Slaves et Esclavage

The Jewish relationship to slavery does not begin with a practice but with a deliverance. The Exodus narrative, the heart of Israel's collective memory, makes the departure from Egypt the founding event around which liturgy, calendar, and ethics are organized. The repeated formula — "remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt" — returns like a legislative refrain: it motivates the rest of Shabbat, the protection of the stranger, the periodic liberation of servants.

This matrix is of a memorial order before being historical: archaeology has not confirmed the narrative of a massive servitude of Hebrews in Egypt followed by an exodus, and most historians read it as an elaborated identity narrative, carrying a truth of meaning more than an account of events. Its significance is no less for that: it is this claimed experience of servitude that, in the Jewish tradition, grounds a duty of emancipation and a distrust of perpetual enslavement. Pessah, celebrated each spring around the Haggada, transmits from generation to generation the injunction that each person consider themselves as personally departed from Egypt — inscribing anti-slavery at the very principle of the rite.

Biblical and Talmudic law does not recognize a single form of slavery, but two distinct regimes. The first concerns the Hebrew servant (eved ivri): an Israelite reduced to servitude for debt or compelled by destitution to sell themselves. Their status is temporary and strongly protected. Slavery in Judaism is a set of practices and rules governing servitude, as they appear in the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud. The Torah mandates their release after six years, and in the jubilee year; it forbids treating them harshly and prescribes providing for them upon their release. The servant who refuses freedom out of attachment to their master has their ear pierced — a sign of an anomaly rather than a norm.

The second regime, that of the eved kenaani — the non-Israelite servant — is more enduring and approaches ancient property law. Yet here too rabbinic law multiplies protections: the obligation to circumcise and partially integrate the servant into the religious household, prohibition against mutilating them, automatic manumission in case of serious injury, prohibition against delivering up a fugitive slave. Halakha develops over the centuries a casuistry in which the logic of property constantly encounters a logic of humanization. Medieval decisors, from Maimonides to the Tosafists, extend this tension: Maimonides, while admitting the status, exhorts clemency and recalls the shared humanity of the servant. One should therefore read neither an abolition — unknown to antiquity — nor an institution comparable to modern racialized slavery, but an intermediate legal system, regulated and reformed from within.

In the early Middle Ages, between the Muslim East and Christian West, long-distance Jewish merchants circulated whom Arabic sources called the Radhanites. Described by the geographer Ibn Khordadbeh in the 9th century, they connected Spain, Francia, Egypt, Persia, and even China, transporting silks, spices, furs — and, among other goods, slaves. This participation, real as it was, must be situated within a medieval economy where the slave trade was a practice shared by Christian, Muslim, and Jewish merchants, with no confessional specificity.

It is from this period that the polemics of the bishop Agobard of Lyon date, who in the 9th century denounced to the Carolingian court the role of Jewish merchants in the slave trade and the Church's inability to baptize them once sold. These texts are precious but partial: they emanate from a resolute opponent of Judaism, concerned with restricting the privileges granted to Jews by Louis the Pious. The archival item and the polemic thus respond to one another without overlapping: Jewish merchants were indeed actors in a Mediterranean slave commerce, but among many others, and the sources most insistent on this point are precisely those that sought to disqualify them. The recent title The Merchants of Goyim, which circulates in online bookstores, furthermore extends this polemical vein and must be read with the greatest critical distance.

The most disputed question concerns the Atlantic slave trade in Africans, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Jewish merchants and planters, often of Portuguese Sephardic origin, were present in the Dutch, English, and Portuguese colonial worlds — in Dutch Brazil at Recife, in Curaçao, Jamaica, Barbados, and Surinam. Some owned slaves; a few participated in the trade. Denying this presence would be as false as exaggerating it.

It is precisely this exaggeration that historian Eli Faber corrected. In Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight [Faber, 1998], he systematically examines port registers, lists of ship owners, property deeds, and censuses from British and Dutch colonies. His conclusion is clear: Jewish participation in the slave trade was marginal relative to the immense slave-trading apparatus dominated by Christian interests, and Jews were, on the whole, minor, late, and secondary actors in it [Faber, 1998]. Where propaganda claimed a central role, the figures reveal residual participation. Other historians — Seymour Drescher, Wim Klooster, David Brion Davis — have confirmed this finding, placing the Jewish contribution to trafficking well below one percent of the total. Faber's work explicitly responded to The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, a pamphlet published by the Nation of Islam in 1991, which scholars have denounced for its selective method and falsified conclusions.

Understanding the theme "Slaves and Slavery" requires analyzing the black legend grafted onto it. From the late twentieth century onward, a discourse claimed that Jews had organized, financed, and dominated the slave trade, making them the privileged culprits of Black enslavement. This thesis rests on a characteristic technique: isolating real cases of Jewish merchants or slaveholders, extracting them from their quantitative context, then extrapolating a systemic role where only a proportional presence existed—or even one inferior to demographic proportion.

The historical community responded with rare unanimity. The American Historical Association published, in 1995, a statement rejecting the idea of disproportionate Jewish responsibility in the slave trade. The works of Faber, Davis, and Jonathan Schorsch showed that this construction is less a matter of history than of contemporary antisemitism, recycling the old fantasy of a "Jewish plot" in a form adapted to American racial tensions. The subject thus illustrates a lesson in epistemology: on the same corpus of archives, biased selection produces a myth, while exhaustive accounting produces a measure. It is this measure, and not indignation, that must close the debate.

The very title of this book carries a fruitful ambiguity. The French word esclave and the English slave derive, through medieval Latin sclavus, from the ethnonym Slave: in the early Middle Ages, so many Slavic captives fed Mediterranean markets that their people's name came to designate the servile condition itself. The shift says much about the geography of European slave trading, where Central and Eastern Europe long served as a reservoir of slaves for the Byzantine, Latin, and Muslim worlds.

This etymology also illuminates the place of medieval Jewish merchants, active on these routes between Slavic lands and southern outlets, without ever being their masters. It reminds us finally that slavery has no single color: before being racialized and Africanized in the modern era, it was, in the Mediterranean, largely European and "Slavic." The name of the enslaved people become the name of servitude constitutes one of the most striking linguistic testimonies that language preserves of this history — a fact in which the lexical archive confirms the memory of the great continental slave trades.

Agobard of Lyon (c. 769–840) — Archbishop of Lyon under Louis the Pious, he drafted several treatises hostile to the privileges granted to Jews of the Carolingian Empire. His writings denounce the presence of Jewish merchants in the slave trade and the obstacle they constituted to the baptism of captives. A major but eminently biased source, he remains an unavoidable — and suspect — witness to ninth-century debates on servile commerce. His polemic nourished, far beyond his own time, the imaginary of a privileged link between Jews and slavery.

Ibn Khordadbeh (c. 820–c. 912) — Geographer and high Abbasid official, author of the Book of Roads and Kingdoms. He provides the oldest detailed description of Radhanite Jewish merchants, their transcontinental routes and the goods they transported, slaves included. His testimony, neutral and administrative, constitutes the cornerstone of knowledge of the great Jewish commerce of the early Middle Ages.

Moses Maimonides (Rambam) (1138–1204) — Philosopher and codifier of Jewish law, he devotes lengthy developments in the Mishneh Torah to the status of the servant. While maintaining the legal distinction between Hebrew and Canaanite servant, he exhorts gentleness, recalls the common humanity of the servant and makes mercy a requirement of piety. His synthesis fixed for centuries the rabbinic doctrine of servitude.

Eli Faber (1943–2020) — American historian, professor at John Jay College of the City University of New York. His work Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade (1998) constitutes the authoritative scholarly refutation against the thesis of central Jewish responsibility in the Atlantic slave trade. Through systematic examination of colonial archives, he establishes the marginal character of Jewish participation and provides research with a decisive instrument of measurement.

David Brion Davis (1927–2019) — Historian of slavery at Yale University, Pulitzer Prize laureate. Author of a masterwork on servitude in Western culture, he spoke out publicly to denounce the falsifications of The Secret Relationship. His authority helped to establish, in the scholarly field, consensus on the minor share of Jews in the trade.

The theme of "Slaves and Slavery" can ultimately be read as a layering of three strata. The first is memorial: Judaism is founded on the claimed experience of servitude and on the demand for deliverance, making anti-slavery a liturgical principle. The second is juridical: a Hebrew law that, without abolishing servitude — unthinkable in Antiquity — frames it, limits it and humanizes it. The third is historical: a real but measured participation of Jewish merchants and property owners in the servile systems of their time, never dominant, often proportional, sometimes inferior to their demographic weight.

On this last point, the decisive contribution was to substitute accounting for legend. Against a myth of disproportionate responsibility forged for polemical ends, the archives delivered their verdict [Faber, 1998]. The very name of the book, where the Slavic people lent their name to the servile condition, finally reminds us that slavery was a universal institution, shared, and that no group held a monopoly on it. To write this history with accuracy is to refuse both oblivion and caricature.