Slavery and Interethnic Sexual Violence

Abstract

Abstract This article unpacks the 1610 case of a multiple perpetrator rape of enslaved female Jews from Tétouan by Catholic convicts and Muslim slaves in Livorno, early modern Italy’s leading slaving center. Adding to the ongoing attempts to expose the violence inherent to the historical records of slavery, it charts the efforts to silence the slaves and offers a counternarrative to the one their slavers wished to create by erasing their suffering. The article argues that the assault was justified as part of a business strategy. The rape of female slaves by enslaved men as a means of increasing the slavers’ profits, it suggests, was thus a more global phenomenon than has hitherto been assumed and was not limited to women’s systematic raping in Atlantic slavery. Problematizing the scholarly focus on Muslim-Christian reciprocity in early modern Mediterranean slavery, it then proposes that the affluence of Livorno’s Jewish community increased the vulnerability of enslaved Jews in the city to excessive abuse. Complicating historiographic notions regarding religious pluralism and interethnic relations in Livorno, the assault’s analysis underscores the importance of writing Jewish slave women back into not only the history of slavery but also the narratives of Jewish history and Italian history.