Unshackling Our Interpretive Practices: Rereading Rabbinic Slavery
Marjorie Lehman and Mira Beth Wasserman
Credit: Kurt Hoffman
Marjorie Lehman is Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics and Area Chair of Rabbinic Literatures and Cultures at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Mira Beth Wasserman is Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs, Associate Professor of Rabbinic Literature, and Director of the Center for Jewish Ethics at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College.
Few moral claims command such widespread consensus as the repudiation of slavery. Across lines of religion, ideology, and identity, there is no moral ambiguity about activities like the trafficking, subjugation, and abuse of human beings—these are not practices about which reasonable people can disagree. In Jewish circles, we confirm our collective denunciation of slavery each time we gather for prayer and celebrate the story of our exodus from bondage.
And yet, while Jews today are clear and vocal in their repudiation of human trafficking and bondage, this moral clarity is altogether lacking in the Torah, Talmud, and Jewish interpretive tradition. Even as the Torah excoriates the domination and oppression of a slave-owning Pharaoh, it also sets out laws to govern the acquisition and treatment of slaves by Israelite masters. Although Leviticus 25 prohibits Israelites from enslaving Israelite kin, touting the refrain that the Israelites must remember that they were once enslaved by the Egyptians, that historical memory does not forbid the ownership of non-Israelite slaves. Instead, in biblical literature, and later in rabbinic literature, slavery appears as a legitimate institution with all of the trappings of buying and selling people, coercing them sexually, and claiming and enslaving their children. Furthermore, we find that slaves and slavery are everywhere in rabbinic literature, entangled within categories of family, property, and ritual law. Many central Jewish ritual commandments—such as reciting Shema, donning tefillin, and sitting in a sukkah—distinguish men from women, adults from children, and the free from the enslaved with respect to who is obligated to perform them. Jewish legal codes spanning centuries present slavery as a matter of fact and not as an institution that needs to be eliminated.
In short, the chasm between contemporary repudiations of slavery and its acceptance and legitimation in our textual tradition confront us with a stark ethical challenge: What should we do when the very sources that are the foundations for Jewish ethics offend our moral judgment? The broad consensus among Jews today that slavery is immoral makes it an instructive example for reflecting on how to respond to ethical lapses in the traditional texts we revere.
We, the authors of this essay, are both Talmud professors in rabbinical schools, and many of the core texts in our respective curricula—Talmudic sources focusing on daily ritual, on festival observances, on marriage, conversion, and mourning—include passing mentions of enslaved people. Each of us has taught these texts for years, and in our eagerness to delve into the topics that remain most relevant to Jewish practice today, we gave scant attention to the slaves who populate so many pages of the Talmud. Sometimes, however, our students would stop us, and ask questions we could not answer: Who are these slaves and why are they so often depicted participating in Jewish rituals? Had they been captured and sold, or born into slavery? Did they come from other religious traditions that they were forced to leave behind? And what are we to make of the fact that sages such as Rabban Gamliel and Rabbi Yehudah Hanasi, whose teachings and example form the core of our tradition, were slave-owners?
In the wake of the 2020 killing of George Floyd and the racial reckoning it sparked in the United States, these questions took on a new moral urgency, and we turned to each other to confer about how to address them. We returned to texts we had studied and taught before, reviewing them together, and this time, rather than glancing over the references to slavery, we interrogated them more carefully. The more we sought to understand the place of slavery in rabbinic texts, the more we came to recognize the degree to which the topic has been neglected in religious circles and among critical academic scholars of the Talmud. This past semester, we took a first step toward addressing this neglect by offering classes at our respective schools that focused on slavery in rabbinic texts. Soon, we will begin publishing some of the fruits of our joint research. This essay offers us the opportunity to share some of our initial findings and to make the case that careful examination of the roles of slavery and the enslaved in our texts is critical to the formation of ethical readers and leaders in Jewish life.
As a preliminary foray into our larger research project, we offer a case study of one of the most famous enslaved characters in rabbinic literature, Tavi, the slave of Rabban Gamliel. There are multiple references to Tavi in the Mishnah, in collections of midrash, and in both the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. Given the complicated histories of our textual sources—they were each compiled over the course of centuries—we don’t presume that we can learn much from them about an actual person named Tavi. Some scholars have even raised questions about whether the various depictions of Tavi refer to a single character, arguing that “Tavi” might have been a generic way to refer to the enslaved or a device for bringing disparate traditions about slave ownership together. Our investigation therefore focuses not on how one actual slave was treated by his rabbinic master, but rather on how rabbinic discourse treats the topic of slavery. Below, we will show that the imagining and reimagining of Tavi’s character in rabbinic storytelling reflects an ongoing strategy of justifying and rationalizing slavery in Jewish life, a strategy that we aim to examine and challenge. In explicating the different characterizations of Tavi, we discover different rabbinic attitudes about slavery, human difference, and the dictates of Torah and morality.
In rabbinic literature, Tavi is portrayed as learned, pious, and beloved by his master, Rabban Gamliel of Yavneh. As nasi, or patriarch, Rabban Gamliel is remembered for presiding over the nascent rabbinic community during the early decades after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Mishnah Berakhot 2:5-7 records three exceptions to normative ritual practice that he invokes only for himself: despite the exemption extended to new bridegrooms, Rabban Gamliel recites the Shema on the night of his wedding; despite the prohibition on washing when one is in mourning, Rabban Gamliel bathes on the night after his wife dies; and despite the tradition that one does not receive visits or words of consolation for a slave, Rabban Gamliel mourns Tavi, explaining to his students that Tavi was not like other slaves, “He was kasher.” The ambiguity of the word kasher (which might be translated as “proper,” “fitting,” or “pious”) makes it hard to understand exactly what is laudable about Tavi, and why Rabban Gamliel distinguishes him from other slaves. Taken together, the three exemptions Rabban Gamliel makes for himself give the impression that he might have a higher regard for Tavi than he does for his wife.
Other rabbinic sources fill out the picture of what made Tavi so exceptional in the eyes of Rabban Gamliel. According to Talmud Yerushalmi Sukkah 2:1, 52d and Mekhilta derabi Yishmael, Massekhet depisha bo, 17, Tavi observes mitzvot. Indeed, he puts on tefillin. In the Mishnah’s discussion of what constitutes the fulfillment of the commandment to dwell in a sukkah on the holiday of Sukkot, an anecdote about Tavi’s pious observance becomes a critical datum in an early rabbinic debate. It reads as follows:
One who sleeps beneath the bed in the sukkah did not fulfill his obligation.
Rabbi Yehudah said: It was our custom that we would sleep beneath the bed before the Elders and they did not say anything to us.
Rabbi Shimon said: There was an incident involving Tavi, the slave of Rabban Gamliel (מעשה בטבי עבדו של רבן גמליאל) who was sleeping beneath the bed, and Rabban Gamliel said to the Elders: Did you see my slave Tavi, (טבי עבדי), who is a Torah scholar and knows that slaves are exempt from the mitzvah of sukkah? Therefore, he sleeps under the bed. And through this, we learned that one who sleeps beneath the bed did not fulfill his obligation. (mSukkah 2:1)
At issue is the question of whether one can fulfill the commandment of dwelling in a sukkah if one sleeps within the structure, but under a bed. Some rabbinic authorities argue that sleeping under a bed invalidates the fulfillment of the sukkah commandment because the bed obstructs one’s view of the skhakh roofing, the essential structural element that transforms ordinary huts into sacred sukkah spaces. Rabban Gamliel reasons that since the learned Tavi knows Torah law and knows that as a slave, he is exempt from the obligation to dwell in a sukkah, the fact that he sleeps underneath the bed confirms that such behavior does not fulfill the obligation.
While this legal reasoning is not airtight, the anecdote conveys important information about Tavi. More specifically, it associates Tavi with two central religious practices: Torah study and dwelling in the sukkah. Like the commandment of wearing tefillin, Sukkah is a time-bound positive commandment that does not devolve on women, slaves, or children (see mBerakhot 3:3; mSukkah 2:8; mKiddushin 1:7). The reasoning seems to be (and this is made explicit in the Talmud Yerushalmi) that in the limited space of his master’s crowded hut, Tavi moves under the bed to make room for those who are obligated to fulfill a commandment that he is not required to perform. Tavi emerges as something of a tragic figure, whose fidelity to the tradition he studies and reveres requires that he deny himself access to its fundamental rites and its circle of practitioners.
Oddly, despite Tavi’s commitments to rabbinic learning and practice, there is an ongoing tradition, tracing back to the Babylonian Talmud, of identifying Tavi as a Canaanite slave. The presumption of Tavi’s non-Israelite identity has become so entrenched, it is often inscribed into the very translation of the Mishnaic passage we just cited, even though it does not appear there in the original Hebrew. As part of our project of re-examining familiar sources such as this one with a lens focused on the enslaved, we have begun to question this characterization of Tavi as a non-Israelite.
To understand the significance of Tavi’s identity as either an Israelite/Hebrew or a Canaanite slave, we need to take a step back to consider these two categories more broadly. Across rabbinic literature, male slaves are identified in several different ways, and a small number of these texts differentiate between Hebrew and Canaanite slaves. In such texts, the term eved ivri refers to a Hebrew slave and the term eved kena’ani refers to a Canaanite slave (see, for example, mKiddushin 1:2-3), and the two are described as being governed by different sets of rules, including that Hebrew slaves serve their masters for limited terms while Canaanite slaves are held in perpetuity. The Talmud implies (bYevamot 46a-48b) that when Jews acquired Canaanite slaves, they subjected them to a quasi-conversion ritual that allowed them to participate in some household observances.
The implication of the limited number of texts that distinguish between Canaanite and Hebrew slaves is that all slaves can be categorized as either one or the other, with “Canaanite” serving as a blanket term that encompasses all slaves who are not of Israelite backgrounds. Yet, in the majority of these rabbinic sources, the term eved is unmarked—the text does not specify whether the slave in question is Hebrew or Canaanite. Tavi is an example of such an unmarked eved. He is consistently referred to as simply an eved, without any descriptive term to classify him as an eved ivri or eved kena’ani. This leaves the question of Tavi’s identity open for interpretation. Is he an Israelite? A Canaanite? The Mishnah does not tell us.
There are some clues, however, and we think it is possible that in early rabbinic sources, Tavi is presumed by the rabbis to be an enslaved Jew. The label talmid hakham (“disciple of a sage”) granted to him in mSukkah 2:1 suggests that Tavi learns Torah because he, like his rabbi-master Rabban Gamliel, feels commanded to do so. It would then follow that Tavi is a Jew who, before his enslavement, was required to observe the commandment of dwelling in the sukkah. His enslavement changes his status, banishing him from the circle of the obligated due to his exemption as a slave.
Similarly, references to Tavi donning tefillin make more sense if Tavi is a Jew. Although he is exempt from this commandment as a male slave, it is utterly plausible to think that he chooses to fulfill this ritual as a full-fledged Jew living with the great Torah scholar, Rabban Gamliel. This is further possible because in early rabbinic sources, being exempt from the performance of a given commandment does not constitute an exclusion or prohibition from performing it. Rather, exemptions offer individuals such as women and slaves the right to abstain from time-bound obligations, possibly due to pressing household duties. Read in this light, we can understand Tavi as a pious Jew, eager to perform whatever commandments he can, who nevertheless understands his duty to defer to those of higher status when his master’s sukkah becomes too crowded. Perhaps this is what Rabban Gamliel means when he characterizes Tavi as kasher (mBerakhot 2:7). Rabban Gamliel might very well be claiming Tavi as a Jewish slave who knows his place in the rabbinic hierarchy.
As persuasive as our case for Tavi’s Jewish roots might be, this is not the dominant interpretation of his identity. The tradition that Tavi is Canaanite can be traced back to a source found in the Babylonian Talmud, in Yoma 87a, where the text effectively shuts down the possibility that Tavi is a Jew. Amidst a homily on the question of whether an ancestor’s deeds shape the destiny of descendants for generations, Tavi is singled out as the exemplar of a meritorious individual who suffers. The text argues that he must live and die a slave because of the sins of his biblical ancestor, Ham the father of Canaan, the progenitor of the Canaanites (Gen. 9):
Fortunate are the righteous—not only do they merit, but they merit their children and their children’s children until the end of all generations; as there were a number of sons of Aaron who deserved to be burned like Nadav and Avihu, as it is stated: “The sons of Aaron who were left” (Leviticus 10:16), but the merit of their father protected them.
Woe to the wicked—not only do they render themselves liable, but they also render their children and children’s children liable until the end of all generations. Canaan had many children who deserved to be ordained like Tavi, the slave of Rabban Gamliel, but their father’s liability caused them [to remain as slaves]. (bYoma 87a)
The Talmud here sets out a principle of generational merit on the one hand, and generational culpability on the other. Aaron exemplifies ancestral virtue, while Ham—the most vilified of Noah’s three sons—epitomizes blameworthiness that stretches down through the generations. In both cases, the force of an ancestor’s deeds has the power to overcome whatever the individual deserves for their own actions. But the specific examples offered here suggest that the karmic effects of ancestral wickedness far outweigh the efficacy of ancestral righteousness: while Aaron’s righteousness is potent enough to protect only some of his offspring from the punishing deaths that they deserve, the wickedness of Ham reaches down from the primordial past to condemn all of his descendants, including even the meritorious Tavi, to abject enslavement.
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To understand this tradition about Tavi, we need to look back to the biblical story of the aftermath of the flood. According to Genesis 9, after Noah and his family disembark from the ark, Noah plants a vineyard, drinks wine, and becomes drunk. When Ham comes upon his father naked and in a drunken stupor, he goes to tell his brothers, Shem and Japheth, who take care to protect Noah’s modesty by carefully shielding him with a cloak. Though the Torah’s account is cryptic, it implies that Ham is guilty of a grave transgression either for reporting his father’s state to his brothers or for some other unnamed action. When Noah awakens, he seems intent on punishing Ham, and yet it is Ham’s son, Canaan, whom he singles out with a curse: “He [Noah] said, “Cursed be Canaan (ארור כנען); the lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers (עבד עבדים יהיה לאחיו)” (Gen. 9:25).
In bYoma, this curse becomes a rationalization for the persistence of Canaanite slavery throughout time. If Tavi is Canaanite, this tradition provides a tacit justification for the enslavement of even such a pious individual. The Talmud here offers a stark moralizing vision that rationalizes and vindicates any apparent miscarriage of justice, suggesting that however arbitrary or unfair one’s plight might seem, it can be understood as the working-out of generational debt. In singling out Tavi as the quintessential example of one condemned by the wickedness of his ancestors, the Talmud links the magnitude of Tavi’s virtue to the magnitude of his ancestor’s guilt. In this moral system, even though Tavi is worthy of rabbinic ordination, his enslavement is justified, nonetheless.
The redactors of Bavli Yoma may have invented a Canaanite identity for Tavi, or they may have received and preserved a tradition that wasn’t clearly reflected in the Mishnah. This does not mean that we have to read Bavli Yoma’s understanding of Tavi back into every reference to him elsewhere. We think that Yoma’s redactors were drawn to an emphasis on Tavi’s Canaanite identity because they were discomfited by the idea that ancient Jews held their fellow Jews in bondage. It was more palatable to them to imagine that Tavi was a foreigner than to think of him as one of their own. However, there is more at stake here than the question of one elusive character’s backstory.
The identification of Tavi as a Canaanite raises questions about where the concept of the Canaanite slave comes from and how it functions in rabbinic discourse more generally. The concept of the Canaanite slave has become so entrenched in readings of rabbinic texts that few today register its peculiarity or recognize that it is, in fact, a rabbinic invention, appearing initially in early rabbinic material (see for example, mKiddushin 1:2-3). Nowhere in the Torah does the term eved kena’ani, “Canaanite slave,” appear. Indeed, the Torah mandates that the Israelites utterly destroy and root out all Canaanites (Deut. 7:1-2), not that they enslave them. And when the Torah does discuss slaves of non-Israelite lineage, it does not label them as ethnically Canaanite. Rather, it refers to them as being “from the nations round about you” (Lev. 25:44). It is the rabbis who begin referring to all foreign slaves as Canaanites.
The biblical injunction against allowing any Canaanite to live makes it all the more surprising that the term eved kena’ani eventually becomes the primary rabbinic nomenclature for male slaves of non-Israelite lineages. But Bavli Yoma sheds light on this when it invokes the curse on Canaan as a justification for Tavi’s enslavement, suggesting that by identifying a slave as “Canaanite,” the rabbis invoke a connection between the slave and the original Canaan. One implication of identifying all non-Israelite slaves as descendants of Canaan—or at least as heirs of his curse—is that their enslavement is a consequence of an ancient sin, almost as though these non-Israelite slaves brought the condition of slavery upon themselves.
Centuries later, the biblical story of Ham’s blunder and Noah’s curse played a central role in the defense of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. American defenders of slavery would identify Ham as the ancestor of Black Africans and invoke “the curse of Ham” to argue that the mass enslavement of Black people is biblically ordained and to justify a system of domination based on race. But race was not the salient category for ancient people that it would become for moderns. In the time of the rabbis, the biblical story of Noah’s curse had a different resonance. Within the rabbinic context of Yoma, the justification for Tavi’s slavery is rooted in generational guilt, not Blackness. This makes sense because for the rabbis, the important difference between peoples was not racialized. More central was the distinction between Israel and all other nations. Though the particulars of the interpretations of Noah’s curse are different, what the tradition in Yoma shares with nineteenth century defenders of American slavery is the compulsion to look to the Bible to justify the total domination of one human being over another.
That said, we propose that in doubling down on Tavi’s Canaanite heritage, Yoma also betrays some rabbis’ misgivings about slavery. The notion that all slaves are descendants of Canaanites, an accursed people, might suggest that while these rabbis could imagine themselves as owners of enslaved non-Jews who, in their minds, were born to be slaves, they might not have been comfortable dominating those who shared their Israelite ancestry. They further placated themselves in fantasizing that slaves such as Tavi became Torah experts who willingly embraced their subjugation without protest, even adopting Jewish rituals.
We want to confront and challenge attempts to justify slavery in our texts. Those who read Tavi’s Canaanite identity back into the anecdote of Mishnah Sukkah 2:1 do so as a strategy for legitimating Rabban Gamliel’s slave ownership. They rely on Bavli Yoma to suggest that enslavement is Tavi’s destiny, letting Rabban Gamliel off the hook for any moral culpability. Tavi is the quintessential slave/foreigner tainted by the Bavli with an inherited guilt that is inescapable. When Tavi himself is imagined as embracing his accursed status unquestioningly, who can condemn Rabban Gamliel for owning slaves, or any of the rabbis for tolerating slavery? The rabbis thus absolve themselves for perpetuating the enslavement of non-Jews.
And yet, it is not just the slave Tavi whom rabbinic tradition deems a Canaanite. Bavli Yoma anticipates a longstanding predilection for identifying every unmarked eved as a Canaanite slave. Jewish commentators today continue to cling to the view that unless otherwise specified, all the slaves in rabbinic literature are Canaanite slaves. Adin Steinsaltz, in his widely used The Talmud: A Reference Guide, includes entries on the eved kena’ani and its counterpart, the eved ivri, but does not include a separate entry for the unmarked eved, even though in the vast majority of cases in rabbinic literature, the word eved is not marked as either ivri or kena’ani. Steinsaltz’s interpretation does not consider what is apparent in the rabbinic sources themselves—that in most instances, the distinction between kena’ani and ivri is not operative. The general category of eved seems to encompass people of all backgrounds, Jews included, and the use of this term signals that the status of being enslaved is of singular importance, eclipsing other aspects of identity. In ignoring the general category of eved, Steinsaltz does not consider what is apparent in the rabbinic sources themselves, namely, that in most instances, a slave is a slave.
The ambiguity of Tavi’s identity reminds us that there is an argument to be made for seeing the unspecified eved as a chattel slave, possibly a Jew, possibly not. The moral stakes are high. If we rely on Bavli Yoma to determine that Tavi is, in fact, a non-Israelite—specifically a Canaanite slave—we risk turning all references to unmarked slaves like him into non-Jews as well. Slavery then becomes an institution in which Jews participate as slave-owners but not, for the most part, as slaves. In our view, the interpretive tradition represented in Bavli Yoma and then perpetuated by interpreters from the time of the Talmud until Steinsaltz, belies the testimony of the texts themselves. The automatic elision of the unmarked eved with the Canaanite slave obscures the likelihood that early rabbis had no compunctions about the ownership of enslaved Jews, just like they had no compunctions about slavery in general.
The fusion of the category of the ambiguous unmarked eved with the Canaanite slave may have eased the consciences of the rabbis and later interpreters who were distressed at the notion that Jews, even those as prominent as the great Rabban Gamliel, could own, trade, and dominate their fellow Jews. But from our perspective, consigning non-Jews alone to slavery does not mitigate the moral offense. On the contrary, it compounds it, by introducing a troubling hierarchy between Jews and non-Jews. The linkage between the eved and the eved kena’ani is constructed problematically on the belief that it is more acceptable for Jews to enslave non-Jews than to enslave other Jews. This interpretation can only function as an apology for rabbinic slavery to the degree that non-Jews are regarded as less than Jews, unworthy of human dignity and freedom.
Our own commitments to human rights cannot sustain a moral order in which generational enslavement is legitimate for non-Jews but not for Jews. The failure of the commentarial tradition to recognize the troubling implications of this apologetics is deeply disappointing.
Over and against the dominant tendency to obscure, apologize for, or altogether avoid the subject of the legitimation of slavery in the core texts of Jewish tradition, we are trying to bring the moral failures of the rabbis to light. We do so not because we relish disparaging the rabbis, but because there is a moral cost to turning away from slavery in our tradition. So long as we deny the ethical failings of our texts, we cannot redeem them. In our view, reckoning with the realities of slavery in our texts is imperative not only because doing so disrupts apologetics that are dishonest, but because it can contribute to a reckoning with our own individual and collective responsibilities. More honest readings enable us to hold these texts up to our own world and ask ourselves if we are doing better today. They prompt us in our modern-day communities to evaluate whether we have moved far enough in a more ethical direction, and they foster conversations about what we need to do to garner change.
“I have not found a form of slavery that was better than others. That includes the religious forms of slavery, in the Jewish Bible, the Christian Bible, and the Qur’an. Among those texts there are some differences, but the differences do not change what it is to be enslaved. I understand that some Jewish, Christian, and Muslim people believe that their religions made slavery more humane. But, I don’t think any form of slavery is humane.”
We undertook our examination of slavery and the rabbis in the wake of what had seemed for a moment to be a sea-change in American society’s moral life. Five years ago, a litany of names of victims of police violence—Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd are just a few—pierced the national conscience, and for a brief time, many Americans seemed open to learning about the ways that slavery and racism are deeply intertwined in the American past and present. On a personal note, following the death of George Floyd, we were separately involved in proposals to revise history curricula in two different Jewish day schools, in two different cities. At the time, there was some openness, although it is not clear that change ensued. Our own confrontations with the persistent inequities and stubborn prejudices in our contemporary world was the impetus that turned us back to these texts and helped us to see how rabbinic tradition was implicated in legitimizing slavery.
A national reckoning about slavery in America still has not happened, and in some parts of the country, education about the history of slavery is now discouraged and contested. We nonetheless remain compelled by the idea that unless the abuses of the past are honestly and openly recognized and addressed, they will continue to subvert and impede the pursuit of equity and dignity in the present. To be sure, the stakes of a conversation about slavery are much different in relation to rabbinic tradition than to American life. The past we are excavating in stories about Tavi is far more remote and much less central to Jewish life than three hundred years of bondage are to American society. But there is nonetheless a steep moral cost to letting Tavi’s character remain shackled within old, unexamined reading practices. For too long, we were so inured to Tavi’s presence under the bed and at the margins of Jewish law that we failed to examine what was actually in the text and what was projected onto it. In doing so, we unwittingly perpetuated notions of Jewish exceptionalism and failed to recognize and decry apologies for human bondage.
We teach these texts differently now because we believe that careful readers make for more ethical leaders. Our texts can only serve as sources for Jewish ethical reasoning so long as we subject their content to ethical critique. We want our students to notice and attend to the cruelty of treating Tavi as accursed so they can develop new, liberatory readings of Torah texts. More than this, we want them to develop practices of critical reading that they can bring to their analyses of social life. We want the empathy they develop for characters on the printed Talmudic page to train them to have empathy for the diversity of people they encounter. To be an ethical reader is to bring the pain of the world into confrontation with the text, and then to bring practices of attentive care back into the world.
Religious studies scholar Bernadette J. Brooten has argued that sacred texts and religious traditions have played a central role in justifying and normalizing the moral offense of human trafficking. Judaism is no exception. We keep Brooten’s interview with the internationally known formerly enslaved anti-slavery activist, Mende Nazer, front and center in thinking about our work. Nazer commented:
I have not found a form of slavery that was better than others. That includes the religious forms of slavery, in the Jewish Bible, the Christian Bible, and the Qur’an. Among those texts there are some differences, but the differences do not change what it is to be enslaved. I understand that some Jewish, Christian, and Muslim people believe that their religions made slavery more humane. But, I don’t think any form of slavery is humane.
By deliberately attending to the way we read rabbinic texts about slavery, we can refuse to adopt longstanding traditions of interpretation that have minimized and rationalized its practice. Training ourselves and our students to notice the prevalence of slavery in our texts—and the tendency to justify it through appeals to Jewish privilege—can prime us to take notice of other forms of dehumanization and chauvinism in the social worlds we inhabit. And while attending to the enslaved status of Tavi is no substitute for extending our care to living, breathing victims of human trafficking and domination, perhaps a practice of close and careful reading can help awaken our attention, stir our compassion, and sharpen our ethical faculties.
