"Perhaps the most elusive aspect of medieval slavery is its role as spiritual metaphor, as an instrument of the religious imagination. In south India, among the pietist and fiercely egalitarian Vachanakara saint-poets of Bomma's own lifetime, for example, slavery was often used as an image to represent the devotee's quest for God: through the transforming power of metaphor the poets became their Lord's servants and lovers, androgynous in their longing; slaves, searching for t heir master with a passion that dissolved selfhood, wealth, caste and gender, indeed, difference itself. In their poetry it was slavery that was the paradoxical embodiment of perfect freedom; the image that represented the very notion of relationship, of human bonds, as well the possibility of their transcendence. This imagery would not have been unfamiliar to Ben Yiju. He and his friends were all orthodox, observant Jews, strongly aware of their distinctive religious identity. But they were ...
