New Perspectives on the Mediterranean Enlightenment: Introduction

In Memory of Professor Michael Heyd

The present collection of articles is the first project in print to emerge from the activities of The Mediterranean Society for Enlightenment Studies.¹ The Society was founded in 2012 by a group of scholars from Greece, Italy, and Israel, and has since held seven international annual conferences, which have addressed central aspects of Enlightenment studies such as religion, cultural pluralism, toleration, and freedom. The venues of these conferences—Thessaloniki, Zakynthos, Jerusalem, Haifa, Istanbul, and Izmir—with their rich cultural histories, afforded unique settings for our discussions. The society includes members from Greece, Turkey, Israel, and other Mediterranean countries such as Italy, France, and Spain, and hosts scholars from other regions. We remain committed to welcoming new scholars from other countries, not least from the Balkans and the Arab world.

The aim of this Special Issue is to present our unique Mediterranean perspective on the history of the Enlightenment to a larger audience. After a generation of scholars who emphasized the varying manifestations of the historical Enlightenment, the notion of a Mediterranean Enlightenment might be received offhand, as one more manifestation of a plurality of Enlightenments. Yet for those scholars who live in the Mediterranean this notion cannot be taken for granted. The late Michael Heyd, one of the founders of our society, to whose memory this collection of essays is dedicated, remarked in one of its conferences in his customarily prescient manner, that there was no other contemporary region in which the values of the Enlightenment were more relevant than the Mediterranean. In recent years the values of the Enlightenment have come up against increasing challenges in all of the countries of the Mediterranean—in particular Greece, Turkey, Israel, and, not least, the Arab world. Even a seemingly more stable and longstanding democracy such as France, and those established later such as Italy and Spain, face formidable challenges to their enlightened and liberal values in our age of increasing globalist instability. The Mediterranean therefore combines a variety of national, religious, ethnic, and cultural factors vis-à-vis the attempt to uphold and strengthen the values of the Enlightenment—toleration, liberal democracy, women’s rights, and a cosmopolitan attitude which seeks the right balance between preserving the uniqueness of different civilizations and the creation of international institutions to be shared by them all. The activities of The Mediterranean Society for Enlightenment Studies often assume a common interest in scholarship, but are equally motivated by the idea that such scholarship can help, whether obliquely, or, may we dare hope, directly, in furthering enlightened ideals in an age, and in a region, regrettably often lacking them.

Should the Mediterranean Enlightenment be viewed as a unique form that is distinct from other Enlightenments, or as a manifestation of an overarching Enlightenment that is unique in its particulars, yet ultimately shares central characteristics? This question arises from the ongoing debate among Enlightenment scholars regarding the unified or pluralized nature of the historical eighteenth-century Enlightenment. While personally I support what is currently the minority view, clinging to the more traditional conception of a unified Enlightenment, I am aware that other scholars, including contributors to this collection, think otherwise. Yet even those, like myself, who maintain this approach, are not impervious to the idea that a unified Enlightenment does not preclude varying manifestations based on cultural, religious, geographical, and national differences. In short, the notion of a Mediterranean Enlightenment remains valid whether one views it as a unique case compared to other Enlightenments, or as a singular manifestation of a more general Enlightenment. Whatever approach one chooses, addressing the concept of the Mediterranean Enlightenment seems apt for our times. The introduction by Joanna Innes and Mark Philp to a recent collection of essays on democracy in the Mediterranean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries presents one approach to such a conceptualization.² The following essays address a similar topic in different ways.

What then is the Mediterranean Enlightenment? This question lies at the base of the essays presented here, yet it is only by considering them as a tapestry of perspectives that one can attempt to answer it. Particularly significant is the attempt to identify some common denominator connecting, even if not uniting, the various Mediterranean countries, in relation to Enlightenment ideas. One approach is to trace the transmission of such ideas. These followed trade routes, the travels of scholars and philosophers (a prominent example was the Comte de Volney), and other routes of transmission. In our own era, with its internet culture, such transmission has become almost instantaneous, although perhaps for that very reason, often superficial and hence less effective. Another approach, which goes beyond charting the transmission of ideas, and is the focus of several essays here, is to study the transmutation of common Enlightenment ideals once transplanted to a new setting. Thus mainstream Enlightenment notions originating in say Italy, Spain, and above all France, found, and continue to find, their place in new Mediterranean contexts, where they interact with local traditions and circumstances. What happens to these notions once they flourish, or not, in these new surroundings? What accounts for their successful or unsuccessful transplantation, and for these varying outcomes? These are the questions to be addressed here in an attempt to discuss the Mediterranean Enlightenment, whether as a historical phenomenon or as a current political one.

Regarding the latter, there is no denying that the Arab Spring was the most dramatic geopolitical attempt to transplant liberal enlightened values to Mediterranean countries, and what seems, at least for now, its failure (although in Tunisia it has proven more successful, and there are hopeful signs that positive developments in other countries may emerge in the foreseeable future). From the present political perspective, if not from a purely historical one, this event, if so varying a phenomenon can be referred to in the singular, has brought to a head the difficulties of propagating the ideals of the Enlightenment. These difficulties are evident even in a distinct geographical region such as the Mediterranean, in which physical distance has not precluded the transmission of ideas on the one hand, while retaining distinct cultural differences on the other. The distance between Italy and North Africa is famously very small, yet it divides two very different realities, as the desperate stream of migrants attempting to cross it over the past few years painfully reminds us. This distance is as much a historical as a geographical one, and the simple accessibility of ideas, today no longer a barrier in any geographical sense, evidently does not suffice to explain the success, or lack thereof, of ingraining enlightened liberalism.

The history of the influence of Enlightenment ideas, and of European culture in general, in the Middle East is not new. The Napoleonic invasion of Egypt has often been viewed as a watershed in the modernization of the Middle East, irrespective of its occasionally questionable nature, which had varying institutional and cultural effects in different Mediterranean regions. Thus interpretations of Middle Eastern modernization have tended to see it as either heavily indebted to post-Napoleonic western influence, or in terms of pre-existing local developments. If the latter, they have been understood as either strengthening local modernizing developments, or as disrupting them and preventing the emergence of indigenous cultural and political traditions which might have led to a modernity comparable, if not identical to, western liberal democracy.³ However, the underlying assumption of the essays included in this issue is that the Enlightenment tradition, as the source of modern democracy, has something unique and inimitable to offer, irrespective of the contributions of varying indigenous constellations. And if so, the question that arises is whether non-western societies are inimical or receptive to this legacy.

But lest any hint of cultural chauvinism be suspected here, we should remember that even western societies have struggled, and continue to struggle, with implementing enlightened ideals. Following the disappointing outcome of the Arab Spring, the anticipation of the spread of enlightened values in the Arab world might seem overly optimistic. Yet we should be wary of any western presumption on this point, given the erosion of enlightened liberal values in many western societies today. Nevertheless, we cannot lose sight of the fact that the eighteenth-century Enlightenment originated in western, specifically European, culture, and that its global history is one of the spread of ideas from Europe outward. Since the Mediterranean presents the full range of these historical and political trajectories, the implicit assumption of this collection is that the influence of the Enlightenment would benefit any society that is subjected to it (which is why postmodernist critiques of the Enlightenment are not considered here). Yet this, again, is not to suggest any necessary Eurocentric bias. Although the Enlightenment was often Eurocentric in its cultural approach, it also included cosmopolitan and pluralistic currents of thought which were amenable to making its reception in non-western contexts at least possible.

What, historically, connected a putative Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim Enlightenment (and these are not necessarily synonymous), to the French, Spanish, or Italian Enlightenments? Networks of trade and the interpenetration of ideas between different cultures no doubt played a part long before the internet age made such transmissions a matter of course. Yet however these ideas reached various Mediterranean settings, and reach them they did, the way they interacted, and continue to interact, with singular local conditions, lies at the heart of these essays. David Heyd’s biographical profile of his brother, the late Michael Heyd, appropriately opens this collection, both because of Michael’s seminal role in the early activities of our society, but, more importantly, because he embodied the spirit of Enlightenment studies—uniting a scholarly interest in the historical Enlightenment with a personal commitment to its highest ideals.

The following six essays address various historical and political manifestations of the Enlightenment in the Mediterranean. Beginning in the western Mediterranean, Roberto Rodríguez-Milán examines how Spanish Enlightenment historiography struggled to apply modern historical methods to a national past replete with long-accepted myths, prefiguring a challenge which has resurfaced in new forms in contemporary culture. Sergio Cremaschi presents a general overview of the intellectual facets of the Italian Enlightenment, with an emphasis on its approach to moral philosophy. He views the Italian Enlightenment as part of the European Enlightenment, influenced not least by the ideas of Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson, and similar to the Scottish Enlightenment in being both local and cosmopolitan. Dionysis G. Drosos and Maria Kavala’s essay describes the development of the late Greek Enlightenment, emphasizing attitudes toward Jews as signifiers of the influence of the Enlightenment, as anti-Semitism gradually gave way to a more tolerant attitude combining Enlightenment values and Greek nationalism. In the only essay on the influence of the Enlightenment on Arab thought, Wael Abu-‘Uksa discusses the nineteenth-century Aleppine Christian scholar Fransis al-Marrash, specifically his conception of religious faith and its place in Arab civilization. From the Jewish perspective, Shmuel Feiner presents the Kulturkampf in the late nineteenth-century Zionist debate, emphasizing the secular outlooks of Judah Leib Gordon and Theodor Herzl, which were heavily indebted to the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, and its approach to the separation of religion and state. As both Gordon and Herzl recognized, the Jewish national project would remain flawed without imbibing the values of the Enlightenment. This is followed by Fania Oz-Salzberger’s discussion of the legacy of the Enlightenment in the state of Israel. She distinguishes between two Modern Hebrew terms for the Enlightenment, haskalah and ne’orut, and charts their importance in the political and ideological development of Israel. While the values of the haskalah, with their emphasis on the Jewish religious aspect of the Enlightenment, remain potent in contemporary Israeli debate, those of the more secular and openly liberal ne’orut are increasingly imperiled. As Oz-Salzberger notes, in this respect the challenges facing the Enlightenment’s legacy in Israel mirror those it is facing in many other countries today.

There are, of course, other aspects of the Mediterranean Enlightenment which are not addressed here, such as developments in the French Enlightenment, particularly in the south of France, and in the French perceptions of the Mediterranean; developments in the Ottoman Empire and later on in modern Turkey; the history of the Enlightenment in the Balkans; and not least, further study of the Enlightenment legacy in the Arab world. However, by shedding new light on a region of the world where the values of the Enlightenment have a rich though largely unexplored history—particularly in English-language scholarship—these essays demonstrate the multifarious nature of the Mediterranean Enlightenment. From this diversity, however, there emerges a sense of underlying unity, which attests to the continuing importance of the study of the Enlightenment for our twenty-first-century world. This sense of the cosmopolitan nature and efficacy of the Enlightenment is addressed in Anthony Pagden’s Afterword. As Pagden notes, the protagonists of the Enlightenment “thought of themselves as belonging to a single, if immensely varied, community.” This sense of community and unity did not, however, preclude singular contributions from various nations, cultures, and geographical regions. Unity does not imply absence of inner diversity, and it is in this respect that the singular contribution of the Mediterranean to the Enlightenment, from the long eighteenth century to our own time and beyond, should be understood.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the members and friends of the Mediterranean Society for Enlightenment Studies for their support in preparing this collection of essays. Particular thanks are due to the founders of the society and to its senior members—its President, Dionysis G. Drosos, Fania Oz-Salzberger, Sergio Cremaschi, as well as Samuel Fleischacker, and in particular to the family of the late Michael Heyd, his spouse Shula Bitran and his brother David Heyd, as long-standing members and supporters of the society.I would also like to thank The European Legacy for hosting this special issue.

Notes

1. Formerly The Mediterranean Society for the Study of the Scottish Enlightenment. For the activities of the society, see https://msfsose.blogspot.com.

2. See Innes and Philp’s introduction to Re-Imagining Democracy in the Mediterranean.

3. Ze’evi, “Back to Napoleon?” 73–94; also see Broers, The Napoleonic Mediterranean, esp. 30–34.