Jewish views on slavery

The Torah does not promote slavery, but neither does it condemn it. Slavery was customary during the antiquity and the Middle Ages, and legislations commonly permitted the slave trade. According to the Jewish Law, Jewish slaves had the right of emancipation on the seventh (Sabbatical) year, and all slaves had to be freed after seven Sabbatical cycles on a Jubilee year. A slave who was taken to the Holy Land became free as soon as he touched the soil.

Allegations that Jews dominated the slave trade in Medieval Europe, Africa, and/or the Americas has been widely debated by scholars.

In Scriptures

The old Testament sets rules that allow slavery (Leviticus 25:44-46; Exodus 21:7-11), while at the same time forbidding one to return a runaway slave (Deuteronomy 23:15-16). Hebrew slaves must be freed after six years of servitude (Exodus 21:2). Non-Hebrews were slaves for life. If a master beat his male or female slave so severely that the slave is killed immediately, the master is to be punished. If the master had beat the slave but the slave lives one or two days, the master can go unpunished (Exodus 21:21). It is also against Jewish Law to have, or permit, a sex slave. This was expanded upon in Exodus with the guidelines for Jewish soldiers who went on a quest to look at men to war in foreign lands and saw a beautiful woman who they wished to marry. She was to be in mourning for her lost parents for one month, after which the soldier was then free to marry her. The following excerpt said "Later, if you decide you no longer want her as a wife, you have to let her go free. Because you forced her into a sexual relationship with you; you are not allowed to sell her a slave." Slaves were considered money (property). If a male Hebrew slave was given a wife, his wife and children became the permanent property of the slave owner. Hebrews could sell their daughters into slavery. Forced sex with female slaves was not punished. Hebrews slaves were not to be ruled over severely, but that rule only applied to Hebrew slaves. --Hebrews did take slaves during war. Deut 20:11 "If they open the gates and surrender, they are all to become your slaves and do forced labor for you."--12 But if it does not make peace with you, and it actually makes war with you and you have to besiege it, 13 Jehovah your God also will certainly give it into your hand, and you must strike every male in it with the edge of the sword. 14 Only the women and the little children and the domestic animals and everything that happens to be in the city, all its spoil you will plunder for yourself.

History

In 492 Pope Gelasius permitted Jews to introduce slaves from Gaul into Italy, on the condition that they were non-Christian.

Ibn Khordadhbeh in the 9th century describes two routes by which Jewish slave-dealers carried slaves from West to East and from East to West. According to Abraham ibn Yakub, Byzantine Jewish merchants bought Slavs from Prague to be sold as slaves. Louis the Fair granted charters to Jews visiting his kingdom, permitting them to trade with slaves, provided the latter had not been baptized. Agobard claimed that the Jews did not abide to the agreement and kept Christians as slaves, citing the instance of a Christian refugee from Cordova who declared that his coreligionists were frequently sold, as he had been, to the Moors. Many, indeed, of the Spanish Jews owed their fortune to the trade in Slavonian slaves brought from Andalusia. Similarly, the Jews of Verdun, about the year 949, purchased slaves in their neighborhood and sold them in Spain.

The means by which Jews earned their livelihoods were largely determined by the restrictions placed on them by the authorities. The Christian Church repeatedly protested against the sale of Christians to Jews, the first protest occurring as early as 538. At the third council of Orleans a decree was passed that Jews must not possess Christian servants or slaves, a prohibition which was repeated over and over again at different councils—as at Orleans (541), Paris (633), Toledo (fourth council, 633), Szabolcs (1092), Ghent (1112), Narbonne (1227), Béziers (1246). After this time the need of such a prohibition seems to have disappeared. Thus, at Marseilles, in the 13th century, there were only two cases of Jewish, as against seven of Christian, slave-traders It was part of St. Benedict's rule that Christian slaves were not to serve Jews.

Despite the ruling, many Christians trafficked with the Jews in slaves, and the Church dignitaries of Bavaria even recognized this traffic by insisting on Jews and other merchants paying toll for slaves.

Allegations and refutations

Allegations that Jews dominated the slave trade in Medieval Europe, Africa, and/or the Americas often appear in antisemitic discourse as a part of "Jewish domination" or "Jewish persecution" antisemitic canard. It was alleged that Jews controlled trade and finance and hatched plots "to enslave, convert, or sell non-Jews." Such allegations are denied by David Brion Davis, who argues that Jews had no major or continuing impact on the history of New World slavery.

One of the latest examples of such accusations are made in the Nation of Islam's 1991 book The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. These charges were widely refuted by scholars.

According to a review of Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight by Eli Faber and Jews and the American Slave Trade by Saul S. Friedman in The Journal of American History,

Eli Faber takes a quantitative approach to Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade in Britain's Atlantic empire, starting with the arrival of Sephardic Jews in the London resettlement of the 1650s, calculating their participation in the trading companies of the late seventeenth century, and then using a solid range of standard quantitative sources (Naval Office shipping lists, censuses, tax records, and so on) to assess the prominence in slaving and slave owning of merchants and planters identifiable as Jewish in Barbados, Jamaica, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, and all other smaller English colonial ports. He follows this strategy in the Caribbean through the 1820s; his North American coverage effectively terminates in 1775. Faber acknowledges the few merchants of Jewish background locally prominent in slaving during the second half of the eighteenth century but otherwise confirms the small-to-minuscule size of colonial Jewish communities of any sort and shows them engaged in slaving and slave holding only to degrees indistinguishable from those of their English competitors.

Jewish slaves

Jewish communities customarily ransomed Jewish captives according to a Judaic mitzvah regarding the redemption of captives (pidyon shvuyim). Knowing this, slave traders preyed on Jews. In his A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson writes:

Jews were particularly valued as captives since it was believed, usually correctly, that even if they themselves poor, a Jewish community somewhere could be persuaded to ransom them. If a Jew was taken by Turks from a Christian ship, his release was usually negotiated from Constantinople. In Venice, the Jewish Levantine and Portuguese congregations set up a special organization for redeeming Jewish captives taken by Christians from Turkish ships, Jewish merchants paid a special tax on all goods to support it, which acted as a form of insurance since they were likely victims.

See also

• Slavery and religion
• Christianity and slavery
• Islam and slavery
• Slavery and Buddhism

Further reading

• Eli Faber: Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight. New York: New York University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-8147-2638-0
• Saul S. Friedman: Jews and the American Slave Trade. (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998. ISBN 1-56000-337-5
• Roth, Norman: Medieval Jewish Civilzation
• Tertullianus, Qunitus Codex Agobardinus

External links

• Excerpts from Slavery and the Jews. A Historical Inquiry By Eli Faber

• Slave Trade, Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906 ed.
• Jewish occupations Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906 ed.
• Slave markests in East Europe

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Singer, Isidore; et al., eds. (1901–1906). The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)