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

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Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast and in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast, we interview fiction and non-fiction authors working in, around, and about the Asia-Pacific region. 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, from Princeton University Press. 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, giving Judaism's own history.
Craig Perry is an professor at Emory University in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, and the Islamic Civilization Studies Graduate Program. He has a 2024 NGW Mellon Family Foundation, Rome Prize winner Medieval Studies, and the co-editor of the Cambridge World History of Slavery, Volume 2, AD 500–AD 1420
Craig, thanks so much for coming on the show today to talk about your book, Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt. I know a lot of this book is based off something called the Cairo Geniza. What exactly is this trove of historical documents, and why is it useful for understanding the history of slavery in Medieval Egypt?

**Craig Perry** (3:55)
Thank you for having me. The Cairo Geniza. We'll start first with the word Geniza. Geniza is a word that refers to a practice, and that practice is people save written materials because they have a certain respect and reverence for them. So, conventionally, it's thought that people put into Geniza writings that had the name of God on them. And the idea was that you didn't want to casually discard, burn, put into a trash heap, a holy text. It was out of respect.
So, Geniza is a widespread practice in Jewish communities. There's also a practice of Geniza in Islamic cultures, some of them. And today, too, you would find Geniza in some Jewish institutions. For example, at a seminary that I was at in Cincinnati, there was a bin next to a copier labeled Geniza. So, if a rabbinical student was copying a text for class and they made a mistake on the photocopier, they wouldn't throw away this copy of a Hebrew text with the name of God on it. They would place it in a Geniza. And then the idea is that you would empty your Geniza and give the materials a proper burial. And the Cairo Geniza is a particular one because around in the 11th century, Jews of one of the few synagogues in Cairo, at that time there were multiple, they expanded their synagogue and they built a chamber that was designated as a Geniza and it was huge. And they deposited materials in this Geniza for about almost the millennium, up until the time it was being emptied sort of permanently. And they deposited all manner of materials in it, including things like copies of biblical books, prayer books that had the name of God, but also things that were not sure why they put them in there. Deeds of sale for homes, personal letters, alphabet books that students used to learn the Hebrew alphabet, materials in the Arabic script, materials in Greek, materials in Coptic and so on and so forth. And for reasons we also don't quite understand, they didn't sort of bury these materials, although there were some materials buried in their cemetery outside of the synagogue complex. So when people talk about the Cairo Geniza, we're talking about usually this Geniza at the Ben Ezra Synagogue of Fustat, which is old Cairo. You can go there today, it's recently been renovated, the synagogue. And over the course of the 19th century, different antiquities collectors bought up materials thought to come from this Geniza, or perhaps were learning from other antiquities or from other sources of antiquities in Cairo.