Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 2018 ISSN: 1016-3476 Vol. 27, No. 2: 111–132 Copyright © 2018 Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta. MARRIAGES AT THE MARGINS: INTERFAITH MARRIAGES IN THE MEDITERRANEAN PAUL SANT-CASSIA University of Malta 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. Keywords: Interfaith marriages, Conversion and Religious Syncretism, al Andalus, Cyprus, Crete. Introduction Mixed marriages across dominant social divisions (status, class, ethnicity, caste, religion, race, citizen/slave, coloniser/colonised), have long been subject to control, regulation, and racist oppression. In the classical Mediterranean, mixed marriages and abductions are paradoxically inversions of each other and alternate as reciprocal shadows. An abduction could be a ‘mixed marriage’ gone wrong (e.g. the abduction of Io, daughter of Inachus, King of Argos, by Phoenician sailors culminating, through subsequent reciprocal bride- thefts, in Paris’s abduction of Helen); and a mixed marriage could be a peacefully resolved ‘abduction’ (the collective abduction of the Sabine women by Romulus and his followers). In many classical Greek city states, notably Athens, mixed citizenship marriages were banned to enforce citizenship endogamy. To reduce the risks of Athenian men 'going native' in the city's colonies, 1 or to prevent upper-class Athenians from contracting marriage alliances with leading families in other city states, Periclean legislation clamped down on mixed marriages by granting citizenship only upon clear descent from an Athenian father and mother. Mixed citizenship marriages were associated with oligarchic threats to democracy and mixed citizenship cohabitation a potential threat to ‘city- filiation’. Imperial Rome banned mixed marriages either between citizens from different social classes or between Romans, Greeks and Egyptians in Egypt (Lane Fox, 1986).