The chapter addresses the question of the definition of a Jewish collectivity as it was formed in Hellenistic and Roman times by Jews. Having a single Hebrew term to designate themselves, Bney Israel (“the sons of Israel”), Jews had to do without concepts such as ethnos, genos, laos, dēmos, populus, natio, polis, and civitas when referring to themselves as a collective group. The chapter examines the notions that Jews used in order to refer to themselves as an entity, and shows that the definition of Judaism by Jews was modeled in view of different concepts of other entities that were predominant in the Greco-Roman world and was influenced by the tension between political, geo-ethnic, historical, juridical and civic definitions. Each type of collective definition served a different realpolitik and was conditioned by different political circumstances, which determined the way in which Jews demarcated themselves as a group. The chapter aims to reveal the evolution that the definition of Judaism underwent in a period of great changes and focuses in particular on the transition between the Hellenistic and Roman periods.

In the previous chapter we saw different uses medieval societies made of enslaved people. Slavery became important in institutionalizing personal forms of control that sustained the social, economic, and also the political system of medieval societies and contributed to their development. The medieval world systematized enslavement in different ways and for different ends. We examined specific and localized forms of enslavement, but also revealed their common traits. The enslaved were employed in diverse, versatile, and flexible ways. The adaptability of forms of enslavement to changing circumstances made it useful for social change. The result were distinct medieval forms of slavery, fundamental to the social structure, system, and organization of medieval soci-eties. Social dynamics had become dependent on forms of enslavement. This is why we understand slavery as a historical process and why we refer to it using the plural form.

And yet, medieval economies, societies, and cultures were connected. The question of connectivity is all the more pertinent because medieval slaveries depended on the enslavement of foreigners and their integration as dominated subjects. How did these systems of migration and integration function? How did they connect one to another despite being distinct and diverse? The present chapter develops a global perspective in order to complete the local perspective adopted in the previous chapter. It explores the ways in which medieval slaveries formed a coherent system that connected societies, economies, and polities. Slavery proves to be a historical process also in its role as a means of connectivity. But this role cannot be examined without taking into account the fact that the enslaved did not play this role out of free will. Human beings who were kidnapped, coerced, and trafficked found themselves forcibly migrated away from their homes and families. The role of slavery as a historical process in the development of the societies of the first millennium was carried out on the back of its victims, enslaved women, men, and children. How can we begin to grasp slavery from their point of view? As we shall see, perceiving the enslaved as coerced migrants, forcibly dislocated, trafficked, and integrated into an enslaving environment will help us to study the terrible psychological impact of the system of slavery.

The slave trade, forced migration, coercion, and human trafficking have all played a terrible role in the long history of humanity.

The previous chapters have examined different phenomena of persons, societies, and cultures enslaving others and they have revealed the ways that they were systematized. The long-term historical perspective adopted in this study has revealed the ways in which slavery was connected to the development of distinct societies during the period of their formation and transformation. Enslavement of human beings was not just a part of the major historical processes of Mediterranean, European, and Middle Eastern societies in the first millennium, but played a constitutive role in their development. One of the main conclusions to draw from this study is that slavery operates as a system: it provides legal structures for acts of enslavement, adapts itself to the socioeconomic setting, and also justifies itself within a cultural and ideological context.

We normally refer to slavery in the singular. However, the complexity and diversity of societies, economies, polities, and cultures of the first millennium resulted in very diverse forms of slavery. This diversity was a product of different conditions, circumstances, and needs that created different forms of enslavement for different purposes; this shows the adaptable and versatile character of the system of slavery. We therefore need to refer to slaveries in the plural, and to understand the ways they are connected to processes of change and transformation, that is, to understand slavery as a historical process. By adapting the forms of socioeconomic subjugation to changing circumstances, systems of slavery develop, change, and grow. The fact that this is done by exploiting and abusing human beings, and by using extreme violence and domination over them, does not prevent slavery from becoming central to processes of development. On the contrary, the legitimation of the use of severe force, violence, and coercion is what allows slavery to flourish.

Enslavement is an act of violence. It changes forever the status and state of a human being, whether born or made enslaved. Persons who sell or bind themselves, or participate in their enslavement as active agents, no matter what the reasons and motivations may be, are not enslaving themselves, but are being enslaved by others. Slavery is the system that allows acts of enslavement to happen, legitimizing, institutionalizing, and sustaining them.

The previous chapter challenged the theory that the decline of slavery was one of the products of the passage from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the Latin terminology of slavery reveals a change in the meaning of the terms “slave,” “slavery,” or “enslavement” (Latin: servus and servitium/servitus). By the eleventh and twelfth centuries these terms began to be employed to designate the status of serfs, the medieval dependent peasants in Western and Central Europe, who were legally attached to the land they cultivated. Their obligations and services to the landowner, their “servitude,” were designated by the term servitium/servitus (Bloch, “Comment et pourquoi finit l’esclavage antique”). This marks the establishment of a new socioeconomic system in Western Europe: serfdom. But what happened between these two periods? What was the meaning of these terms in Western Europe between the eighth and the eleventh centuries? And what were their equivalents in the neighbouring medieval Mediterranean societies? Such questions invite us to reflect on the language of slavery.

The Language of Slavery, Servitude, and Social Dependency

Roman and medieval Latin employ the term servus for a male slave, ancilla for a female, mancipium for both, along with puer (“boy”) for a young male slave; libertus and later aldius were employed for freedmen. What is remarkable about the use of these terms in early medieval Latin legal formularies and other documents is the inconsistency in the juridical meaning of these terms. They refer sometimes to slaves, sometimes to freedmen, or to free persons. Servus or mancipium could designate a person enslaved in the household or for agricultural work in the countryside, a tenant, and even a slaveholder tenant who was under legal obligations to a landowner (Rio, Slavery after Rome). Medieval Latin documents use the terms servus and mancipium to designate states of legal dependency vis-à-vis a slaveholder, a landowner, or any party towards whom these persons had legal obligations. In other words, servus came to designate someone who was legally dependent on another party, and his dependency consisted in providing services. In the Carolingian empire cases of self-sale, self-donation, debt bondage, were all translated into a person-to-person relationship in the form of a legal dependency.

If we try to imagine what slavery looks like, we will probably visualize black cotton pickers, chained Africans coerced into slave ships, Roman gladiators, slave markets in modern Libya, girls and women forced into a life of prostitution, children undertaking hard manual labour. For many of us the term slavery resonates a horrific experience of harsh exploitation in a way that restricts personal freedom and dignity. If we look for images on the internet, we will probably get the same results. Such images reflect the modern concept of slavery, which is composed of stories, histories, education, political awareness, and is also fed by the news. All of these conditions are based on acts of enslavement that reduce a human being to a tool, a device, a piece of merchandise, a means of profit and exploitation, in ways that contradict human rights, freedom, and dignity, a severe crime against a human being.

The perception of slavery as a crime against humanity is a product of the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement that fought with great success to eradicate slavery from the world. Its objective was to end phenomena that existed throughout history in myriad societies, phenomena that although very different one from another, had in common the legalization of the enslavement of human beings. The fight for the eradication of slavery went hand in hand with the development of the human rights movement. Yet, what appeared in the twentieth century as a great international political success seems in the twenty-first century now just wishful thinking. The currenthuman rights discourse refers to “modern slavery” or “contemporary slavery” and publicizes modern forms of enslavement that have become frequent over the last thirty years. This raises a disturbing question: is slavery back? And if so, are we dealing with the same kind of phenomenon, the same slavery?

To take a recent case, in January 2019 a federal jury convicted the couple Mohamed Toure and Denise Cros-Toure of Southlake, Texas, for the forced labour of a Guinean girl for sixteen years. Three months later they were sentenced to seven years in prison each and $288,620.24 in restitution. The couple brought the girl from her Guinean village in 2000 and forced her to work without pay in their home as a housekeeper, cook, and nanny. The case was tried as a case of forced labour, meaning work which a person is coerced to provide against their will.

Ever since Roman slavery became a focus of research it has been treated under two axiomatic theses that became inseparable. The first was that slaves formed a social class of Roman society and played a major role in the economic life of the Empire. The second was that Roman slavery declined along with the declne of the Empire. The two theses together have determined the way we define and understand what Roman and medieval slaveries were. So, it is essential to analyze this idea of decline in the state of slavery in the passage from Late Antiquity into the Middle Ages.

Upon his death in 395 the emperor Theodosius (347–395) left both his sons as co-emperors of the Empire: Arcadius (395–408) reigned from Constantinople and Honorius (395– 423) from Rome. The Roman ruling authority, the imperium (i.e., Empire) was shared between the two but was divided geographically: the first ruled the Greek-speaking Eastern parts of the Empire, and the second the Latin West. The Empire's unity was kept, and any decision of either applied to the entire Empire. And yet, this political change was the beginning of a long process that transformed the unified Roman Empire into a medieval world of distinct civilizations. The Roman Empire continued to rule the northeastern regions of the Mediterranean. Today we term it “Byzantium,” the ancient Greek name of the Empire's new capital Constantinople (namely Istanbul, Europe's largest city today). The city's inhabitants named themselves “Byzantines,” a term we apply nowadays to the entire population of the Eastern Roman Empire whose language was Greek and whose religion was Orthodox Christianity (though they themselves still saw themselves as Rhōmaioi or Romans). Unlike the period of the first to fourth centuries, it no longer ruled the Mediterranean alone.

Meanwhile, in the West newcomers of Germanic and Asian origin appeared. They founded new political entities within the Western borders of the Empire: the kingdoms of the Vandals, the Visigoths, the Franks, and the Ostrogoths. In the sixth century Justinian (527–565) launched extensive and successful military campaigns to regain all these territories. His victories were short lived and were overshadowed by the conquest of the Byzantine East in the seventh century by the Sassanian Empire, a Persian Zoroastrian state that ruled over what is today Iran and Iraq between 224 and 651.

In his second-century compilation of legal “institutes” the Roman jurist Gaius classified the different statuses of men as follows: “The main classification in the law of persons (Latin: jus personarum) is this: all men are either free (liberi) or slaves (servi). Again, among free men (liberi homines), some are free-born (ingenui) while others are freed (libertini). Free-born are those who were born free; freedmen, those who have been manumitted from lawful slavery. There are three kinds of freedmen: for they are either Roman citizens, or Latins or in the category of capitulated aliens (dediticii, i.e. who have in the past taken up arms and fought against the Roman people and then surrendered after defeat)” (The Institutes of Gaius, bk. 1, tit. 3–5).

This text goes on to describe in length the circumstances pertaining to each. It elaborates on the social states of the enslaved referring to slaves who were chained as a form of punishment, interrogated under torture, handed over to fight in gladiatorial combats with swords or with beasts. It refers to the legal forms by which slaves were manumitted (freed as legally freed persons). A manumitted male slave could become agent (procurator) of his owner and so act on his behalf. Female slaves (anchillae) could be manumitted for the purpose of marriage (since Roman marriage only existed between two free persons). Slaves could be also manumitted in the owner's will. They could become Roman citizens and inherit from their enslavers.

Unlike the different circumstances of slaves, the different types of freedmen entailed different legal statuses. There were those who were given the status of Latins (“assimilated to the Latins of the colonies”) who could not make a will for themselves, inherit, or be appointed as guardians in a will. There were “capitulated aliens” (dediticii) who could not be granted Roman citizenship and their presence in the city of Rome was forbidden. Gaius’ first Institute made clear that slavery was part of a large array of legal statuses that made up Roman society.

In comparison to this elaborated definition of legal categories and the social states and the distinct statuses that they constituted, the biblical New Testament offers a contrasting definition: “For when all of you were baptized into Christ, you put on Christ as though he were your clothing.

Slavery has existed throughout history in different parts of the world and across different societies. Its exact definition is a matter of debate, as is the question of whether the entire range of historical and modern phenomena known as slavery can be narrowed down to a single definition. What is accepted, however, is the fact that throughout history societies have systematized the ownership and possession of human beings, their lives, and their labour within legal, social, economic, and cultural frameworks, and profited from their exploitation and trade. Although slavery does not exist legally in any of the member states of the United Nations today, reference to “contemporary forms of slavery” has become widespread over the last two decades. Different phenomena of human exploitation, bondage, trafficking, and commodifying, as well as de facto possessing of human beings are now termed “modern slavery.” This leads to a theoretical problem in studying the conditions that constitute slavery: what is the difference between defining it de jure and de facto? This question has troubled scholars of slavery, jurists, judges, and lawyers (Kotiswaran, Revisiting the Law).

Slavery was defined in the 1926 Convention of the League of Nations, which by 2013 had been ratified by ninety-nine states. Its first article defines slavery as follows: “(1) Slavery is the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised. (2) The slave trade includes all acts involved in the capture, acquisition or disposal of a person with intent to reduce him to slavery; all acts involved in the acquisition of a slave with a view to selling or exchanging him; all acts of disposal by sale or exchange of a slave acquired with a view to being sold or exchanged, and, in general, every act of trade or transport in slaves.”

Slavery is defined de jure in most legal codes in modern states and is punishable. Facing a growing number of phe-nomena that are perceived as modern slavery, contemporary legal systems require criteria that will enable judges to decide whether a particular form of human exploitation, trafficking, possession, or merchandising has occurred and whether it falls under the legal definition of slavery and is therefore a crime. In other words, the main question is how to identify what I will term here as “de facto slavery.”

The chapter addresses the question of the definition of a Jewish collectivity as it was formed in Hellenistic and Roman times by Jews. Having a single Hebrew term to designate themselves, Bney Israel (“the sons of Israel”), Jews had to do without concepts such as ethnos, genos, laos, dēmos, populus, natio, polis, and civitas when referring to themselves as a collective group. The chapter examines the notions that Jews used in order to refer to themselves as an entity, and shows that the definition of Judaism by Jews was modeled in view of different concepts of other entities that were predominant in the Greco-Roman world and was influenced by the tension between political, geo-ethnic, historical, juridical and civic definitions. Each type of collective definition served a different realpolitik and was conditioned by different political circumstances, which determined the way in which Jews demarcated themselves as a group. The chapter aims to reveal the evolution that the definition of Judaism underwent in a period of great changes and focuses in particular on the transition between the Hellenistic and Roman periods.