Silence, Speech, and the Personhood of Enslaved Women in Medieval Egypt

This paper investigates an unlikely archive for a social history of domestic slavery in medieval Egypt. For nearly 800 years, a large cache of legal documents lay interred in the lumber room of a synagogue in Old Cairo until scholars began to acquire and study them in the late nineteenth century. Today these sources, commonly called the Cairo Geniza, represent one of the densest such archives for the social history of the medieval Middle East between the late tenth and thirteenth centuries. To date I have identified over 400 documents that relate to domestic slavery and the slave trade, including bills of sale, deeds of manumission, court depositions, family letters, wills, and responsa. Using this corpus, this paper will analyze how the scribes and everyday writers who produced these records represented enslaved women, and it will ask to what extent the documents permit a history that narrates their life histories and centers them as actors. Unsurprisingly, enslaved women did not create their own records, and the scribes and slave owners who did write about them did so primarily to commodify them. As such, an archival silence pervades this corpus as with so many other histories of slavery. Despite this, a number of legal records, and personal letters that describe legal proceedings, report the speech of enslaved women: one person “refuses to be sold”; another is suspected of inventing a personal history for herself; and one woman converts to Islam in order to compel her Jewish owners to sell her. I will argue that, despite their relative scarcity, these more verbose reports can be used, at the very least, to generate further plausible interpretive possibilities and, in some cases, to confidently reconstruct enslaved speech that scribes chose to omit.