Castration
Slavery
See: Slavery
Quotes
During this period, Jewish merchants, from the cities in the
valley of the Rhône, Verdun, Lione, Arles and Narbonne,
in addition to Aquisgrana, the capital of the empire
in the times of Louis the Pious (Louis I); and in Germany from the centres
of the valley of the Rhine, from Worms, Magonza and Magdeburg; in Bavaria
and Bohemia, from Regensburg and Prague - were active
in the principal markets in which slaves (women, men,
eunuchs) were offered for sale, by Jews, sometimes
after abducting them from their houses. From Christian Europe the human
merchandise was exported to the Islamic lands of Spain, in which there
was a lively market. The castration of these
slaves, particularly children, raised their prices,
and was no doubt a lucrative and profitable practice.
The first testimony relating to the
abduction of children by Jewish merchants active in
the trade flowing into Arab Spain, comes down to us in a letter from
Agobard, archbishop of Lyon in the years 816-840. The French prelate
describes the appearance at Lyons of a Christian
slave, having escaped from Córdoba, who had been
abducted from Leonese Jewish merchant twenty four years before, when
he was a child, to be sold to the Moslems of Spain. His companion in
flight was another Christian slave having suffered a
similar fate after being abducted six years before by
Jewish merchants at Arles. The inhabitants of Lyons confirmed
these claims, adding that yet another Christian boy had been abducted by
Jews to be sold into slavery that same year. Agobard
concludes his report with a comment of a general
nature; that these were not considered isolated cases, because, in
every day practice, the Jews continued to procure Christian slaves for
themselves and furthermore subjecting them to
“infamies such that it would be vile in itself to
describe them.”
Precisely what kind of abominable “infamies” Agobard
is referring to is not clear; but it is possible that
he was referring to castration more than to circumcision.743
Liutprando, bishop of Cremona, in his Antapodosis, said to have been
written in approximately 958-962, referred to the city
of Verdun as the principal market in which Jews
castrated young slaves intended for sale to the Moslems of Spain.
During this same period, two Arab sources, Ibn Haukal and Ibrahim al
Qarawi, also stressed that the majority of their
eunuchs originated from France and were sold to the
Iberian peninsula by Jewish merchants. Other Arabic writers
mentioned Lucerna, a city with a Jewish majority, halfway between Córdoba and
Málaga in southern Spain, as another major market, in which the
castration of Christian children after reducing them
to slavery was practiced on a large scale by the very
same people.
Contemporary rabbinical responses provide further
confirmation of the role played by Jews in the trade
in children and young people as well as in the
profitable transformation of boys into eunuchs. These texts reveal that anyone
who engaged in such trade was aware of the risks involved, because any
person caught and arrested in possession of castrated
slaves in Christian territories was decapitated by
order of the local authorities.744 (744.Ariel
Toaff provides the following authority in an endnote: “On the
rabbinical responses relating to the trade in
castrated young slaves and on the role of Lucena (outside Córdoba) as a center
for the castrations, see A. Assaf, Slavery and the
Slave-Trade among the Jews during the Middle Ages
(from the Jewish Sources), in "Zion", IV (1939), pp. 91-125 (in Hebrew); E.
Ashtor, A History of the Jews in Moslem Spain,
Jerusalem, 1977, vol. I, pp. 186-189 (in Hebrew).”)
Even the famous Natronai, Gaon of the rabbinical college of Sura in the
mid-9th century was aware of the problems linked to
the dangerous trade in young eunuchs. “Jewish
(merchants) entered (into a port or a city), bringing with them
slaves and castrated children [Hebrew: serisim ketannim]. When the local
authorities confiscated them, the Jews corrupted them with money,
reducing them to more harmless advisors, and the
merchandise was returned, at least in part.”745 But if
one wishes to interpret the significance and scope of the Jewish presence in
the slave trade and practice of castration, it is a fact that the fear
that Christian children might be abducted and sold was
rather widespread and deeply rooted in all Western
European countries, particularly, France and Germany, from which
these Jews originated and where the greater part of the slave merchants
operated.
Personalities in the clergy
nourished that fear, conferring religious connotations
upon it with an anti-Jewish slant, failing to account for the fact that slavery
as a trade had not yet gone out of fashion morally
and, as such, was broadly tolerated in the economic
reality of the period. On the other hand, the abduction and
castration of children, often inevitably confused with circumcision,
which was no less feared and abhorred, could not fail
to insinuate themselves in the collective unconscious
mind of Christian Europe, especially the French and German
territories, inciting anxiety and fear, which probably solidified over
time, and, as a result, are believed to have
concretized themselves in a variety of ways and in
more or less in the same places, as ritual murder.746 [2011] Solving the Mystery of Babylon the
Great by Edward Hendrie