From Dr M. Costa

As often happens, when some Maltese discuss their racial or ethnic origins, confusion reigns supreme and this is what happened in the case of Marisa Micallef while writing her article “Maltese who do not accept their DNA”.

To begin with, for anyone to reasonably accept or reject anything, one should know what one is accepting or rejecting, in this case DNA. Ms Micallef gratuitously asserts that “the genetic pool of the Maltese is really more North African than European” and she quotes absolutely no authority to prove her point. A recent peer-reviewed scientific study in Malta has concluded that “there seems to be little input from North Africa”, the prevalent genetic composition of the Maltese being associated with that of Sicily and Calabria which, of course, does not exclude genes from Muslims who occupied that part of the world after the Islamic conquest (vide Alex E. Felice, “Genetic Origins of Contemporary Maltese”, The Sunday Times, 5 August). A study on the Y chromosome published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Annals of Human Genetics in 2005 came to the same conclusions.

Certainly, quoting some Maltese surnames such as Muscat and Xuereb proves little or nothing. Surnames are not a scientific way of proving genetics as they are acquired and may change while genes are inherited. If we take as an example the use of nicknames, which may have eventually become surnames, the word denoting the nickname could have been Semitic, Romance, Germanic or other, and the person to whom the nickname was attributed could have been of any ethnic or racial origin and the event could have happened in Malta or abroad. In other words, etymological origins of surnames and genetic origins are two different things altogether.

Ms Micallef mentioning the arrival of St Paul, the Normans and the Knights as a possible contributing factor to our European culture is equally worthless, at least regarding the first two. As regards St Paul, Ms Micallef presumably mentioned him in his role as the Apostle who is supposed to have introduced one aspect of “Europeanness” to Malta, Christianity. Modern historians seriously doubt that Christianity was introduced in Malta by St Paul; archaeological records concerning Christianity in Malta does not go back further than the fourth century when this religion was becoming widespread in the Mediterranean basin, including North Africa, which is today Muslim, following the so-called Edict of Milan. As regards the Normans, they certainly did not make Malta culturally “European” and an Islamic culture persisted in these islands far beyond 1091.

Ms Micallef writes that the depiction of Jesus “with brown hair and blue eyes… demonstrates our local genetic inferiority complex”. To describe this kind of iconography as “local”, as if it originated or exists only in Malta, one must never have ventured outside these islands. Jesus was a Jew, a Judean, native of Judea. The Romans foisted the name Palestine on the area a century after the death of Jesus after driving the Jews out of Jerusalem.

Ms Micallef, who describes herself as an English fan, unwittingly betrays her own racial prejudice by asking whether Capello will use “pasta” to improve the performance of English footballers as if Italians have never produced anything in their cultural history but pasta – Leonardo, Michelangelo, Marconi, Fermi, Vivaldi, Pirandello, Puccini, Dante, Rubbia, Levi-Montalcini and so on are apparently all noted for their delicious cooking of macaroni. She is also racist when she writes that there are “thousands of Russians who have arrived in Malta illegally or semi-legally and have caused many a marriage break up”.

It would take too much space to tackle all the absurd points in Ms Micallef’s article. The general tone, from what I can make out, seems to be that the Maltese should not harbour racial prejudice towards Africans because they themselves are genetically closer to North Africans. As if it would have been OK had we not been genetically North African! While the ills of racial prejudice should be self-evident to all and require no elaboration, even this argument of Ms Micallef’s would be fallacious since sub-Saharan Africans and North Africans are ethnically and genetically different, at least to the extent that humans are genetically different from one another. Ms Micallef’s argumentation is, therefore, gravely muddled even if taken from this point of view.

Mario Costa

MOSCOW