Rescue the Surviving Souls by Adam Teller

Author:Adam Teller [Teller, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691161747
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2020-04-13T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Transregional Contexts

THE EXPERIENCES OF THE EASTERN European Jews captured in Poland-Lithuania, brought to the Ottoman Empire, and there ransomed were truly transregional. They were swept up in two branches of early modern Europe’s extensive slave trade: first the capture and sale of people from eastern Europe in Istanbul, and then the capture and sale (or ransom) of people by pirates in the Mediterranean. Neither was geared specifically toward Jews, and it was really only in the decades after 1648 that they formed a noticeable part of the business.

Though the experience of the Jews from eastern Europe in the mid-seventeenth century may have been of negligible importance in the history of the European slave trade, for them it was of great significance. First and foremost was the impact on the captives themselves. They were brutally snatched from their families and communities, often in fear of death and sometimes having witnessed the murder and destruction of all that they held dear. They were then sent on a cruel, monthlong journey to Istanbul and put up for sale there as a commodity little better than animals. Though most seem to have been redeemed by the local Jewish community and set free, their suffering did not end there. Bereft of resources, they had to either undergo the arduous journey home or give up on their previous lives entirely and start afresh in new and strange surroundings.

In the midst of all this horror, there were perhaps one or two mitigating circumstances. The Jews of eastern Europe had not only been aware of the slave trade for decades but been in contact with the Jews of the Ottoman Empire too. Though not very intensive, these contacts meant that they knew they would find a Jewish community at the end of their journey (should they survive it), which, to judge from the historical chronicles, they believed would do whatever it could to ransom them. Hope of that sort can be invaluable in the kind of struggle to survive that the forced marches and journeying involved. In addition, since hundreds, if not thousands, of Jews were taken at one time, the captives were able to band together to help each other. The sources are replete with such stories. This continued when they arrived in the Ottoman Empire, where they were helped by the local Jews, and even after they were freed, when they created their own systems of self-help, most particularly an information network. This resilient web of connections meant that the Jewish captives did not have to suffer the humiliation of that complete loss of identity and social standing, termed by Orlando Patterson “social death,” which so often accompanies capture and enslavement.1

Jewish women’s experience was, as we have already seen, often harsher and more difficult than that of men. In addition to the threats of rape and other violence at the hands of their captors, they had to face a male-dominated and often very unsympathetic Jewish society. Though there is no evidence that women were overlooked

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