Farewell to co-editor Irad Malkin

Mediterranean Historical Review ISSN: 0951-8967 (Print) 1743-940X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fmhr20 Farewell to co-editor Irad Malkin To cite this article: (2019) Farewell to co-editor Irad Malkin, Mediterranean Historical Review, 34:1, 1-6, DOI: 10.1080/09518967.2019.1594090 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2019.1594090 Published online: 28 May 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 4 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fmhr20 Mediterranean Historical Review, 2019 Vol. 34, No. 1, 1–6, https://doi.org/10.1080/09518967.2019.1594090 Farewell to co-editor Irad Malkin After a lengthy and eventful period sharing the helm, our co-editor Irad Malkin is leaving the Mediterranean Historical Review. During his long stewardship, Irad contributed so much to the journal that after more than three decades, his name and that of the MHR became virtually synonymous. This is not only thanks to the investment, promotion and expansion of the journal in which Irad played a vital role, but also thanks to the reputation that both he and the MHR have acquired in their contribution to making the history of the Mediterranean an innovative field of research. What is now an established research field worldwide, was hardly so three decades ago when the Mediterranean Historical Review was founded. At the time, the very notion that cross-chronological and cross-geographical history of Mediterranean civilizations, often very different one from another, can find a common historiographical framework was uncertain. In both his research on the ancient Greek civilization and his co-editorial work, Irad Malkin was a cardinal agent in making this field what it has become today. Establishing a geohistorical perspective on the Mediterranean involves asking global historical questions about the peoples who have lived in relation to this geographical space, and whose societies, cultures and lives have shaped its history and were all affected by it. This also involves putting the emphasis on questions of interconnectivity, disparity, relatedness, forms of movement, and types of stability. Such questions have made Mediterranean history a thriving field of research that offers a unique model of inquiry to the study of history as a whole. Irad’s role as co-editor is now in the safe hands of Youval Rotman, a Byzantinist from Tel Aviv University, who, as our former Reviews Editor is well familiar with the MHR’s traditions and is also keen to point it in new directions. The modern Ottomanist Avner Wishnitzer from Tel Aviv University will now edit the Reviews section. Stéphanie Binder, a classicist from Bar-Ilan University, is our energetic new managing editor. A warm welcome therefore to all of them. For his vigorous contribution and for serving as an active motor in the development of the entire field of Mediterranean research, we are grateful to Irad Malkin, and have invited dear colleagues to add a more personal note to our farewell. The MHR editorial team medhistrev@gmail.com The Mediterranean Historical Review (MHR) was founded in 1986 by a group of then relatively young historians at Tel Aviv University (TAU), among them Shlomo Ben Ami, a historian of modern Spain who was head of the School of History; Irad Malkin, a historian of ancient Greece; Ron Barkai, who studied medieval Spain; Elie Barnavi, a specialist in early modern France; Yaakov Shavit, a historian of modern Jewish history; the Ottomanist Ehud Toledano; and me, a historian of Renaissance Italy with a special interest in the Venetian presence in the eastern Mediterranean. An international board of prominent historians of different fields and backgrounds, including Michel Balard, Raymond Carr, Pierre Chaunu, Halil Inalcik, Alberto Tenenti, Gilles Veinstein and others, gave their support and endowed the journal with prestige. Ben-Ami edited the © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 Farewell to co-editor Irad Malkin first two volumes, with Malkin as his associate, but as of vol. III (1988), with a few intermissions and more than any other of the “founding fathers”, Malkin served as coeditor. Thus his mark is noticeable in every aspect related to the journal and its impressive success. Several of Irad’s articles appeared in the MHR, and are still among those that attract the largest number of readers. He also edited two special issues of the journal, dedicated to Mediterranean Cities: Historical Perspectives (with Robert L. Hohlfelder, 1988) and Mediterranean Paradigms in Classical Antiquity (2003). The extent to which the Mediterranean has been at the centre of his academic concerns is even reflected in the name he chose for his email address (Mediter) – an interest of which I was very much aware during the 12 years we edited the journal together (2003–2015). The MHR profited from Irad Malkin’s erudition, his original and innovative insights as a historian of Greek Antiquity, and consequently from the network of international academic connections that was built on the basis of his scholarly achievements. His main object of research was the ancient Greek colonies established on Mediterranean coasts between the eighth and sixth century BCE, from the Propontis (the Sea of Marmara) and the Black Sea, through Asia Minor and the Aegean, up to North Africa, mainland Italy, Sicily, France and Spain. The central themes of his numerous publications revolved around the Greek identity, and the role of myths, especially the concepts of “foundation” and heroic founders, as well as religion, sanctuaries, games and encounters with other populations. The central question that has occupied him during his academic career concerned the apparent discrepancy between, on the one hand, the great dispersion of Greek colonies around the Black Sea and the Mediterranean and, on the other, the connectivity of the same colonies with one another, that ended up by forging a PanHellenic identity, a question he phrased as “how distance creates the virtual centre”. To put it differently, colonization, according to Malkin, was significantly responsible for the rise of a Hellenic identity. These ideas were first put forward in an article published in the MHR in 2003, and later presented more extensively in Malkin’s book, A Small Greek World (Oxford University Press 2011, 2nd edition 2013). Irad’s innovative research has received worldwide acclaim. Several of his books were translated into other languages, including French, Italian and Hebrew. He has been invited as a visiting professor or fellow to the most prestigious academic institutions, such as Johns Hopkins University, École Normale Supérieure, École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales, Oxford University, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Berkeley University and Université de Montreal. He won many prizes and fellowships in different countries, and was elected in 2014 as laureate of the Israel Prize (the highest honour that the state of Israel awards to scholarship and other public activities). Irad’s multifarious activities as chair of the history department at TAU, editor of the MHR, director of the Dan David Prize, member of the Board of Governors of TAU, as well as a visiting professor in important universities abroad never hindered him from producing new scholarly works of the highest quality. To date he has published six books, edited (alone or with colleagues) seven others, and has written some 60 articles, with more in the pipeline. Indeed, historical research seems to be for him an existential priority. I can attest that he is one of the few senior scholars who still visits the TAU central library on a regular basis. When he is not around, I am sure he can be found in the reading room of some other library on another continent. He has now retired from teaching and administrative responsibilities, including from editing the MHR, in order to be able to advance various new research projects. Undoubtedly, we shall have many Mediterranean Historical Review 3 opportunities to admire more of his lucid insights into the fascinating world of the Greeks established around the greater Mediterranean “like frogs around a pond” (Plato, Phaedo, 109b). Benjamin Arbel Tel Aviv University arbel@tauex.tau.ac.il I first met Irad Malkin when he came to Oxford in the wintry early months of 2005 to give the Nellie Wallace lectures on networks in Antiquity. He disrupted our comfortable routines right from the start, inviting the crowd of Graeco-Roman historians who had gathered from all over Oxford and well beyond to contemplate the Mediterranean as a whole, and in a literal sense: the lectures were delivered in a small room at Wadham College in front of a huge relief map of the Mediterranean borrowed from the Examination Schools. By the end of the first lecture he had won everyone over – so much so that when the questions finished, instead of making straight for the drinks table at the back as long, stern Oxford custom required, the crowd headed instead to the front to carry on the discussion under the map. It was a conversation that has continued ever since, as we have found a variety of excuses to invite Irad back, culminating in his appointment to the Oxford Faculty in 2017 as Visiting Professor. More personally, as a new appointee back in 2005, I found an inspiring and generous new friend and colleague, and the beginning of a now longstanding collaborative, combative working relationship that has immeasurably enriched my own research. The intellectual firepower and elegant argument of the Nellie Wallace lectures reached a larger audience as A Small Greek World (Oxford University Press 2011). Despite the modest name, the book traces not only the web of connections made by speakers of Greek with each other across the Mediterranean, but also its part in a much larger regional network created between settlers from several homelands through stories told in many languages. The introduction of network theory to ancient history had an electric effect, launching what sometimes seems like a thousand dissertations, but the underlying themes were not new: the creation of a multicultural, integrated Mediterranean and the distinctive role played in that dynamic by Greek-speakers have been the continuous parallel tracks of Irad’s entire career. Like the Mediterranean Historical Review itself, his work has been a primary factor in the rising popularity and sophistication of “Mediterranean Studies” in recent decades, and it has changed the way we think about Mediterranean Antiquity. Irad’s first book on Religion and Colonization in Ancient Greece (Brill 1987) brought the religious aspects of the Greek colonization of other lands into clear focus for the first time, as the settlers negotiated relationships with new places and peoples from first oracles to final sanctuaries. The next book on Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean (Cambridge University Press 1994) broadened the focus from specific foundations to Greek colonial settlement and territory in general, bringing the topic to life through the ties that bound a single inland Greek city with the coasts and communities of the sea as a whole. With his third book, The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity (UCP 1998), Irad reached further beyond the traditional confines of Greek history to reveal a new Mediterranean world of myth and identity in which Odysseus himself became a larger than Greek character mediating contact and conflict between settlers and indigenous peoples. Things became more complex again in a classic article on “A 4 Farewell to co-editor Irad Malkin Colonial Middle Ground: Greek, Etruscan and local elites in the Bay of Naples” published in a volume on The Archaeology of Colonialism (The Getty Research Institute 2002), edited by Claire Lyons and John Papadopoulos. This essay introduced ancient historians to the concept of the “middle ground”, where people of many origins speaking several languages watch and learn from each other in a context where force and hierarchy are less important than interaction and survival. Developed first to discuss European colonialism in the Americas, the middle ground has now become one of the key shared tools of ancient historians. The same must now be said of course of network theory, and of the new, smaller Mediterranean world that Irad has mapped out over the last decade. For most scholars, such riches would be followed by a well-deserved rest on one’s laurels, but he has chosen a more interesting and restless path, turning his attention to the role of the lot in Greek history at home and abroad. We look forward to the results: as ever, the contemporary political implications will be as important as the ancient revelations. Josephine Crawley Quinn Oxford University josephine.quinn@classics.ox.ac.uk Long before the Mediterranean Sea and area surrounding it became popular in current Classical scholarship (marked by P. Horden’s and N. Purcell’s Corrupting Sea [Blackwell 2000]), Irad Malkin had already started studying far-reaching movements and migrations within these regions. His books and articles on the so-called Greek Colonization immediately became works of reference. Step by step, beginning with his dissertation on “Religion and Colonisation in Ancient Greece”, continued, in a certain sense, by “Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean” and “The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity”, as well as a large number of related articles, he enriched our understanding of the phenomenon of “the Greeks overseas” enormously. This was due to the fact that he combined a high degree of methodological sensitivity and conceptual thinking with a profound knowledge of the relevant evidence in all its aspects, from archaeological remains to the literary tradition and the written sources. In this respect, it was particularly important that he insisted on the heuristic relevance of our traditional sources (albeit not without a critical approach), not declaring them anachronistic nor fictitious per se. Thus, for me (and I am surely not alone), one of his statements became a basic methodological principle: “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”1 In all these studies, Irad had enough opportunities to point out the importance of seafaring and maritime communication within the Greek world and beyond. He was thus obviously in the topmost rank when the Mediterranean and its culture came to the fore of the classicists’ interest. Since then, he has enlarged his field of research more and more, taking into consideration, for instance, the interconnectedness between the Mediterranean Sea and the Near East. All his efforts led to his studies regarding networks in the Mediterranean, now represented in his seminal work on A Small Greek World. To sum up: Who could be more suited to take part in establishing and editing the Mediterranean Historical Review? Indeed, this happened even before he had published his PhD thesis, his first book mentioned earlier, and it happened in the vibrant, stimulating, innovative atmosphere of Tel Aviv University among a small group of scholars from very different intellectual backgrounds. I am sure that it was not by chance that our colleagues, among them young scholars like Irad, developed the idea of studying the Mediterranean diachronically and across the relevant disciplines exactly at this place. Mediterranean Historical Review 5 I still recall the first information provided by the publishing house, the first call for papers and my first impression of it as well. It was clear to me from the very beginning that, among the plethora of newly founded reviews, this special one would have a brilliant future. Now this is confirmed by history itself. The Mediterranean Historical Review has clearly shaped our historical perceptions of this particular part of the world, especially due to its true historical character in crossing borders of cultures, disciplines and epochs. Collectively continuing, so to speak, the work of great scholars such as Alfred Philippson and Fernand Braudel, the editors and authors have had a tremendous impact on the “Mediterranean turn” and the conceptions of interconnectedness and long-distance communication as well, which characterise current trends in many fields. It was – and is – our friend Irad who has always been committed to these and similar topics. By his multifarious activities, his well-known publications, his teaching activities in many countries and not least at his University, he has inspired generations of scholars. As far as I am concerned, I can tell that I owe him much more than he may think. Wherever I touched upon a topic he had been dealing with, I got the idea that all had been sufficiently done and that I could only add minor supplements or slight modifications. I am sure that I am not alone in this respect. I can therefore only express my gratitude to him as spiritus rector of the Mediterranean Historical Review, and as an admired friend, and my hope that he will remain close to the review – and to his fellow scholars. Hans-Joachim Gehrke Freiburg, Germany hj.g.gehrke@gmail.com Irad Malkin co-founded the Mediterranean Historical Review at the very beginning of his career, fresh after finishing his PhD dissertation on Greek religion and colonization. There can hardly be a more powerful subject to force one to look at the great sea connecting people all through the millennia of European civilization, but most people would look at peculiar details of a certain area or time-span, and forget about the great sea. Furthermore, at this stage in their life, most young scholars would invest their efforts in publishing their own research, rather than deal with the burden of editing a journal. However, a group of historians at Tel Aviv University had a different vision of their vocation, leading them to thinking of a new concept of a journal, focused not on a period or a narrow discipline, but on the elusive notion of a connecting “wine-dark sea” (to use a Homeric expression). The Mediterranean Historical Review was created as a sui generis forum bringing together people thinking in terms of historical processes rather than isolated events. The journal was making several important statements, not only propagating the study of history in its longue durée, following the Annales School and Fernand Braudel, but putting an emphasis on connections and interactions, which characterized the Mediterranean world throughout the ages. The ideas of connectivity and networks were yet to be developed, and applied to the study of history, as it happened in Irad Malkin’s own pioneering research during the following decades. From Religion and Colonization in Ancient Greece (Brill 1987), and The Returns of Odysseus: Colonization and Ethnicity (University of California Press 1998, translated into Hebrew in 2004), to A Small Greek World: Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean (Oxford University Press 2011), Irad Malkin explores the Mediterranean in its paradoxical divergence and unity. His study of the interactive networks of the 6 Farewell to co-editor Irad Malkin Greek world and its dynamics brought about a new understanding of the emergence of the ancient Greek civilization as a decentralized, non-hierarchical complex system, connected through the Mediterranean. The conception of colonial environment as “middle ground”, where different cultural strands interacted and blended, is of great methodological importance for the study of multi-ethnic encounters. This innovative research is a major contribution to our understanding of the Mediterranean, not only during the Archaic and Classical periods, but during the entire course of its history. In fact, it is paradigm-changing: the centre/periphery dichotomy ceases to be the default perspective, conditioning the perception of the past, and the possibility of a multidirectional network of connections and nodes becomes a feasible way of envisaging historical processes. The Mediterranean Historical Review has come of age, and the journal is now one of the most respectable international periodicals. With his passion for the Mediterranean, Irad Malkin invested enormous energy in the success of the journal, as the authors and colleagues gratefully acknowledge. The co-founder begins now a new stage in his life, dedicating his time and energy to yet another novel path of research. Seafaring nations have a blessing to those embarking on a new endeavour: “A big ship needs a big sea.” The faithful readers of the journal all wish Irad Malkin a very happy sailing to his new destinations. Yulia Ustinova Ben-Gurion University of the Negev yulia@bgu.ac.il Notes 1. Malkin, “Ithaka, Odysseus and the Euboeans,” 4. Bibliography Malkin, I. “Ithaka, Odysseus and the Euboeans in the Eighth Century.” In Euboica. L’Eubea e la presenza euboica in Calcidica e in Occidente (Atti del Convegno Internazionale Napoli 13–16 Novembre 1996), edited by M. Bats and B. D’Agostino, 4. Naples, Publications du Centre Jean Bérard, 1998.