Blond, tall, with honey-colored eyes: Jewish ownership of slaves in the Ottoman Empire 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 modem 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. 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. Slavery in the Ottoman Empire Research on slavery in the Ottoman Empire first concentrated on economic and legal issues; the early studies of Ehud Toledano are especially noteworthy.3 During the past 15 years, research has concentrated on the existence of various classes of slaves, their mobility from one place and one master to another, and on bonds of loyalty and patronage. Growing academic interest in the history of women and minorities has drawn the attention of scholars to the lives of the slaves themselves. The first study dealing with slavery in the Muslim world in its Jewish context was an article published by Simha Assaf in 1939, who indicated how widespread Jewish ownership of slaves was and who discussed the status of slaves under the headings of the "law of the land" and the halakhah. The first to enter the fray was Haim Gerber, followed by Ovadia Salama.6 In the mid-1990s, Ruth Lamdan wrote on Jewish slaveholding in Syria and Palestine during the sixteenth century, which addressed the institution's halachic and social aspects and focused in particular on the distress slaveholding caused the wives of owners. The documents concern female slaves almost exclusively; I found only one case concerning a male. Slavery thus seems to have been limited to those who would provide household services of the kind exclusively performed by women, including sexual ones. This helps explain why nearly all the slaves were white females, principally of Slavic origin captured during Ottoman campaigns, or by their Tatar collaborators in Eastern Europe, with only a few of other provenance - Circassian, Caucasian, Hungarian, and Austrian. Black slaves are not mentioned. Physical descriptions of female slaves remark about fair hair and light-colored eyes, although, possibly, this simply reflects the general characteristics of the captured and enslaved women; male preference, however, should not be ruled out.10 Women, too, bought slaves, but most likely the traits women sought out were domestic skills, physical strength, and an obedient nature. Beauty, for them, was no doubt for the most part irrelevant, although it may have been they considered slave owning an act of conspicuous consumption, the slave being a "beautiful object" to be shown off. No wonder, the documents speak of female slaves who were deformed and scarred. Many, if not the large majority, of the women brought from Balkan and Eastern European regions were originally Christians, and they are identified accordingly as nasraniyye, isaviyye milletinden. When religion is not specified, we may assume that at least some of the women had converted to Judaism and were given Jewish names. Others retained their Slavic or Balkan birth-names. More here: http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/amcdouga/Hist349/resources/jewish%20slave%20owning.pdf

• published: 30 Dec 2015
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