ABSTRACT
In the transition from late classical times to the Middle Ages, Jewish communities spread out between the Middle East and southern Europe. They brought with them the world of images that developed in Talmudic literature and adopted the ‘racial’ and ethnic stereotypes of the regions in which they now lived. Blacks continued to be identified as descendants of Canaan, slaves by nature. With the development of slave markets in those regions, another ethnic group of natural slaves was identified: the Slavs of southeastern Europe, mainly from the Balkans. From now on the two separate groups would be considered the children of Canaan: the blacks (cushim) were his black children and the Slavs his white ones. Indeed this is the source of the word ‘slave’ in some European languages (sclave, esclave, schiavo). The word for ‘eunuch’, too, comes from the same source, e.g. the Arabic sakhab. Some Slavic slaves were sold to Jews. In Jewish sources from this period, like The Itinerary of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudella, the land of origin of these slaves was called ‘Canaan’: ‘Sclavonia, called by the Jews who inhabit it “Canaan” because the inhabitants sell their children to all nations.’1 Such was the judicial and theological sophistication of scholars in all three monotheistic religions that they could put two completely different ethnic groups into a single status unit of slaves by nature, the legal heirs of the archetypal Canaan.2
