Marriages at the margins : interfaith marriages in the Mediterranean

Abstract

Interfaith marriages in the Mediterranean constituted transgressive challenges to the social order and oriented scholarly reconstructions of the past to view them as ‘exceptional’ and not meriting scrutiny. But it is precisely because they were bracketed as ‘exceptional’ that they reveal themselves as visibly invisible tactics of social amelioration. Linked as they are to conversion and the policing of group boundaries and membership, this paper argues that the question of what constitutes interfaith marriages differed between the various prophetic religions and between religious elites and the grassroots. This created ‘gaps’ for social mobility through interfaith marriages. Ironically, a significant number of interfaith marriages in Medieval al Andalus and the Ottoman Balkans were between male converts and non-converted women, resulting in the cultivation of aggregated religious practices. Interfaith marriages challenge dominant national and scholarly constructions of the past as consisting of discrete, mutually exclusive, religious and social strata.