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 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. Research for this article was carried out during my postdoctoral fellowship as a Mandel Scholar at the Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center, the Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The article is based on a lecture delivered at a conference in honor of Prof. Amnon Cohen in June 2005 at the Ben-Zvi Institute, Jerusalem; and in Ankara, Turkey, in October 2005. I thank Prof. Kenneth Stow for his kind and friendly guidance.     

“Doing the Right and the Good”: Thinking Against Mass Incarceration

In 1952, Rabbi Eliezer Yehudah Waldenberg (a member of the Supreme Rabbinical Court of Israel) and Rabbi Ben Zion Meir Chai Uziel (the Rishon LeTziyon and Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel) addressed the question of incarceration in a Jewish state according to the halakhic tradition. A generation later, Rabbi Chaim David Halevi the Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv-Yaffo) also addressed this question. Their approaches shed light on the way we should be thinking about incarceration in general, and the overwhelming problem of the current moment in the United States: mass incarceration.