The slave trade of european women to the middle east and asia from antiquity to the ninth century

Kathryn Ann Hain
2018
In Jerusalem, history is never dead. Fourteen years of living with the vibrant people of this city inspired my research. The rich, shared heritage of the resident Christians, Muslims, and Jews led me to the medieval period. Two different narratives about Arab and Jewish relations swirled around in the dust of the city. One was that Jews and Arabs had fought since Isaac and Ismail and would fight to the End of Days. The other was that during the medieval period, Jews and Muslims had lived in the
more » ... peace and paradise of "convincia." Both stereotypes were little more than a veneer covering deeper modern tensions. The past had social history that had contributed to the present lived experience of the not-so-holy city. Slavery and the import of foreign slaves to the Muslim world was one of these wounds that had formed the present. Ibn Khurdadhbih wrote a geography book in ninth century Baghdad that had stayed on the "Best Copied" list of Arabic classics for centuries. It continues to amaze modern scholars. It described a trade including European slaves, "eunuchs, concubines, and boys" that reached through the Abbasid Empire and on to India and China. I encountered this text courtesy of Haim Beinart, author of Atlas of Medieval Jewish History. Beinart used student volunteers to gather materials and verify facts. One of these volunteers, Yonatan Kaplan, his new son-in-law and later, my advisor and lecturer in Jerusalem, introduced me to the puzzle of the medieval Radhanite Jewish trade network by giving his Medieval Middle East students a copy of the Ibn x Khurdadhbih text. He posed the discussion question, "How was this possible?" which grew into this dissertation. My thanks to him for an intellectual query that has taken fifteen years and counting to answer.
doi:10.26053/0h-r86n-d500 fatcat:je4c7j3anng2vj5yzbdohnfkeu