Medieval Past, Multicultural Present: The Politics of Jewish and Muslim Heritage in Palermo, Sicily

This thesis examines the notion of multiculturalism in Palermo, the capital of Sicily, Italy. Characterized by the coexistence of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities in the Middle Ages, Palermo has been conceived as a 'multicultural mosaic.' The city's tourism office relies on this medieval history to craft an alluring narrative about Palermo as an innately cosmopolitan city. This narrative commodifies multiculturalism to attract tourism and frames modern migration as a tool to restore an idealized past, folding contemporary migrants into Palermo's branding strategy. However, commemorating the past does not necessarily translate into multi-religious coexistence in the present. While the historical presence of Islam and Judaism in Palermo is celebrated and capitalized on, contemporary Muslim and Jewish communities struggle to negotiate their place in the city's urban space. How does the notion of multiculturalism come into focus in this tension between Palermo's medieval past and its present? After examining the construction of Palermo and its medieval heritage as multicultural, I attempt to move beyond the bidimensional nature of the mosaic image associated with the city. Instead, I posit that Palermo's past is best understood as a stratigraphic record: the city's historical layers are stratified on one another and are made visible, according to the present's needs. I explore this by looking at the renovation of Palermo's first present-day mosque and synagogue. Both established in former churches, these two places of worship retain pre-existing Christian features, and thus exist in a state of chronological pollution. This state limits the Muslim and Jewish communities' claims to the city, since their places of worship exist in the shadow of earlier churches. However, I argue that this attention to the stratification of Palermo's built environment also enables the establishment of a Muslim and Jewish right to the city. In a process of continuous negotiation with the past, the newly established mosque and synagogue are framed in relation to Palermo's Muslim and Jewish medieval history. The mosque's fortuitous orientation towards Mecca is said to index the existence of an earlier medieval mosque in the same area. Similarly, the contemporary synagogue is believed to be where the medieval synagogue used to stand in Palermo's medieval Jewish quarter. Attending to the coexistence of various material temporalities in Palermo's present ultimately allows us to understand how historical narratives are mobilized to legitimize the presence of Islam and Judaism in the urban space. Far from being a recent phenomenon, the rebirth of these two religions in Palermo is imagined as a return.