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of the same conditional stance as today's equally common claim that Romans are
by definition not racists. both are claims that call for critical analysis. in their
framing, two key words—
tolleranza
and
accommodazione
—recur with great fre-
quency. but they do not mean one and the same thing.
indeed, the distinction between them reveals a dynamic that in some re-
spects is quite specific to the heirs to the repression of papal Rome.
Tolleranza
is about “putting up with” people who are different; when they become too dif-
ferent, they hit the nadir known as “zero tolerance” (
tolleranza zero
). far from
representing an unqualified embrace of difference, tolerance in this sense has
instead the ring of the contradiction that the french anthropologist louis Du-
mont (1982, 238-239) identified in the american segregationists' slogan “sepa-
rate but equal”—an oxymoron that breaks down in practice, because separation
breeds mutual distrust rather than an equitable sharing of goods and resources.
Dumont saw in the land that so fascinated De tocqueville, the paradoxical de-
sire to maintain privilege while adhering to democratic values. his observation,
however, fits a much wider range of cultural contexts. ideological generosity—as
we see in bruce Kapferer's (1988) fine comparative study of australian egalitarian
“mateship” and the pacific ideology of sri lankan buddhism—can easily morph
into racism, sexism, and violence. it is the logic and process of such transforma-
tions that concern us here.
self-Deceptions of the liberal
tolerance, i suggest, is no less prone than mateship is to this kind of inversion.5
indeed, recent scholarship on attitudes to migrants in some southern european
societies, with their strong emphasis on the obligations of reciprocity, illustrates
his point particularly well. Thus, efthymios papataxiarchis (2009) has persua-
sively argued that only a short distance separates the generous initial reception of
immigrants and refugees from highly specific accusations of ingratitude—accu-
sations that are grounded in the social practices and self-stereotypes associated
with hospitality. long before southern europe attracted massive migration, such
attitudes already informed local responses to tourism (herzfeld 1987, 81-86); the
rhetoric of tourism was similarly couched in the idiom of hospitality and of its
centrality to local tradition. while that rhetoric may serve to lure customers,6 it
also effectively disguises the implicit right to resentment and anger that it confers
on hosts who feel that their “guests”—a concept also embedded in the notion of
immigrant “guest workers” (German
Gastarbeiter
)—have abused the hospitality
offered to them.
“explanations” of Roman adaptability that merely invoke the complex cul-
ture of the ancient empire, which was after all based on conquest and slavery,
thus explain very little in reality. Roman Jews—one of europe's most ancient
Jewish communities, dating at least as far back as the sack of the second temple
in 70 ad—are seen as preservers of the ancient traditions of the Roman table. but
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