Princeton UP Ideas Podcast · New Books Network

Craig Perry, "Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History" (Princeton UP, 2026)

·53 min·3 clips

Yatsaya was sold six or seven times before a public beating pushed her out of the community.

1. On New Books Network, Rabbi Mark Katz interviews Craig Perry about "Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History." 2. Perry says his path to Jewish history began after years teaching in public schools, in Morocco, and at a Jewish day school in Los Angeles. 3. He connects the book to the Cairo Geniza, a chamber that eventually yielded about 300,000 pieces of paper and documents from roughly three centuries. 4. Perry says the Geniza matters because it preserves family letters, bills of sale for slaves, court depositions, and responsa that ordinary archives often miss. 5. He places medieval Cairo inside the Fatimid caliphate, a Shiite power that founded Cairo in the late 10th century and challenged the Abbasids in Baghdad. 6. He explains that Jewish law in the Middle Ages mainly dealt with the Canaanite slave, while the Hebrew slave was largely a biblical category with limited relevance. 7. Perry stresses that Jewish men were barred by Jewish law from having sex with enslaved women, even though some still did and sometimes fathered children. 8. He notes that Islamic law treated children born to enslaved women and Muslim fathers as freeborn Muslims, which differed sharply from Jewish law. 9. Perry says slavery in Cairo was often domestic or "personal service," with enslaved people running errands, fetching water, and moving through markets. 10. He argues that the long-distance slave trade gets too much attention, while the local resale market in Egypt shaped daily life and family separation. 11. Perry describes palace slavery as a separate world of concubines, eunuchs, entertainers, and enslaved soldiers drawn from Central Asia and Africa. 12. He says women made up about one-third of slave owners, and slave ownership could let free women avoid household tasks and protect their status. 13. He adds that Jewish women sometimes went to Muslim courts when Jewish legal channels did not protect their rights in slave sales or ownership disputes. 14. Perry contrasts a pious "good slave owner" who freed and married an enslaved woman with a "bad slave owner" who ignored communal law. 15. He frames that contrast as a contest between masculinity tied to dominance and masculinity tied to belonging, community, and law. 16. He recounts the unnamed "banished concubine" who appears only briefly in the record after a Jewish merchant was accused of impregnating her and sending her to Berbera in Somalia. 17. He also discusses Yatsaya, a woman sold six or seven times and then recorded as leaving the community after a public beating in front of Muslims. 18. Perry says conversion to Islam could force a Jewish owner to sell an enslaved person, which gave enslaved people one limited path to shape their own fate. 19. He notes that about one in four enslaved people in the surviving documents seems to have become freed, sometimes with dowries, real estate, gold, or clothing. 20. He closes by tying medieval Jewish slavery to Maimonides' Passover language, which asks how to explain Egyptian slavery to children through the figure of a slave woman and her child.

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