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

About this episode

Craig Perry discusses his book on the role of slavery in Jewish households in medieval Egypt, using evidence from the Cairo Geniza.

Slavery was a key part of pre-modern Islamic society, spanning from soldiers to concubines. And one of the most revealing repositories of evidence we have for how slavery worked in practice comes from the Cairo Geniza, a cache of hundreds of thousands of discarded documents from a medieval synagogue in Cairo. Craig Perry examined these documents for his new book: Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History (Princeton University Press, 2026). The book dives into everyday documents, like wills and manumission deeds, to reconstruct how Jewish households in Egypt bought, sold, owned and freed enslaved people—and how they grappled with the morality of owning slaves, given Judaism’s own history. Craig Perry is assistant professor at Emory University in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, and the Islamic Civilizations Studies Graduate Program. He is the 2024 Andrew W. Mellon Family Foundation Rome Prize winner in Medieval Studies and the coeditor of The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, AD 500–AD 1420. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its…

People in this episode

Guest: Craig Perry

Topics covered

• slavery
• Jewish history
• medieval Egypt
• Islamic society
• Cairo Geniza
• moral implications of slavery

Keywords

• slavery
• Jews
• medieval Egypt
• Cairo Geniza
• Jewish households
• moral implications
• Islamic society

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Emory University, Princeton University Press, The Cambridge World History of Slavery

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