SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Just like other late antique societies, Jewish society in late antique Palestine was a slaveholding society in which slavery was a common phenomenon of daily life. Even though the proportional numbers of slaves within the population would not have reached the extent of Roman mass slavery, many similarities existed between Jewish and Roman slave practices and attitudes towards slaves. At the same time, we must ask whether Jews, who were subjugated to Roman and Byzantine Christian imperial rule and considered the Torah their most authoritative moral guide, developed different perspectives on slavery and treated slaves differently than non-Jewish Romans, whether pagan or Christian, in late antiquity. Was there something specifically Jewish about Jewish slaveholding practices in late antiquity? Did Jews, who commemorated the Exodus from Egyptian slavery in the annual Passover holiday and who were seen as a ‘servile’ people by Roman rulers, develop alternative approaches to slavery?