In this book, Craig Perry mines a remarkable cache of fragmentary documents preserved in an Egyptian synagogue to write a new history of slavery and the slave trade in the medieval Middle East. These documents—which range from the everyday correspondence of traveling merchants to legal queries sent to Jewish jurists—provide the richest surviving archive for the social history of slavery during the centuries when Cairo was an imperial and commercial capital at the intersection of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. Perry draws on this archive, known as the Cairo Geniza, to shed new light on such crucial topics as the slave trade in state diplomacy, the entanglements of gender and household slavery, and the lives of the enslaved.
Perry chronicles a protean slave trade that trafficked enslaved people from Europe, Africa, and India to the Egyptian market. His account cuts across different scales of analysis, from the macro-level of imperial rule to the micro-level of the family kitchen. Along the way, he upends the traditional story of Passover; medieval Jews, he writes, could explain slavery to their children by pointing to the enslaved people who served the holiday meal. When freed, some former slaves converted to Judaism and became the parents of Jewish children. Perry’s narrative reveals a world, long hidden from historians, in which enslaved people made their way through the alleys of Cairo, toiled in the workshops of apothecaries, and found ways to evade the surveillance of their owners. With this book, Perry writes enslaved people into the social and economic life of medieval Islamic society.
Craig Perry is assistant professor at Emory University in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, and the Islamic Civilizations Studies Graduate Program. He is the 2024 Andrew W. Mellon Family Foundation Rome Prize winner in Medieval Studies and the coeditor of The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500–AD 1420.
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“The main themes and arguments of the book speak to a range of current issues in the study of slavery, both in the medieval Middle East and in a broader, comparative perspective. It also offers a fascinating examination of slaveholding, masculinity, and their intersection with Jewish identity in a way that I have not seen elsewhere.”—Hannah Barker, Arizona State University
“This book constitutes a major contribution to historians’ understanding of one of the most pervasive and consequential institutions in the medieval Islamic world. Among its most important critical interventions is its refreshingly objective acknowledgement of the inescapable reality of Jewish involvement in the slave trade and its careful description of the diffuse networks through which it was carried out.”—Arnold Franklin, Queens College, City University of New York
“The wealth of evidence we have for eleventh- and twelfth-century Egypt, unmatched anywhere in the world before 1300, is becoming ever clearer in a range of remarkable books. Craig Perry’s new book is one of the best of them. Slaves and slavery were intrinsic to the urban world in Egypt; they penetrated Egyptian society and culture in countless ways. Craig Perry shows us what it was like to be a slave and what it was like to own one, with a subtlety of analysis, a deep sympathy, and a gripping narrative verve. Every medievalist should read this book.”—Chris Wickham, author of Medieval Europe
“Perry has delivered a profound and moving investigation of slaves who labored in Jewish homes and businesses in medieval Egypt. In this multiscalar history, he breaks down patterns of human trafficking while also giving an inside look at slaves’ survival strategies, daily lives in markets and public spaces, marronage, and the families and households of freed people. A full portrait emerges that is sure to shift our understanding of urban slavery in a minority community.”—Kristina Richardson, author of Roma in the Medieval Islamic World: Literacy, Culture, and Migration
“A brilliant reconstruction of slavery and slaveowners in the Jewish community of medieval Cairo drawing on the vast but highly fragmentary records of a synagogue. Perry centers his work on the enslaved and has produced a foundational text that everyone with an interest in slavery should read. This book alone should rekindle interest in the thinly researched topic of medieval slavery.”—David Eltis, author of Atlantic Cataclysm: Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades
“In the medieval Middle East, slavery was everywhere, yet we know surprisingly little about it. But while slave-soldiers have gotten most of the attention, women and girls forced to work as domestic laborers in ordinary households were far more ubiquitous. Drawing on the abundantly preserved records of the Jewish community of Cairo, Perry’s book is the definitive study of the personhood of women whose appearances in the written record are fleeting yet hint at a larger story of how most premodern people belonged to groups that both owned slaves and were themselves vulnerable to enslavement. Illuminating.”—Marina Rustow, author of The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue
