Somewhere, beyond the sea.

• Author: Morris, Benny
• Position: 'The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean' - Book review

David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 816 pp., $34.95.

In The Rebel, his treatise against totalitarianism, particularly of the Left, and in some of his earlier essays, Albert Camus hailed the Mediterranean, which for him embodied life, light, beauty (quite probably sex) and a sense of limits. He contrasted what Cambridge don David Abulafia calls "the Great Sea"--actually a Hebrew designation (hayam hagadol)--with the darkness of northern Europe's cities and forests, seedbeds as they were of the twentieth century's encompassing murderous ideologies, Bolshevism and Nazism.

"The Mediterranean sun has something tragic about it," Camus wrote in "Helen's Exile" (1948):

quite different from the tragedy of [northern] fogs. Certain evenings at the base of the seaside mountains, night falls over the flawless curve of a little bay, and there rises from the silent waters a sense of anguished fulfillment. In such spots one can understand that if the Greeks knew despair, they always did so through beauty .... Our time, on the other hand, has fed its despair on ugliness and convulsions. This is why Europe would be vile, if suffering could ever be so. He identified the sea with Greece, a place that revered moderation. "It never carried anything to extremes, neither the sacred nor reason, because it negated nothing .... balancing shadow with light. Our Europe, on the other hand, off in the pursuit of totality, is the child of disproportion."

Abulafia's sweeping survey of the "sea between the lands" and its shoreline peoples--from the Stone Age through the present era of global tourism--tells us a different story. It is a tale in large part characterized by hubris, excess and mass murder. Take the Punic Wars of the third and second centuries BC, the three bouts of combat between the Phoenician colonies (with their center in Carthage) and Rome for command of the central and western Mediterranean. It was a war to the finish, ending in the annihilation of Carthage and the sowing of its ruins with salt, its inhabitants put to the sword or consigned to slavery. Or take the campaigns of the Almohads, sectarians who ruled the western Mediterranean lands (Spain, Morocco) during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with an iron fist, dispensing death and terror in the name of a pristine Islam. Or take some of the crusaders, who slaughtered Muslims (and Jews) in vast numbers in their efforts to reclaim and purify the Holy Land.

Abulafia doesn't really tackle the contemporary resurgence, and its implications, of Salafist Islam around the Mediterranean basin, from the Strait of Gibraltar through Bosnia and Alexandria, which may yet heraid a new Mediterranean age (in The Great Sea he postulates five eras between 22,000 BC and AD 2010, a periodization that is not completely persuasive). But he does refer to a "new Ottomanism" when considering the Gaza flotilla incident of May 2010 and its aftermath. (He could well have added Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogaffs recent repeated threats to send Turkish warships into the eastern Mediterranean to assert the "rule of law.")

Excess seems to be part of the human condition, and while paragons of excess--mass murderers, in short--may have flourished at certain times in certain places, there are probably few of the earth's regions that have demonstrated complete immunity.

What we have in The Great Sea is a history that emphasizes politics and warfare: these are the primary and most significant arenas of human agency--and the major vehicles of change. In fact, in his "Introduction," Abulafia, a man of noble Sephardic Jewish lineage (and in his book one repeatedly encounters the Jewish dimension, almost invariably Sephardic, in this or that period and land--and the occasional precursing Abulafia to...