Open Slavery existed in the region of Palestine until the early 20th-century. The slave trade to Ottoman Palestine officially stopped in the 1870s, when the last slave ship is registered to have arrived, after which slavery appeared to have gradually diminished to a marginal phenomena in the census of 1905. However, the former slaves and their children still continued to work for their former enslavers, and were reported to still live in a state of de facto servitude in the 1930s.
History
Palestine was a part of the Ottoman Empire between 1516 and 1917.
Slave trade
Palestine was close to the Red Sea slave trade, but also to the slave ports of the Mediterranean Sea, were slaves from the Trans-Saharan slave trade were imported via Libya and Egypt.
The Ottoman Empire issued decrees to restrict and gradually prohibit the slave trade and slavery between 1830 and 1909, but these laws were not strictly enforced in the Ottoman provinces, such as Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula.
In 1880, the Ottoman Empire gave Britain the right to search and seize any vessel to Ottoman territories suspected of carrying slaves. The British occupation of Egypt in 1882 seriously disturbed the import of slaves to the Mediterranean provinces of the Ottoman Empire, since a large part of the slave import had came via Egypt. Formally, the Ottoman Empire declared black slaves manumitted in 1889.
The last official slave ship arrived to Haifa in Palestine in 1876, after which the official slave trade to Palestine appeared to have stopped. The end of the open slave trade also appeared to have resulted in the gradual death of slavery itself. In the 1905 census for Palestine, only eight individuals were officially registered as slaves. However, while no longer officially referred to as slaves, it appeared as if the former slaves continued to work for their former enslavers, as did their children.
In the last decades of open slavery in Palestine, the origin of slaves appeared to have been similar to other Ottoman provinces: a small minority were Caucasians (usually Circassians), but the wast majority of the slaves were of African origin, mostly from Ethiophia (Abyssinia) and the Sudan.
Function and conditions
Slaves were given tasks which were regarded as disdained and degrading to free Muslims, such as domestic servants, municipal services, industrial work, sex slaves (concubines), and farmhands and sharecroppers. As commonly in other parts of the Muslim world, slaves were preferred to free employed people as domestic servants, since they were dependent on their employer and not loyal to their clan and their own families.
Female slaves were used as domestic servants in private households as well as concubines (sex slaves), while male slaves were used in a number of different tasks such as laborers, bodyguards, servants and attendants.
Women slaves were more rarely described by foreigners since women lived in harem seclusion, but female servants (slaves) were sometimes noted in passing, such as Edward Robinson, who noted upon his visit to an Arab home in Jaffa in 1838: "Of the many females it contained, we saw none except the mother of the family, who welcomed us at our entrance, and the Nubian slave who washed our feet."
Male slaves are also known as poets to the Bedouin tribal leaders during the 19th- and 20th centuries. William Hepworth Dixon noted slaves in various tasks Jerusalem of the 1860s, such as in his depiction of Jaffa Gate, when he mentioned "Yon negro dozing near his mule is a slave from the Upper Nile, and belongs to an Arab bey who lets him out on hire", and the servants in the coffee houses: “Enter this coffee house, where the old sheikh is smoking near the door; call the cafigeh, the waiter, commonly a negro slave; command a cup of black comfort, a narghiley [water pipe], and a morsel of live charcoal", and "Saïd is a Nubian, a negro, and a slave; and like the mule and horses is the property of an Arab gentleman, not too proud to let his people and his beasts earn money by trade."