Event details

The Program in Judaic Studies and the Center for Jewish Life invite you to this year's Biderman Lecture, featuring Craig Perry, on Thursday, October 29.

Every Passover, Jews retell the story of their ancestors' liberation from slavery in Egypt. Yet a thousand years ago, Jewish parents in Cairo could explain slavery to their children by pointing to the enslaved people serving the holiday meal. Drawing on the Cairo Geniza, a remarkable trove of medieval documents preserved in an Egyptian synagogue, Craig Perry uncovers this hidden chapter of Jewish history. He follows enslaved men and women brought to Egypt from Europe, Africa, and India into the kitchens, workshops, and alleys of medieval Cairo, and traces how some, once freed, converted to Judaism and raised Jewish families of their own. The result is a vivid and surprising portrait that invites us to rethink a familiar story.

Open to the public. Kosher refreshments will be available.


More about Craig Perry

Craig Perry is the Jay and Leslie Cohen Associate Professor of Middle Eastern & South Asian Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University. His research integrates Jewish sources and subjects into the history of the global Middle Ages. To date, much of his scholarship has used documents preserved by Jews in the Cairo Geniza to shine new light on the history of slavery and slave trade. Perry is the co-editor of the landmark volume The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2 (2021) on the medieval period. This year, Princeton University Press published his monograph Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History. His current research is focused on reading geniza documents alongside medieval geographical and historical works to write a new social history of medieval Africa and African diasporas. In 2024 this new work was recognized by the American Academy in Rome with the Andrew W. Mellon Family Foundation Rome Prize in Medieval Studies.