youval rotman

In a world where princesses found themselves enslaved, kidnapped boys became army generals, and biblical Joseph was a role model, this book narrates the formation of the Middle Ages from the point of view of slavery, and outlines a new approach to enhance our understanding of modern forms of enslavement. Offering an analysis of recent scholarship and an array of sources, never before studied together, from distinct societies and cultures of the first millennium, it challenges the traditional dichotomy between ancient and medieval slaveries. Revealing the dynamic, versatile, and adaptable character of slavery it presents an innovative definition of slavery as a historical process.

If we wish to fight for the eradication of modern slavery we first need to understand its significance as a form of exploitation, adaptable to changing circumstances. The purpose of this book is to challenge perspectives that look at slavery as a discrete phenomenon and instead to examine the historical development of the first millennium through the eyes of slavery. Perceiving slavery not just as a social phenomenon but as a system that enabled the development of historical
societies and emerging economies reveals the role it plays as a historical process.

In every period in history the definition of insanity is pertinent, and its meaning is different. We owe this perception to a large movement in the scholarship of the nineteen-sixties and seventies that changed our concept of what constitutes sanity and insanity. This scholarship examined the ways in which such concepts were formed as part of the medical, mental, social, cultural, but above all political settings. A number of important studies on psychology and psychiatry, whether in the fields of social sciences, the humanities or medicine (by Michel Foucault, Roy Porter, William Bynum, Gladys Swain, Marcel Gauchet, Franco Basaglia, among others), has radically changed the way we look at insanity. These studies brought insanity out of the individual dimension, and made it a social, cultural and political phenomenon. In a way, the wave of study of psychiatry of the sixties and seventies was a reply to the development of psychoanalysis in the first half of the twentieth century, which concentrated on the psychological dimension in the individual. These new directions of thought shifted the understanding of what constitutes insanity from the individual to the social and political dimensions. Nevertheless, they still placed the individual in the center, affected by the social settings, mental constructs and politics. This perspective was conditioned by the link between psychology and medicine, according to which the insane person was perceived as sick.
The present study chooses a different line of investigation. In a way, it goes in the opposite direction in focusing on societies which sanctified what we consider today as insanity. These societies looked for spiritual values in abnormal, in-sane, behavior, and legitimized it by attributing a unique spiritual character to figures who portrayed it. In this they were changing the social and cultural norms related to abnormality and normality. A parallel process can also be detected in contemporary societies. Only few decades ago, people in Western societies who turned to healers, clairvoyants, and mediums were considered to be themselves not in their right mind. Today, not only is such behavior legitimized, but this is even becoming a norm. These so-called ‘new age’ phenomena express the invasion of the religious sphere into modern secular societies. We do not call them ‘religious,’ but ‘spiritual’ in order to reject the religious establishment and its historical framework. However, such expressions of spirituality have long been the realm of the religious sphere. The question is why secular societies today have become more and more inclined to adopt and legitimize these expressions of spirituality, and justify their functionality.

In the Roman and Byzantine Near East, the holy fool emerged in Christianity as a way of describing individuals whose apparent madness allowed them to achieve a higher level of spirituality. Insanity and Sanctity in Byzantium examines how the figure of the mad saint or mystic was used as a means of individual and collective transformation in the period between the birth of Christianity and the rise of Islam. It presents a novel interpretation in revealing the central role that psychology plays in social and historical development.

Early Christians looked to figures who embodied extremes of behavior-like the holy fool, the ascetic, the martyr-to redefine their social, cultural, and mental settings by reading new values in abnormal behavior. Comparing such forms of extreme behavior in early Christian, pagan, and Jewish societies, and drawing on theories of relational psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sociology of religion, Youval Rotman explains how the sanctification of figures of extreme behavior makes their abnormality socially and psychologically functional. The sanctification of abnormal mad behavior created a sphere of ambiguity in the ambit of religious experience for early Christians, which brought about a deep psychological shift, necessary for the transition from paganism to Christianity.

A developing society leaves porous the border between what is normal and abnormal, between sanity and insanity, in order to use this ambiguity as a means of change. Rotman emphasizes the role of religion in maintaining this ambiguity to effect a social and psychological transformation.

Slavery may no longer exist as a legal institution, but we still find many forms of enslavement in contemporary societies. It is a troubling paradox, and one this book addresses by considering a period in which the definition of slavery and freedom proved considerably flexible. Between more familiar forms of slavery, those of antiquity and of the Americas, the institution as it was practiced and theorized in the Byzantine Mediterranean was of a different nature.

Looking at the Byzantine concept of slavery within the context of law, the labor market, medieval politics, and religion, Youval Rotman illustrates how these contexts both reshaped and sustained the slave market. By focusing on a period of great change, his historical analysis brings a new perspective to concepts of slavery and freedom. In this period, when Byzantium had to come to terms with the rising power of the Islamic state, and to fight numerous wars over territory and economic interests, Rotman traces a shift in the cultural perception of slaves as individuals: they began to be seen as human beings instead of private property. His book analyzes slavery as a historical process against the background of the political, social, and religious transformation of the Mediterranean world, and demonstrates the flexible and adaptable character of this institution.

Arguing against the use of the term slavery for any extreme form of social dependency, Rotman shows instead that slavery and freedom are unrelated concepts. His work offers a radical new understanding of the geopolitical and religious dynamics that have defined and redefined slavery and freedom, in the past and in our own time.

Ce livre apporte une contribution neuve au débat sur le devenir de l’esclavage antique. Et il éclaire en conséquence la définition de la liberté dans le monde de la Méditerranée médiévale. Entre VIe et XIe siècle les sociétés de la Méditerranée orientale montrent une évolution des catégories de personne libre et d’esclave. Byzance est au cœur de l’étude à la fois parce qu’elle continue Rome et parce qu’elle rencontre des changements historiques majeurs, dont l’entré en scène de l’islam. À Byzance l’esclavage antique ne décline pas, il n’est pas non plus remplacé. Mais, il se modifie en fonction du contexte politique, social, culturel et religieux. L’auteur récuse la définition prioritairement économique de l’esclavage, et montre que non-liberté et liberté sont moins des statuts civils que des rapport sociaux, ce qui suggère également une réflexion sur notre temps.

The report by Sayak Chakraborty summarizes an open seminar that Youval Rotman gave on the relationship between history, psychology and anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, the University of Delhi, in October 2019,  invited and hosted by Prof. Pooran Chand Joshi. The relationship between psychology and history has troubled psychologists and historians, and is as long as the discipline of psychology itself. Youval Rotman proposes to use anthropology, and more particularly the study of animism, as a means to establish a two-way relationship between history and psychology that can be beneficial to both disciplines.

In Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (1969), the Norwegian anthropologist
Fredrik Barth has argued that it is impossible to find definite criteria for
ethnicity and that ethnicity is rather the result of labelling. Boundaries
between so-called “ethnic groups” are created either by the group itself, or
by others. So it may be that at one time the boundary marker is language, the other time it is religion, a third time it is a common history. Barth’s perspective was adopted by scholars who were looking for ways to address the question of what forms a “collective identity.” Barth suggested, however, that collective identities do not really exist, but are fictions. In fact, we can moreover argue that the term identity itself, loaded with psychological significance, cannot so easily be translated from the psychological-individual sphere to the social collective sphere. Nonetheless both terms, ethnicity and collective identity, are
used in all aspects of human life and serve as means to achieve real and often political objectives. Collective identities as demarcations between peoples, whether we define them as reality or fiction, are referred to for a reason.
The article examines what criteria can be adopted as defining features of a collective entity. We shall take here as a case study the very large definition of Jews in the Greco-Roman world and will focus on the ways in which certain Jews portrayed themselves to themselves as a collective group. Having a single term to designate themselves, Bney-Israel (“the sons of Israel”), they had to do without terms such as ethnos, genos, laos, dēmos, populus, natio, polis, and civitas when referring to themselves as an entity. The question is what kind of collective entity they were referring to, and whether their definition was kept unchanged. For this, the article  proposes to focus on the borderline between what constituted a Jew and a Gentile by analyzing the way in which Jews included newcomers in their collectivity and excluded others. The article shows that Jews referred to themselves as an entity by employing prisms to define political entities available to them in Greco-Roman antiquity.

The article examines the new psychological language that developed in late antiquity to formulate a personal relationship with the one God. This language used the Greek term for the soul, the psyche (Latin anima), and defined it as the relational faculty of the human mind. The perception of the human mind as relational became instrumental to formulate the experience of conversion, that is, a mental and emotional process of self-transformation, psychological in the modern sense of the term. The article analyzes the psychological perspective of the ancient authors who developed the idea of the relational faculty to connect to God by using modern theories that perceive the human mind as relationally configured. In order to analyze ancient and modern writers together, the article develops a new methodological approach to move in between ancient and modern writings without falling into the pit of anachronism. This approach enables the author to define a common theoretical field for historical analysis and psychoanalysis, and to use the historical evidence in order to evaluate and challenge the modern psychoanalytic prism. To bridge between the two disciplines, the present article uses anthropology. Thanks to its psychological aspect, anthropology of religion validates the two-way relationship between history and psychoanalysis. Anthropological field research on the beliefs in tree spirits conducted by the author in an animistic environment has revealed a relational psychological language in the core of the animistic belief, and provides the missing link to connect history and psychoanalysis.

Keywords: history-psychoanalysis, potential space, conversion, tree spirits, animism

Following three turning points in the historical development of psychology this study examines how the relation between mental health and the state of illness is linked to the concept of “passions.” The first was the birth of modern psychiatry in 18th century France. The second was the development of the field of inquiry in antiquity about the psuche and its mental activities, and the third was the turn of early Christian thought about mind and soul. A comparison between early modern and ancient concepts of “the passions” reveals the moral and ethical aspects of the concept “mental health,” and shows that more than for any other kind of illness, the history of mental illness and mental health is embedded within a moralistic philosophical perspective. Pathology as a field of study of “the passions,” whatever their definition was, enabled thinkers to refer to mental illness and health in moral terms.
Although “passions” meant different things to different authors in different times, it was used by all as means to link between inner mental activities and the way the body react to the outside world. We can see it as an obligatory element to conceptualize illness, disorder, and health in regards to mental activities. Pagan ancient authors as well as early Christian authors used it to construct new theories and praxes about mental health, while early modern psychiatrists used it to develop corporeal methods of cure. In all currents of thought the concept of “passions” and the definition of the ways in which they affected the mind were used to distinguish mental illness and mental health from any other type of illness and health.

Keywords: psychopathology, passions, moral psychology, mental illness-history, Christian psychology

The paper examines the relation between three concepts: a child's will, children's agency and child labour. Addressing the current debate about children's agency, this paper shows how these concepts were developed in Byzantine society in order to advance a religious agenda that encouraged the child to run away from home in favour of a new life in a monastery. Children were attributed with a will of their own and acted upon it before they reached the age of puberty. This perspective took the child out of the private sphere by attributing agency to it. The paper addresses the current debate about children's agency revealing the conceptualization of this term as motivated by an economic agenda in which the need to profit from the child's labour plays an important role.

The religious, theological and philosophical discourse in Late Antiquity concerning the human soul, the Greek psuchē, reveals a sophisticated and complex psychological language that was aimed at conceptualizing and articulating the act of conversion. The analysis of Gnostic, Orthodox Christian, and Neoplatonic writings in relation to the psuchē shows the cardinal role that this term played in formulating individual processes of mental transformation. Attributing active agency, mutability and relational aspect to the individual psuchē turned it into a unique conceptual device, necessary to define anew the human condition.

This paper analyzes the effects that the international politics in the central Middle Ages had on the slave trade, and the Byzantine slave trade in particular. The geopolitical changes of the seventh and eighth centuries, which transformed the late Roman Empire into a medieval world composed of different civilizations, radically changed the economic dynamics of these regions and the Byzantine slave market as a consequence. However, the paper examines the Byzantine slave trade not only as a consequence of these dynamics, but also as one of their causes. In other words, it focuses on the way in which international politics and economy, especially the economy of slavery, intertwined, and in fact became one.

This map shows the scale of human trafficking in the ninth-eleventh century and the different itineraries taken by medieval slave traders. It is followed by five tables of data about prices of slaves and their value in comparison to different types of merchandize and salaries in eastern Mediterranean regions, mainly in Byzantium and Egypt. These tables shed light on the question how expensive were slaves and how profitable was human merchandizing.

This paper explores the functions of slavery in Mediterranean societies in order to address the question whether a concept of Mediterranean slavery existed.
Over three millennia slavery was an inextricable part of Mediterranean social and economic life. Its existence and expansion were conditioned by two main factors: the evolution of the Mediterranean political map, which determined the relations between Mediterranean civilizations, and the international economic map. Prosperity entailed large slave markets. But the value of a human being was in itself an engine for economic dynamics, and prosperity was also dependent on slavery. Slaves were not used exclusively in any economic sector. However, they were required, especially in the cities, for creating and maintaining a household as a hierarchical socio-economic enterprise. Many slaves advanced in their positions thanks to the opportunities that this framework offered. A few, especially in Muslim public sectors, rose high. This did not mean that they were less abused or suffered less from cruelty than slaves elsewhere. Just as we cannot categorize slaves in Mediterranean societies as a class according to their socio-economic position, we cannot categorize them according to the cruelty with which they were treated. Cruelty, abuse, rape and death were always prevalent, and although slaves did not suffer from them exclusively, their juridical status made them especially vulnerable and their subjugation especially extreme. Legislators tried to restrict cruelty towards slaves, but cultures found reasons to justify the inferiority of slaves, the existence of slavery and its perpetuation. This papers shows that slavery was not only a consequence of Mediterranean history, but also played a role in determining its course by its impact on relations between states, societies and cultures, and through a constant flow of human beings into and within the Mediterranean. The fact that most slaves were uprooted, transported and transplanted by force did not conflict with the fact that they were considered vital in most of Mediterranean societies in both the private and public sectors. On the contrary, it explains very clearly why they were trafficked by force. Slaves were considered vital because they were both human and property. And this two-sided seemingly self-contradicting definition proved to be extremely elastic and adaptable to changing reality.

Slavery has existed throughout history in different parts of the world and in different civilizations. Its exact definition is a matter of debate, as is the question of whether the entire range of historical and modern phenomena known as slavery can be narrowed down to a single definition. What is accepted, however, is the fact that throughout history civilizations have institutionalized the ownership and possession of human beings within juridical, social, economic and cultural frameworks. In what follows I would like to examine the use of comparative methods in the study of slavery as a historical phenomenon. The historical study of slavery underwent major innovations over the last fifteen years. This development needs to be considered in view of the changes that occurred in the perception of slavery in today's world. As this paper reveals the two are connected since the historical study of slavery depends on our ability to use a comparative approach that examines both past and present. In the study of slavery this perspective is a product of the relation between history and the social sciences.

Using epigraphic sources the present study focuses on the integration of eunuchs into the social elite of the Roman Empire. Eunuchs in high positions were a new late Ro-man phenomenon. Despite the legislative measures taken against castration of a human being, starting from the fourth century eunuchs fi lled high offi ces created especially for them. An analysis of twenty-two inscriptions from the fi rst to the sixth century A.D. reveals the Greek East as a source of the imperial Roman use of eunuchs. The phenomenon entered Roman society after being adopted from Asia Minor, and was later institutionalized as an adaptation of local customs of the northeastern regions of the Roman word. Greek and Latin inscriptions together with historiographic and legislative sources suggest that local social customs, religious positions and positions in the administration held by eunuchs were adopted by the Roman authorities who needed new types of government and social elite. The severe prohibition of castration did not manage to stop this acculturation process, but changed nevertheless its course.

Prevalent in contemporary societies, the custom of ransoming prisoners of war has a long history which goes back to Antiquity. In our modern perspective it is perceived as a political act, a matter of the public and part of international affairs of states. In what follows I will show that this was not always the case, and that the perception of ransoming captives as a public act was a product of the changes in the religious and political sphere of the Roman Empire during the first centuries A.D. My purpose is twofold. On the one hand, I will show a parallel development in the custom of ransoming captives as a public act in both Christianity and Judaism. On the other hand, I would like to explain this development against the political background of the Later Roman Empire. Such a twofold objective will furthermore allow to draw some general conclusions in regards to the dynamic relation between the private and the public in Late Antiquity. In the Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 3b, we find the following discussion between Ravinah and Rav Ashi concerning the rules of dismantling a synagogue-building. Commenting on Rav Hisda who said: " a person may not demolish a synagogue until he has built another building, " Ravinah asks: " What if the money for a new synagogue building has been collected and it is depos-ited? " May one at that point tear down the old building before the new one is erected? Rav Ashi replies: " They may be called upon for money to be used to pay the ransom to redeem captives and thus will need to use the money for this purpose. " Ravinah insists: " What if the bricks for the new synagogue are stacked and rafters are planed and beams are deposited? " To that replies again Rav Ashi: " Sometimes an opportunity for redeeming captives will arise and they will need to sell the materials for that purpose, " and will thus be left with no synagogue if they dismantled the old one. And Ravinah continues: " If so, even after they have built the new synagogue they should not demolished the old one, since they may need to sell the new one to raise money to redeem captives? " To that replies Rav Ashi: " people do not sell their dwellings. " 1 1 Translation by Schottenstein (Tractate Bava Basra I, Brooklyn NY, 2001) with my corrections .

... XLIX, 15. MARIA FLORIANA CURSI, La struttura... suite. Cette institution réglait le cas des citoyens romains qui n'étaient pas de facto sous la potestas de l'État romain en déterminant que celui-ci leur garantissait la conservation de leur statut. ...

Th article compares between  two forms of unfreedom that existed in the Byzantine countryside of the 7th-11th centuries. The rural Byzantine society knew two groups: slaves and non-slaves (defined by the law as "free"). The delimitation between these two groups was fixed by the law which describes the ways of passing from one group to another. This legal delimitation gave the social group of slaves a common and separate civil status. As for the relations of dependence within the group of non-slaves, these were expressed only by the fiscal obligations of the land. When controlled by
a private power, they entailed the right to limit the freedom of these dependents.

We invite you to our panel that will discusse the interrelations between animism, religion and trees in different cultures. The current research on animism understands it within ecological, epistemological and ontological paradigms. We propose to move beyond the macro-theoretical perspective and to examine the religious practices of animism by focusing on beliefs in spirits, personalities and consciousness of trees. The classical theories about animism have largely ignored the elastic and dynamic complexity that animism proposes to the religious structure. In the heart of animistic beliefs we find the individual and the intersubjective relation that the individual develops with an animated subject. Our panel will focus on forms of communications and relationships with tree spirits, and will reveal a new perspective to understand animism, its particularity and importance. The four papers offer an examination of different ways in which relationships are forged between man and tree and the types of religious awareness they express in regards to the self, personality, cosmos, botanical space, environment and landscape. The question that preoccupies us in the panel concerns the role that man-tree relationships play in distinct religious systems. For this we seek to examine the ways beliefs in tree spirits operate in different cultures focusing on the elasticity that it offers to the religious system. A comparative analysis of man-tree relationships in distinct societies will reveal the large and open spectrum that animism offers to the religious and social structure, and will develop a new understanding of the importance of the interpersonal dimension that animism creates between man and the environment.

This paper analyzes the effects that the international politics in the central Middle Ages had on the slave trade, and the Byzantine slave trade in particular. The geopolitical changes of the seventh and eighth centuries, which transformed the late Roman Empire into a medieval world composed of different civilizations, radically changed the economic dynamics of these regions and the Byzantine slave market as a consequence. However, the paper examines the Byzantine slave trade not only as a consequence of these dynamics, but also as one of their causes. In other words, it focuses on the way in which international politics and economy, especially the economy of slavery, intertwined, and in fact became one.

The article examines the new psychological language that developed in late antiquity to formulate a personal relationship with the one God. This language used the Greek term for the soul, the psuchē (Latin anima), and defined it as the relational faculty of the human mind. The perception of the human mind as relational became instrumental to formulate the experience of conversion, that is, a mental and emotional process of self-transformation, psychological in the modern sense of the term. The article analyzes the psychological perspective of the ancient authors who developed the idea of the relational faculty to connect to God by using modern theories that perceive the human mind as relationally configured. In order to analyze ancient and modern writers together, the article develops a new methodological approach to move in between ancient and modern writings without falling into the pit of anachronism. This approach enables the author to define a common theoretical field for historical analysis and psychoanalysis, and to use the historical evidence in order to evaluate and challenge the modern psychoanalytic prism. To bridge between the two disciplines, the present article uses anthropology. Thanks to its psychological aspect, anthropology of religion validates the two-way relationship between history and psychoanalysis. Anthropological field research on the beliefs in tree spirits conducted by the author in an animistic environment has revealed a relational psychological language in the core of the animistic belief, and provides the missing link to connect history and psychoanalysis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

L'A. analyse la presence parallele des esclaves et des paysans dependants dans la campagne byzantine entre le VII eme et le XI eme siecle : il s'agit de definir la dependance paysanne byzantine a travers des institutions sociales comme les colons, les empytheutai et les pareques. La non-liberte inherente a cette definition prend forme par le biais de la possession de la terre et les obligations fiscales qui vont avec. Cependant, cette non-liberte ne regroupe point les paysans dependants sous un statut civil unique ; elle s'oppose ainsi a celle des esclaves qui sont d'emblee prives du droit de posseder.

Scholars have been inclined to think that the political and social shift from the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages brought, among other changes, a decline in the use of slaves, Byzantium included. This may explain why this subject was totally neglected by modern research. However, an examination of the sources for this period clearly shows that slaves continue to be very much a part of Byzantine society. Two factors changed the Roman definition of slavery accordind to which all captives, even if Romans, are considered slaves : the transformation in geopolitical map the 7th century and the development of the institution of Christian marriage

Using epigraphic sources the present study focuses on the integration of eunuchs into the social elite of the Roman Empire. Eunuchs in high positions were a new late Ro- man phenomenon. Despite the legislative measures taken against castration of a human being, starting from the fourth century eunuchs fi lled high of fi ces created especially for them. An analysis of twenty-two inscriptions from the fi rst to the sixth century A.D. reveals the Greek East as a source of the imperial Roman use of eunuchs. The phe- nomenon entered Roman society after being adopted from Asia Minor, and was later institutionalized as an adaptation of local customs of the north-eastern regions of the Roman word. Greek and Latin inscriptions together with historiographic and legisla- tive sources suggest that local social customs, religious positions and positions in the administration held by eunuchs were adopted by the Roman authorities who needed new types of government and social elite. The severe proh...

In the 7th and 8th centuries, the Byzantine geopolitical map changes dramatically. The Empire finds itself reduced to a third of its territory and must adapt itself to a new international map, in which the main political rival, the Arabs, are also the religious rival. The article examines the impact of this new reality on the Byzantine population by focusing on the case of refugees and prisoners of war. It shows how the confrontation with Islam makes Byzantium use Christianity as the marker of its political identity.