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392 Jewish Slavery in Antiquity. by Catherine Hezser. Oxford and New

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392 Jewish Slavery in Antiquity. by Catherine Hezser. Oxford and New 392 Review of Books / Journal for the Study of Judaism 38 (2007) 342-449 Jewish Slavery in Antiquity. By Catherine Hezser. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press 2005. Pp. xi, 439. Hardback. £55.00. ISBN 0-19-928086-X. Catherine Hezser has written the first synthetic monograph devoted to investigat- ing “Jewish slavery,” by which she means the Jewish practice of slavery, both as slaves and their owners. Given the enormous scholarship produced over the last three decades on slavery in the classical world and among early Christians, Hezs- er’s book is a welcome and long-overdue attempt to understand how the Jews in antiquity dealt with this basic antique social institution. Following older apolo- getic arguments, did they really transform the (quasi-)egalitarian ethic of the Hebrew Bible into social reality by resisting slavery or minimizing its effects? Or did they simply adopt the rhetoric and reality of slavery of the communities in which they lived, as Jews in antiquity appeared to have done with so many other social institutions? If the latter, did they in any way depart from these received classical models in order to bring the reality more in line with (at least one plau- sible reading of ) their sacred texts? Although Hezser structures her book more as an overview than an argument, she favors the position that Jews by and large followed the mores and adopted the rhetoric of slavery from their wider cultural worlds. Where differences do exist, they tend to be in some of the details: Jewish literature of antiquity, for example, does not presuppose (as did many Greek and Roman philosophers) that slavery was a condition “natural” to distinctive groups. At the same time, the distinctive biblical and rabbinic traditions led to an understanding of slavery within a theo- logical framework. Th e monograph has four parts. After a helpful review of the scholarship in the introduction, part I, “Th e Status of Slaves,” primarily discusses how Jewish literary sources (and some inscriptions) depict the legal and social status of slaves. Both Romans and rabbis “denationalized” the slave, attributing far more importance to their status qua slaves than to their national or ethnic origin. Th is stance collapsed the biblical distinction between the Hebrew and Canaanite slaves and their treat- ment; a slave was a slave. Although ancient Jewish legal writings mark a clear dis- tinction made between slave and free, slave status also contained ambiguities, both legal (i.e., is a slave to be treated as a person or chattel?) and social: “in reality the boundaries between [slave and free] were rather blurred: in their dependence on the householder, women and minors often resembled slaves; many slaves worked alongside free persons or were even better educated, clothed, and nourished than the free” (105). Rabbinic law introduces a third level of ambiguity in the “half- slave,” who was co-owned but then released by one of the partners. Part II, “Slaves and the Family,” is concerned primarily with domestic slaves. Th roughout the Roman Empire, it appears that by late antiquity domestic slaves outnumbered agricultural slaves. Hezser argues that this was true also among Jews, although she cautiously notes that statistics for Jewish slavery are unavailable. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 DOI: 10.1163/157006307X206094 JJSJSJ 338,3_f5_379_342-449.indd8,3_f5_379_342-449.indd 339292 66/20/07/20/07 33:48:55:48:55 PPMM Review of Books / Journal for the Study of Judaism 38 (2007) 342-449 393 Here Hezser surveys the many kinds of complex household relationships within a slave-holding family. While the master-slave relationship is her primary focus (illustrated with many rabbinic stories of “ideal” slaves and advice concerning their treatment), Hezser also discusses the use of prostitutes and concubines. Although “unlike Roman law ancient Jewish legal traditions do not grant the master unlimited power of life and death over his slave” (214), Hezser sees little that is distinctive in either the Jewish practice or the rabbinic rhetoric on house- hold slaves. Part III, “Slaves and the Economy,” turns to slaves as economic agents and objects. Like Romans, Jews (and rabbis) used slaves to work their land and might have kept a few around as status symbols, as expected of any urban elite. In addi- tion to working in agriculture, domestic slaves would have transacted business for their master. Slaves were also, of course, the objects of economic transactions, and while the slave-trade per se does not appear to have been economically important, Jewish sources treat the regular buying and selling of slaves as a matter of fact. Even manumission of slaves was not an ideal, but a rather “an incentive to encour- age the slave’s good work and loyalty” (321). Finally, part IV, “Th e Symbolic Significance of Slavery,” addresses the meta- phors and parables of slavery in Jewish literature. Jewish writers, she claims, adopted the slave metaphor “by way of self-identification to describe the difficult political situation in which Jews found themselves,” while rejecting ancient Roman slanders that identified Jews as slaves (345). Her discussion of slave parables is both more complex and incomplete, as these parables are highly literary works that might (or might not) contain within them nuggets of realia. A chapter on “Slavery and the Exodus Experience” rounds out the book, in which she specu- lates that the Passover Seder was marked by an aporia between the anti-slavery message of the ritual and the common-day acceptance of slavery. Aside from demonstrating the essential similarities between Jewish and non- Jewish practices of slavery in antiquity, the strength of this book is Hezser’s careful and cautious work describing and sorting the relevant evidence. As is usually true of any survey of this breadth, though, the analyses of these sources is at times thin. While Hezser suggests that “half-slaves” reflect some kind of social reality in the rabbinic world, I suspect that they can be more firmly seen as a form of rabbinic legal rhetoric analogous to rabbinic discussions of hermaphrodites and the mythi- cal koy: more thought experiments than true legislation. In this case, the rabbis, like Romans and Christians, were using slaves to “think with,” an explanation rarely used by Hezser. Chapter 2, “Women, Slaves, and Minors,” might have been more sensitive to more precise distinctions in the ways in which all of these sta- tuses were chattel in some ways and persons in others. In her (legitimate) quest to locate common expectations of master-slave behavior, Hezser’s discussion of the relationship between R. Gamliel and his “ideal slave,” Tabi (155-62) ignores the fact that these stories authorize the status quo in ways more complex than simply JJSJSJ 338,3_f5_379_342-449.indd8,3_f5_379_342-449.indd 339393 66/20/07/20/07 33:48:55:48:55 PPMM.
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