Blond, Tall, With Honey-Colored Eyes: Jewish Ownership Of Slaves In The Ottoman Empire

by: Yaron Ben-Naeh | Published: 2006

Abstract Hundreds of Hebrew written sources, dozens of official decrees, judicial records (sijillat), and reports of European travelers indicate that slaveholding – particularly of females of slavic origin – in Jewish households in the urban centers of the Ottoman Empire was widespread from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. This halachically and legally problematic habit was an unparalleled phenomenon in any other Jewish community in the early modern period. The presence of slaves in Jewish households effected family life in many ways. I dealt with two of them: The first is cohabitation of Jewish men with female slaves, usually non-Jewish, who in effect served as their concubines and bore them legitimate children; the second is marriage with manumitted slaves who converted to Judaism and became an integral part of the community. These phenomena attest once again to the great extent to which Jewish society and its norms and codes were influenced by Muslim urban society, and the gap between rabbinic rhetoric ideals and the dynamic daily existence of Jews from all social strata.

Slavery and slaveholding has been among the most outstanding aspects of life in the various and varying Muslim societies over the centuries. ¹ As is reported by hundreds of Hebrew sources, dozens of official ordinances, documents produced by the Shari’a courts, and the reports of European travelers, slaveholding was also common among Jews in Muslim lands. The ownership of women, in particular, was widespread in Jewish households in the Ottoman Empire on the threshold of the modern era. It was certainly far more common than in Jewish communities in North Africa or Europe. What we know about this practice may now be considerably enlarged thanks to my discovery of about 100 as yet unknown documents from the seventeenth-century court registers of Hasköy, one of the quarters of Istanbul. These documents, especially as we will now study them alongside known rabbinic sources, provide information that both supports existing data and permits asking new questions. ²

Footnote

1 The following are a few references to research literature on slavery in the Ottoman Empire, all of which contain further bibliography: Ehud R. Toledano, The Ottoman slave trade and its suppression: 1840–1890 (Princeton, 1982); idem, State and society in mid-nineteenth century Egypt (Cambridge, 1990); idem, Slavery and abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle and London, 1998), 135–136, n.1; and the volume of essays, Miura Toru and John E. Philips (eds) Slave elites in the Middle East and Africa (London and New York, 2000), esp. Ehud R. Toledano, The concept of slavery in Ottoman and other Muslim societies: dichotomy or continuum; Bernard Lewis, Race and slavery in the Middle East: an historical enquiry (New York, 1990). Toledano’s discussion of the state of research is in Toledano, Slavery, 135–154; Suraiya Faroqhi, Ottoman men and women (Eren Press, Istanbul, 2002); Nelly Hanna, Sources for the study of slave women and concubines in Ottoman Egypt, In: Amira El Azhary Sonbol (ed) Beyond the exotic: women’s histories in Islamic societies (New York, 2005), 119–130; Madeline Zilfi, Thoughts on women and slavery in the Ottoman era and historical sources. In: El Azhary Sonbol (ed), Beyond the Exotic, 131–138. ⇑

2 Dr. Cengiz Sisman and I intend to publish a collection of documents from the seventeenth-century Hasköy court records. ⇑

Download: Blond, Tall, With Honey-Colored Eyes: Jewish Ownership Of Slaves In The Ottoman Empire (.pdf)

Tags: Slavery, OttomanEmpire, WhiteGenocide

For information on the various file formats in this section visit the Info/File Formats page.

This page may have a talk page ?.