I want now to consider two cases of cultural mixture or métissage culturel, each bringing with it daring expansion or boundary-crossing. I use the word métissage even while recognizing that it and the term hybridity originated in and continue to operate in a world of racist thinking. My view, like that of Marc Bloch, is that "ethnicity" is constructed from history, memory, language, customs, and marriage patterns, that it is often multiple, and that it is always changing.
My first example comes from the sixteenth century, a period in which the combination of Christian and classical values still required some defense from an Erasmus and in which transgressive mixture was described as "unnatural," "monstrous," a "prodigy." My second example is drawn from the eighteenth century and operates under the signs of Enlightenment and of colonial violence and desire. What form does the cultural mixture take in each case? Is it derived from simple social exchange, from conscious adaptation, or from coercion? Does it provide a mental universe of easy seamless blending, of shifting identities, or of tension and turbulence? For both examples, I will also describe the reaction of two twentieth-century figures, a writer and a scholar, who have crossed their own boundaries of language and nation. What sparks of interpretation are generated by such a contact across the centuries?
In 1524 in Bologna, a learned voyager from North Africa put the finishing touches on his Arabic-Hebrew-Latin dictionary. His name was Giovanni Leone, Johannes Leo de Medici, previously called Al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzaˆn. He had been born in Granada around the time of its conquest by the Christians and had been taken to Fez, where his uncle had connections with the ruling dynasty. After his studies in Fez, he embarked on a life of extensive travel, sometimes as a merchant, more often as a diplomat for the king of Fez. South to Timbuktu, Gao and Lake Chad, over to Egypt and up the Nile, across the Red Sea to Arabia where he probably made hajj to Mecca, to Istanbul, to Tripoli, to Tunis. Along the way, he participated in the gift exchange and poetry recitation that were part of the world of African hospitality and royal negotiation.
Then in 1518, on his way back from Egypt, he was seized by pirates near the island of Djerba, taken to Rome and given to Pope Leo X. Incarcerated but well-treated in the Castle of S. Angelo, at the height of the Renaissance papacy, Hasan al-Wazzaˆn was catechized and baptized as a Christian at Saint Peter's. He was now Johannes Leo, Giovanni Leone, after the pope who had christened him. After the death of Leo X a few years later, he went to Bologna and prepared his Arabic-Hebrew-Latin dictionary.
Returned to Rome, he translated and revised the big book of his travels in Africa from Arabic into Italian, completing it in 1526. When it first appeared in print twenty-four years later, its editor claimed that Giovanni Leone "had lived for a long time in Rome," which would surely make potential readers think he had remained a Christian. In fact, Leo said in his manuscript that he hoped to return to Africa "safe and sound from his voyage to Europe." Good evidence indicates he did just that: crossed over to Tunis, returned to Islam, and died in Africa as Al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzaˆn.
Leo/Hasan's Description of Africa is a book of cultural mixture. Its author moves back and forth between Christianity and Islam, between Europe and Africa consciously and smoothly. In some comparisons between Europe and Africa, Hasan/Leo assigned equal weight to each. He held on to multiple worlds in his writing without sign of serious strain, even when he was describing battles between the Portuguese and the kingdom of Fez.
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David Cohen Nassy was a member of the Jewish community that made up about a third of the settler population of the Dutch colony of Suriname in the late eighteenth century. His Nassy ancestors had already come to Suriname a century earlier, one of the Sephardic families that had acquired sugar plantations and had established a synagogue at la Savane des Juifs along a bend in the Suriname River. The Jewish community was composed both of Sephardim-or persons of "la Nation Juive Portuguaise," as Nassy preferred to call them-and of Ashkenazic Jews from German-speaking lands.
Most of the Jews now lived in the cosmopolitan town of Paramaribo, together with the families of Dutch Reformed traders and officials, of French Huguenots, of Africans working as domestic slaves and Africans and mulattos who had won their freedom from slavery, of German Lutherans, and of missionary Moravian Brethren. The few thousand European settlers were much outnumbered by the Amerindians, the 50,000 Africans working as slaves on the plantations, and the Maroons, that is, escaped slaves who flourished in villages of the tropical forests.
Nassy himself was part of the slave economy for only three years, during which he purchased a coffee plantation, failed to administer it, and had to sell it at less than half the purchase price. Primarily, he practiced medicine and pharmacy in Paramaribo, engaged in literary activities, and was one of six officers of the Mahamad that administered la Nation Juive Portugaise. A Jew in a world dominated by Christians; a creole born and bred in Suriname rather than in Holland; an imperial settler in lands that once belonged to Caribs, Arawaks, and Waiyanas; a European master in an economy of enslaved Africans-Nassy's mental universe shows multiple hybridities.
Nassy's most intimate connection with Africans and their culture is referred to only briefly in his Essai historique sur la colonie de Surinam (1788): the one hundred "mulattos and Free Blacks" who were Jews. Mostly they were sons and daughters of a Jewish man and an African slave woman or a mulatto woman. The sons were circumcised, and daughters and sons were given Jewish names and brought up as Jews: Joseph de David Cohen Nassy, Rosa Mendez Meza, Reuben Arias, to mention a few. They are, indeed, a fine example of the intuition of the memorandum preserved in Marc Bloch's archives: the "ethnic" composition of different Jewish communities varied according to different circumstances.
David Nassy's mental universe had a double mix. On the one hand, there was the interplay between his modernized Jewish values and Enlightenment beliefs. They were in conflict for him when an Enlightenment hero like Voltaire uttered statements against the Jews; then Nassy had to show how irrational were Voltaire's views and how inconsistent with true philosophy. On the other hand, there were his multiple relations with Africans and their values, given internal importance for him especially because of the Jewish Negroes and mulattos. Supporter of eighteenth-century racist thought though he was, Nassy still could feel wounded or flattered by African judgments.
David Nassy's library and the quarrel of the Sephardic Jews of Suriname with their mulatto members were first studied systematically by Robert Cohen, who died tragically young two years ago. Cohen was the son of Ashkenazic Jews who had lived in the Netherlands for centuries. During the German Occupation of the Netherlands in World War II, they were taken to Westerbrok transit camp and then shipped to Theriesenstadt. There they married and survived; Robert Cohen was born to them after the war. As he grew up, Cohen found it harder and harder to remain in Holland. As his widow recalls, every time Cohen met a man over a certain age, he would fear he was the one that had taken his parents to Westerbrok. Cohen left for Israel and for studies there and in the United States. After publications on the comparative demography of the West Indies and colonial America, he embarked on the years of research that led to his book on Suriname: Jews in Another Environment.
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