The Role of Jews in the Slave Trade in Iran’s Early Islamic Centuries

Jewish traders in Iran in the early Islamic centuries were very famous for the slave trade than anything else. The geographers of the first centuries have mentioned a group of Jews called the Radhanites who traveled to different places and took trade goods, including slaves, to different places. They transported slaves from Europe to Byzantium and to the Islamic world and caused the growth and development of this trade. It seems that various wars in Europe and Asia had an impact on the subject of the slave trade, and Jewish traders contributed greatly to the expansion of the slave trade. In any case, despite the prosperity and expansion of the slave trade in the discussed period, this issue has not been much reflected in the historical sources of this period, and even in new studies, it has been less discussed and concentrated on. Therefore, the present study tries to investigate the role of Jewish merchants in the slave trade in Iran from the early Islamic centuries to the end of the 4th century Hijri based on the limited resources available from this period and using a descriptive-analytical method. For this purpose, efforts will be made to collect historical data from library sources and categorize and finally analyze them using the method of historical studies.