean" in the Egyptian beer industry in the period from 1890 to 1961.
As I show, "Mediterranean" was not an operable identity in the industry. In its early years, between 1890 and 1940, those within it were more likely to align based on confessional lines (Christian vs. Muslim) or hierarchical status (management vs. workforce). After 1940, with the rise of economic nationalism, these same battles were infused with national import, but again there was little sense of Mediterranean solidarity. Nevertheless, Mediterranean is a useful descriptor for the industry as a whole before nationalization. The term Mediterranean allows us to faithfully reckon with an industry comprised of many who defied the easy classifications of "foreign" or "local." With this term we can handle people-like the second generation Jewish migrant from Spain who spoke Arabic, and had lived his whole life in Egypt, but had no Egyptian citizenship-who have proved so problematic to conceptualize within the foreign vs. local dichotomy. This conclusion also allows us to move beyond the state-supported historical narrative of the Egyptian economy in this period, which characterized it as a perpetual struggle between the exploitative foreign compradors and the beleaguered locals. Rather we can see the economy as an arena where nationality only became important when it could be weaponized in struggles between state and private actors or capital and labor.
Although no one at the time would have called it so, if we were to assign an identity to the pre-1961 Egyptian beer industry, Mediterranean would be most fitting.
