By Rabbi Rachel Esserman

It can be difficult for contemporary readers to comprehend just how integral slavery was to ancient and medieval civilizations. That was certainly true for Medieval Egypt during the 11th-13th centuries. As Craig Perry shows in his “Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History” (Princeton University Press), Muslims, Christians and Jews living in Egypt during that time owned slaves. However, due to writings found in the Cairo geniza (a repository for documents located in a room in a Cairo synagogue), there is a greater record of Jewish owners of slaves and those Jews who were slaves than for Muslims or Christians.
Perry, an associate professor at the Department of Middle Eastern and Asia Studies at Emory University, focuses on what he calls urban slavery: those owners and slaves who lived in cities since most of the information available focuses on them. He also explores the status Jews held in Muslim society: while subordinate to Muslims, Jews were a protected class, but with limited rights. That meant that Jews were allowed to own slaves; however, they and Christians could not own slaves who were Muslim. That included slaves who converted to Islam: that did not negate their status as slaves, but they now had to be sold to fellow Muslims.
The type of slavery found in Egypt was different from that practiced later in the Americas. For example, slaves who were part of a Jewish household were expected to follow Jewish law, at least the limited ones that the free Jewish women of the household observed. Having slaves meant that these women did not have to go out in public to perform tasks, something that led to an increase in their status. Perry notes there seem to be far more female slaves than male slaves in these households. He posits one reason may have been that more females were available: they were more likely to be captured during slave raids on neighboring territories and, within Egypt, parents were more likely to sell their daughters than they were their sons.
The treatment of the slave depended on the household. There were Jews who freed their slaves and provided for them afterward, helping them find a trade or arrange a marriage. However, their lives were not always easy: many of them are found on the lists of those who needed charity from communal funds. Those who did convert were accepted as Jews, although their status as a freed person was known. Their children were known as the child of a freed person. However, there was no trace of this status in the following generation: by the third generation that label disappeared. This led to a more multicultural Jewish community than one might have expected since some of these slaves were not native Egyptians. Perry notes, “What we do know about the fortunes of freed people shows that their lives largely resembled those of free people in their variety and in the many factors that shaped their life chances.”
Although Muslim, Christian and Jewish clergy disapproved of the use of slaves for sexual purposes, members of all three religions were willing to risk community disapproval and punishment by using slaves as sexual partners. Some slaves were traded and brought to Egypt just for this purpose. Others were members of households bought for different reasons, but who attracted the attention of men living there. While there are records of arguments and legal battles between husbands and wives due to men’s use of a slave for sex, the records are far more sparse when it comes to the use of violence against slaves. Instances of that seem to have gone largely unrecorded.
Although Perry acknowledges the irony contemporary readers might feel about slave-owning Jews celebrating their release from slavery during the holiday of Passover, Jews of that time period may not have felt the same. Slavery is not outlawed in the biblical text, only limited in its scope. Since slavery was ubiquitous during this time period, it might have felt strange to suggest that it should be abolished. Slavery was simply part of everyday life.
“Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt” is a scholarly work, rather than a popular work of nonfiction. However, Perry keeps jargon to a minimum, which will make his book appeal to the non-scholar. The author also offers a handy glossary of Arabic and Hebrew words readers will encounter in the text. Those interested in Jewish life during the medieval period will surely discover much that challenges or changes their idea about Jewish life during that time.