In recent years, scholarship on borderlands, ransom slavery, and captivity in the pre-modern Middle East and Mediterranean has flourished, largely in Ottoman studies. This paper goes backward in time, looking at captivity and ransom in the Crusader period among Jewish communities in Egypt and Palestine. Although some published works have analyzed Jewish conceptions of charity, there has not been a study that has showed change over time in terms of Jewish ransom tactics. In this paper, I argue that Jewish leaders adopted different policies in order to accommodate the growth and variation in captives taken. Most of the documents utilized for this study are from the Cairo Geniza archive and are letters and petitions. Many are written either by or to Moses Maimonides, and a large number of them, particularly those dealing with piracy, are exchanged between Fustat and Alexandria. The documents I have chosen focus on the period right before the Crusades (i.e. the late 10th/early 11th century) and through about 1300, the period of major Crusader conflicts. This period experienced higher levels of piracy, as well, in large part because of the conflicts between the Fatimids and the Byzantines – this, in combination with the relatively high number of captives taken during the Crusades, sparked the change in their ransom tactics. While the infrastructure for ransom existed on the local level, in specific towns or cities, this period brought about changes in the way that ransoming was handled. From these letters and petitions, we can compare the more decentralized, urban nature of ransom before the Crusades to the changes that took place after. First, because Jewish lands and communities were being taken over by European Crusaders, they had to ransom not only their coreligionists but also the sacred Torah scrolls that had been captured. This increase in the number of captives (now people and texts) led to other changes, such as calling for funds from the countryside and small towns in addition to the urban centers. These communities were working together in ways that were not necessary before. Lastly, we see a move for centralization, for the funds to be collected in one place then disseminated to areas of greatest need. Under Moses Maimonides, one of the most influential Jewish rabbis and scholars of the Middle Ages, this project was realized.

“I bought her and I named her”: Names, Ethnicity and the Experience of Enslavement In Mamlūk Society This paper is about the naming and re-naming of female slaves, whose natal names and ancestries had been erased, with unstable, non-Muslim, often non-human slave names, specific to categories of skin color. The profound implications of the formula, “I bought her and I named her,” become all that more significant when contrasted with the ritualized naming of the freeborn Muslim infant with an Islamic name. The names of female slaves, the Jewels and Gazelles, often described as “fanciful,” have been taken for granted in the literature. I approach the naming and renaming of female slaves rather as an aspect of what Orlando Patterson described as the “social death” of enslavement. Since my spotlight is on female slaves and the specificity of their experience of enslavement, the Yāqūts and Jawhars remain, for the moment, in the background. My research is grounded in a range of sources: biographical dictionaries, chronicles, certificates of audition (samāʿāt), and documents of pious foundation (waqfīyyas). All slaves in Mamlūk society were placed into two overarching categories of skin color: “white” and “black”, the latter including “black,” “brown” and “mulatta” (muwallada). Complex systems of subcategories of geographic/ethnographic classifications were subsumed under “white” and “black.” These categories and subcategories served to imagine and to organize the enslaveable non-Muslim “other” as did the names that were assigned to them, names divided into two separate pools of “white” and “black” slave names. Unlike the names of the freeborn, these names, at least the names of the “black” female slaves I have researched, were unstable. A Gazelle could become a Nightingale and then a Jewel. Her slave name did not become her own until she died or was manumitted. Naming is a serious business in any society. In Medieval Muslim societies, the name was an open book for anyone to read. So in a sense, my work runs counter to the title of Jacqueline Sublet’s Le Voile du Nome, the most serious study of Arabic names and naming to date. The names of slave women are often the only record we have of them. Their slave names, in the very instability and marginality of their naming, have much to tell us about the experience of enslavement.

Bound by international anti-slave trade agreements, the Ottoman state became actively involved in the lives of emancipated Africans in the late nineteenth-century. New interventionist programs developed in parallel to the traditional way in which emancipated African were cared for, which was up until then largely undertaken by private individuals or families. Emblematic of the Ottoman state’s new role is the construction of a specialized ‘guest-house’ in Izmir and the orders in 1890 to send as many emancipated Africans as possible to it. In this new institution, they were to be cared for, trained, and integrated into the fabric of late Ottoman society. Those too young were reportedly placed with other non-African orphans, street urchins, and beggars in Izmir’s School of Arts and Crafts (Mekteb-i Sanayi). This paper will compare how rescued African children were cared for in the Mekteb-i Sanayi with how they were cared for in private households in Izmir at the same time. I will argue that, while seemingly different, the children in each location underwent a similar education and transformation. Thus, despite growing state intervention into the lives of all Ottoman citizens in this period, these novel mechanisms may not have dramatically altered the trajectory of these children as might be assumed. It did, however, succeed in making a part of the population more knowable and had a greater role in shaping and controlling their labour. To understand the experiences of African children in the Izmir Mekteb-i Sanayi, I will draw on Ottoman yearbooks (salnames) for 1890s Izmir, as well as research on Ottoman orphanages in general. For traditional, private emancipation in Izmir, this study will employ a ‘reading against the grain’ of the rich and untapped memoirs of novelist Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil who witnessed this process first hand in the same time period. The novelty of this paper is multifaceted. First, it bridges the existing historiographical barriers between Ottoman slavery studies and other studies on social projects the state undertook in the late nineteenth-century. Second, it brings to light the experiences of the most vulnerable segment of the emancipated slave population, the children. Finally, this paper will also break new ground in shifting the focus away from the history of the emancipated in Istanbul which currently dominates the historiography.