Slavery in History

by Adam Gurowski

The Mosaic law commands: "Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: he shall dwell with thee, even among you, in the place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him." Some modern commentators attempt to contract this humane and universal command, by arguing that it only applied to Jewish born servants or slaves; but sound criticism utterly annihilates the assumption. On the contrary, the phrase "in one of thy gates," is a positive proof that the command had in view fugitives of every tribe and kingdom. All Gentiles, slaves as well as freemen, were considered by the Jews "unclean," and there might have been some difficulty in admitting such runaways into their houses. But whatever was the creed or nationality of the escaped, he found safety "in the gates," and from thence could not be "delivered unto his master." Difference of religion and not of race constituted the paramount distinction between the Jew and the Gentile; if the command, therefore, were exclusively applicable to the Jewish slave, even then its spirit is violated by the American fugitive slave act, to uphold which, the Mosaic law is blasphemed—for the enslaved race of Christian America are of the same faith and baptism as their owners.

With the increase of luxury and corruption under the Hebrew kings, kidnapping and the traffic in men and women seem to have largely increased. The slaves stolen in piratical expeditions among neighboring tribes were exported to a distance, while others were imported from thence into Judea. But against this practice the prophets—those inspired successors of the lawgiver of Sinai—thundered terribly. The Edomites and other Phœnicians—who seem to have been pre-eminently the slave-traders of their time—importing slaves from Gaza, which was then a great thoroughfare and commercial metropolis, and exporting them to other points, were declared to be the most accursed of nations. So now, the modern Edomites of this continent, who have again revived the slave-traffic between Africa and this country, together with all who aid, abet, patronize or excuse them, come under the curse so often denounced against their ancient prototypes.

Under the kings, also, domestic slavery became more extensive, and its influence more fatal. It did not yet, however, succeed in devouring the vitals of the nation, or wholly destroying the small homesteads and the free yeomanry, as it afterward did in Greece, and over almost the entire ancient world under republican and imperial Rome. The epoch of the kings is one of moral degradation and effeminacy on the one hand, and of disasters and captivities to the Jews themselves, on the other. Sensuality and general depravity flourished rank and wild under the malignant influence of domestic slavery. Slavery relaxed the ties of family and society among the Jews, as history shows it to have done in every place and in all ages of its existence—for slavery, sensuality and general depravity mutually engender and sustain each other. But in their deepest and most helpless degradation, the Jews never sold the offspring of their own personal lechery into slavery: this advance on the turpitude of Hebraic slavery—this outrage on the humanity of the faith we inherit from the Jews—was first justified and systematized by the slave states of the great Republic of the West! In ancient as in Christian times, there were doubtless parents who abandoned their legitimate or illegitimate offspring to public mercy, to accident, or to servitude; but all legislators have condemned such inhumanity, and tried, if possible, to regulate and soften it. So, deliberate selling of one's children may anciently have occurred in solitary instances; but it was always and everywhere condemned as the sum of all infamies.

Many of the tutelary regulations for the slaves laid down in the law, fell, it is true, into disuse, even as other parts of the law were violated by the wayward and stiff-necked Israelites. On the advent to power of the good Josiah, however, the violated commandments and regulations of Moses, including those concerning the slaves, were rigidly enforced, and a general reformation inaugurated.

The increase of wealth, the various modifications and changes generated in the organism of society by its growth, as also by wars, captivities, changes of government, etc., brought forth a new subordinate condition in the domestic and civil life of the Hebrews—it was that of the client, and belongs to the latter epoch of the kings. Theologians of doubtful learning, and still more dubious honesty, argue that such clients were slaves; but, in truth, the clients among the Hebrews were no more the slaves of their patrons than the same class were among the Romans or Gauls. The Hebrew client was a subordinate, but independent; he was under the protection of his patron, but both were bound by mutual obligations and prescribed conditions; and the property and estate of the patron were often under the guardianship of the client. Many expressions in the Scriptures, also, bearing on the mission of the future Messianic servant of Jahveh, mean properly a client, and not a slave or a chattel.

The old kingdom of Judea was overthrown in wars with Assyria and Babylon; and the Jews were carried away as captives. These repeated captivities chiefly befell the most wealthy and influential part of the population. Such captives generally became political slaves, that is, were deprived of political, though not of religious or civil rights, and were not made domestic slaves or chattels. They became the property of the king or of the state; but were not individually subject to be scattered or sold; in fact, they became colonists, and lands were assigned them in some part of the empire. Thus Tiglath-Palassar colonized certain regions north of Nineveh with Hebrews; and Sargon (or Sargina) transplanted others to Media. In the Babylonian captivities their condition was precisely similar: thus, when Cyrus liberated forty-two thousand three hundred and sixty Jews from captivity in Babylon, there were among them only seven thousand three hundred and eighty-seven slaves, or about one-sixth of the whole number.

Domestic slavery, as we have seen, made considerable havoc among the Beni-Israel, and its life was continually recruited by wars and the consequent ruin and impoverishment of the people, as well as by other causes already pointed out. But down to the last breath of the political and national existence of the Jews—to the day of the destruction of Jerusalem and the hour of final dispersion—slavery never succeeded in wholly destroying the humble homesteads of the free rural population—as it did in other nations and empires of antiquity: for example, it never extirpated the free agricultural yeomanry in Palestine as it afterward did in the Roman world, from the Atlantic to the Euphrates. The free population was mostly devoted to agriculture, and possessed homesteads; and these small free homesteads were regarded almost as sacred—even kings could only by violence seize upon the poor man's farm.

Little Palestine, to the East, swarmed like a beehive with people, notwithstanding captivities, calamities, and exterminating wars. At the time of David, the kingdom of Palestine was about the size of the present kingdom of Portugal, and had a population of about three million eight hundred thousand. Under Solomon, his son, fifty-three thousand six hundred foreign-born slaves worked at the construction of the temple, most of whom, probably, were the property of the king or of the state—not private chattels. If we allow that the number of Jewish-born slaves of both sexes and of all ages was even four times as large (which is not at all likely, considering the source and means of supply of slaves), it will give only two hundred and sixty-eight thousand slaves of every type, in Judea, or one-fourteenth part of the population.[8]

How corrupt soever the law and its regulations became, both, nevertheless, remained a check upon domestic slavery. Long previous to the terrible Flavian epoch, the Hebrews were thickly scattered over the eastern and western world, not as exported slaves, but as wanderers and adventurers: there may, indeed, have been slaves among them, but such slaves formed the minority. Strangers, indeed, they were, but free according to then existing municipal limitations. It was the surplus of a free population that thus wandered abroad in search of better fortunes—a phenomenon which is reproduced in the present day by the immigration to America of the surplus population of various European states. So large was this emigration that, in the time of Cicero, the Jews, Italians and Greeks formed the principal nationalities that took part in the tumults of the Roman forum, and on one occasion they hooted Cicero while on the rostrum. The great and striking fact of the preservation of the people of Beni-Israel, and its increase at an epoch when the populations of other countries were slowly dying out, is to be attributed solely to the curb which the law imposed on domestic slavery, and which it partially maintained even in the times of the greatest national decay.

On our knowledge of the internal organism and economy of the Hebrews, may be based certain deductions as to the domestic economy of other contemporaneous nations, especially those of Syria and certain parts of west Asia. Lydia, and above all, Babylon and Assyria are historically known only in the last stages of their existence, when political and domestic slavery had almost completely fused themselves together. For earlier times, the sources of investigation are limited, if not altogether wanting, and analogy alone can guide research. It is, however, probable that only the Mosaic law remained to combat and regulate serfdom and slavery with moral and legal weapons. The Hebrews did not possess, and did not transmit to history, any of the products of a brilliant civilization or of a refined culture such as reaches us in echoes from the antique oriental empires. But the Hebrews were, at the same time, endowed with certain spiritual impulses, aspirations and ideas, far grander than those of any of the surrounding nations. Material civilization and culture cannot be considered as the highest manifestation of man's spirit. History presents examples of the development of the noblest human impulses to a degree out of all proportion with the so-called "civilization" of the nation.