Judaism and slavery
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Part of a series on Slavery |
|
| Period and context | |
|
History · Antiquity |
|
| Related | |
|
Gulag · Serfdom · Unfree labour · Debt bondage · Indentured servant · List of slaves · Legal status |
|
|
|
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[1] 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.
Contents |
[edit] 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 Exodus 12:40-41:
- 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.
[edit] Passover
Passover is a biblically-mandated holiday, in which Jews are commanded to recount the story of The Exodus. Deuteronomy 16:3 states:
- that thou mayest remember the day when thou camest forth out of the land of Egypt all the days of thy life.
and Deuteronomy 16:12:
- And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in Egypt; and thou shalt observe and do these statutes.
[edit] The Sabbath
The commandment to observe the Sabbath is linked in Deuteronomy 5:11-14 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.
[edit] The alien
The Bible directs Jews to "love" a stranger (or "a foreigner" or "an alien") in their midsts, for example Leviticus 19:34:
- 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.
[edit] References to slavery
The Hebrew Bible does not promote slavery, but neither does it condemn it.[2] Slavery was customary in antiquity and during the Middle Ages, and the slave trade was taken for granted. According to the Halakha (Jewish religious law), Jewish slaves had the right of emancipation in the seventh (Sabbatical) year, and all slaves had to be freed after seven Sabbatical cycles on a Jubilee year.[3][4] A slave who was taken to the Holy Land became free as soon as he touched the soil.[5]
While acknowledging Jewish participation in slavery throughout history, Jewish scholars have refuted allegations that Jews dominated the slave trade in Medieval Europe, Africa, and/or the Americas.[6][7]
[edit] 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 Leviticus 25:44-46; Exodus 21:7-11).
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." (Leviticus 25:39-43)
Fellow Israelites 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." (Exodus 21:2-6)
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 (Deuteronomy 23:15-16).
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.
Hebrews could sell their daughters into slavery. Forced sex with female slaves was not punished.
In the course of war, it was permitted to take slaves: Deuteronomy 20:11-14 "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 (Exodus 20:8-10 and Deuteronomy 5:12-14).
[edit] Jewish slaves
Jewish communities customarily ransomed Jewish captives according to a Judaic mitzvah regarding the redemption of captives (pidyon shvuyim).[8] Knowing this, slave traders preyed on Jews.[9] 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.[10]
[edit] Jews in the slave trade
 |
The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page.(December 2007) Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved. |
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.[11]
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), 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[12] It was part of St. Benedict's rule that Christian slaves were not to serve Jews.[13]
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.[11] 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.[14] Similarly, the Jews of Verdun, about the year 949, purchased slaves in their neighborhood and sold them in Spain.[15]
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.[16]
[edit] 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.[17]
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.[18] These charges were widely refuted by scholars.[6][7]
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.[19]
[edit] References
- ^ As described in the Book of Exodus
- ^ Slavery and the Torah - bbc.co.uk
- ^ Mishpatim: Jewish Tradition and Slavery By Rabbi Jeffrey Schein, citing Parashat Mishpatim, Exodus 21:1 - 24:18
- ^ Mishnah: The Oral Law by Harry Gersh. Behrman House, Inc. 1984. ISBN 0874413907 p.49
- ^ "Responsa of Geonim," section 12, cited in Slave Trade, Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906 ed.
- ^ a b Reviewed Work: Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight by Eli Faber by Paul Finkelman. Journal of Law and Religion, Vol. 17, No. 1/2 (2002), pp. 125-128
- ^ a b Refutations of charges of Jewish prominence in slave trade:
- "Nor were Jews prominent in the slave trade." - Marvin Perry, Frederick M. Schweitzer: Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present. Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. ISBN 0312165617. p.245
- "In no period did Jews play a leading role as financiers, shipowners, or factors in the transatlantic or Caribbean slave trades. They possessed far fewer slaves than non-Jews in every British territory in North America and the Caribbean. Even when Jews in a handful of places owned slaves in proportions slightly above their representation among a town's families, such cases do not come close to corroborating the assertions of The Secret Relationship." - Wim Klooster (University of Southern Maine): Review of Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight. By Eli Faber. Reappraisals in Jewish Social and Intellectual History. William and Mary Quarterly Review of Books. Volume LVII, Number 1. by Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 2000
- "Medieval Christians greatly exaggerated the supposed Jewish control over trade and finance and also became obsessed with alleged Jewish plots to enslave, convert, or sell non-Jews... Most European Jews lived in poor communities on the margins of Christian society; they continued to suffer most of the legal disabilities associated with slavery. ... Whatever Jewish refugees from Brazil may have contributed to the northwestward expansion of sugar and slaves, it is clear that Jews had no major or continuing impact on the history of New World slavery." - Professor David Brion Davis of Yale University in Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), p.89 (cited in Shofar FTP Archive File: orgs/american/wiesenthal.center//web/historical-facts)
- "The Jews of Newport seem not to have pursued the [slave trading] business consistently ... [When] we compare the number of vessels employed in the traffic by all merchants with the number sent to the African coast by Jewish traders ... we can see that the Jewish participation was minimal. It may be safely assumed that over a period of years American Jewish businessmen were accountable for considerably less than two percent of the slave imports into the West Indies" - Professor Jacob R. Marcus of Hebrew Union College in The Colonial American Jew (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1970), Vol. 2, pp. 702-703 (cited in Shofar FTP Archive File: orgs/american/wiesenthal.center//web/historical-facts)
- "None of the major slavetraders was Jewish, nor did Jews constitute a large proportion in any particular community. ... probably all of the Jewish slavetraders in all of the Southern cities and towns combined did not buy and sell as many slaves as did the firm of Franklin and Armfield, the largest Negro traders in the South." - Rabbi Bertram W. Korn, Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South, 1789-1865, in The Jewish Experience in America, ed. Abraham J. Karp (Waltham, MA: American Jewish Historical Society, 1969), Vol. 3, pp. 197-198 (cited in Shofar FTP Archive File: orgs/american/wiesenthal.center//web/historical-facts)
- "[There were] Jewish owners of plantations, but altogether they constituted only a tiny proportion of the Southerners whose habits, opinions, and status were to become decisive for the entire section, and eventually for the entire country. ... [Only one Jew] tried his hand as a plantation overseer even if only for a brief time." - Rabbi Bertram W. Korn, Jews and Negro Slavery in the Old South, 1789-1865, in The Jewish Experience in America, ed. Abraham J. Karp (Waltham, MA: American Jewish Historical Society, 1969), Vol. 3, p. 180. (cited in Shofar FTP Archive File: orgs/american/wiesenthal.center//web/historical-facts)
- ^ Ransoming Captive Jews. An important commandment calls for the redemption of Jewish prisoners, but how far should this mitzvah be taken? by Rabbi David Golinkin
- ^ Jewish involvement in the slave trade. From a post to Kulanu's listserv by Anne Herschman December 2001
- ^ Paul Johnson: A History of the Jews. 1987. p.240
- ^ a b Slave Trade. Jewish Encyclopedia
- ^ "R. E. J." xvi.
- ^ Aronius, "Regesten," No. 114
- ^ Grätz, "Gesch." vii.
- ^ Aronius, "Regesten," No. 127
- ^ ib. No. 122
- ^ Davis, David Brion (1984). Slavery and Human Progress. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, p.89 (cited in Shofar FTP Archive File: orgs/american/wiesenthal.center//web/historical-facts)
- ^ Anti-Semitism. Farrakhan In His Own Words. On Jewish Involvement in the Slave Trade and Nation of Islam. Jew-Hatred as History. ADL December 31, 2001
- ^ Book 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 The Journal of American History Vol 86. No. 3 December 1999
[edit] 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
[edit] External links
- Slave Trade, Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906 ed.
- Jewish occupations Jewish Encyclopedia, 1906 ed.
- Slave markests in East Europe
This article incorporates text from the 1901–1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, a publication now in the public domain.
