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Judaism and slavery
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Judaism has been influenced by the experience of slavery of the Hebrews in the land of Egypt, as narrated in the biblical story of the Exodus and their emancipation by the hand of God and under the leadership of Moses and Aaron.
Many commandments in the Hebrew Bible are stressed by referring to the experience of slavery and deliverance from it. The Jewish holiday of Passover commemorates the Exodus from Egypt.
rding to the Book of Exodus, the Hebrews were compelled by a famine to move from the land of Canaan into the land of Egypt at the invitation of Pharaoh, when Joseph was vizier of Egypt.
After the death of Joseph, the Hebrews spent many years leading an uneventful existence.
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Judaism has been influenced by the experience of slavery of the Hebrews in the land of Egypt, as narrated in the biblical story of the Exodus and their emancipation by the hand of God and under the leadership of Moses and Aaron.
Many commandments in the Hebrew Bible are stressed by referring to the experience of slavery and deliverance from it. The Jewish holiday of Passover commemorates the Exodus from Egypt.
Slavery in Egypt
According to the Book of Exodus, the Hebrews were compelled by a famine to move from the land of Canaan into the land of Egypt at the invitation of Pharaoh, when Joseph was vizier of Egypt.
After the death of Joseph, the Hebrews spent many years leading an uneventful existence. But a new pharaoh came to power in Egypt "who didn't know of Joseph". He enslaved the Hebrews and compelled them to perform much heavy work. These tasks, particularly brick making, were extremely rigorous and the working conditions were harsh and oppressive. The Hebrews were enslaved in Egypt for at least 80 years. Moses, a fugitive from Egypt for murdering an Egyptian while defending a Hebrew slave, received a call from God to free the Hebrew people from Egypt. Returning to Egypt he attempted to negotiate with Pharaoh, who was not receptive, saying he did not know Moses' God. Moses, under God's instruction, called forth a series of ten plagues. The Pharaoh, enduring most of the plagues, would not let the Hebrews go, however the final plague, in which the firstborn sons of the Egyptians were taken, made the Pharaoh agree to free the Hebrews.
The exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt is mentioned in :
- And it came to pass at the end of four hundred and thirty years, that all the hosts of the LORD went out from the Land of Egypt.
Passover
Passover is a biblically-mandated holiday, in which Jews are commanded to recount the story of The Exodus. states:
- that thou mayest remember the day when thou camest forth out of the land of Egypt all the days of thy life.
and :
- And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt; and thou shalt observe and do these statutes.
The Sabbath
The commandment to observe the Sabbath is linked in to the Egyptian slavery experience:
- Observe the sabbath day, and keep it holy. For six days you shall labour and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work... Remember that you were a servant in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commands you to keep the sabbath day.
The alien
The Bible directs Jews to "love" a stranger (or "a foreigner" or "an alien") in their midsts, for example :
- As a citizen among you shall be the stranger who lives among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt-I am the Lord your God.
Treatment of slaves
The Torah neither encourages nor discourages slavery. However, in the event that a person has a slave, it sets minimum rules on the treatment of slaves (eg ; ).
Because of the experience of slavery in Egypt, an Israelite could not be kept as a slave.:
- "And if one of your brethren who dwells by you becomes poor, and sells himself to you, you shall not compel him to serve as a slave. As a hired servant and a sojourner he shall be with you, and shall serve you until the Year of Jubilee. And then he shall depart from you-he and his children with him-and shall return to his own family. He shall return to the possession of his fathers. For they are My servants, whom I brought out of the land of Egypt; they shall not be sold as slaves. You shall not rule over him with rigor, but you shall fear your God."
Jews were not kept in bonded service for more than seven years, unless they personally submitted to a longer term, in which case they would become permanent slaves.
- "If you buy a Hebrew servant, he shall serve six years; and in the seventh he shall go out free and pay nothing. If he comes in by himself, he shall go out by himself; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master has given him a wife, and she has borne him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master's, and he shall go out by himself. But if the servant plainly says, 'I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free,' then his master shall bring him to the judges. He shall also bring him to the door, or to the doorpost, and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl; and he shall serve him forever."
It has been noted that the reference to the doorpost is a reference to Egypt, where Jewish doorposts were marked on the night before the start of the exodus, so that the symbolism is to the shunning of freedom and to returning to a slavery reminiscent of Egypt.
A Jew is forbidden to return a runaway slave .
It is also against Jewish law to have, or permit, a sex slave. This was expanded 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. A woman was to be given one month for mourning for her lost parents, after which a soldier was permitted 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 [as] 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.
In the course of war, it was permitted to take slaves: "If they open the gates and surrender, they are all to become your slaves and serve you", subject to the other rules relating to the treatment of slaves.
In addition, the rules of the day of rest on Shabbat applied equally to the slave owned by a Jew ( and ).
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.
Jews in the slave trade
The means by which Jews earned their livelihoods were largely determined by the restrictions placed on them by the authorities. In 492 Pope Gelasius permitted Jews to introduce slaves from Gaul into Italy, on the condition that they were non-Christian.
The first prohibition of Jews owning Christian slaves was made by Constantine I in the fourth century. The Third Council of Orleans in 538 repeated the prohibition for Gaul. The prohibition was repeated by subsequent councils - Fourth Council of Orleans (541), Paris (633), Fourth Council of Toledo (633), the Synod of Szabolcs (1092) extended the prohibition to Hungary, Ghent (1112), Narbonne (1227), Beziers (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.
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.
Despite the ruling, many Christians trafficked with Jews in slaves, and the Church dignitaries of Bavaria even recognized this traffic by insisting on Jews and other merchants paying a 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 in The Journal of American History 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:
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.
See also
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
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