In Orthodox Judaism, we often speak about “eved HaShem” aka a slave of God. It’s a good thing.
Judaism has complex views on slavery.
In his book, Homo americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age, Tom Sunic writes:
…[George Fitzhugh] understood that each honorable person in a given social circumstance must be a slave to higher ethical goals. A slave does not only mean a physical slave, subject to physical torments on the part of his master; it could be a highly cultivated person or a leader who decides to become a slave to his Promethean self-ascribed intellectual goals…
Black slavery was to Fitzhugh a matter of fact; a social bond necessary for black Americans, who due to their incapacity to equally participate in free trade and cut throat competition, are far better off in farm bondage in the South, supervised by a paternalistic white farmer, than working for a Northern white crook who pontificates about human rights and strips them of human dignity.
George Fitzhugh (November 4, 1806 – July 30, 1881) was an American social theorist who published racial and slavery-based sociological theories in the antebellum era. He argued that “the negro is but a grown up child”[1][2] who needs the economic and social protections of slavery. Fitzhugh decried capitalism as spawning “a war of the rich with the poor, and the poor with one another”[3] – rendering free blacks “far outstripped or outwitted in the chase of free competition.”[4] Slavery, he contended, ensured that blacks would be economically secure and morally civilized.
Fitzhugh practiced law and was a painter for years, but attracted both fame and infamy when he published two sociological tracts for the South. He was a leading pro-slavery intellectual[5] and spoke for many of the Southern plantation owners. Before printing books, Fitzhugh tried his hand at a pamphlet titled “Slavery Justified” (1849). His first book, Sociology for the South (1854) was not as widely known as his second book, Cannibals All! (1857).
Fitzhugh differed from nearly all of his southern contemporaries by advocating a slavery that crossed racial boundaries. Writing in the Richmond Inquirer on 15 December 1855, Fitzhugh proclaimed: “The principle of slavery is in itself right, and does not depend on difference of complexion”, “Nature has made the weak in mind or body slaves … The wise and virtuous, the strong in body and mind, are born to command”, and “The Declaration of Independence is exuberantly false, and aborescently fallacious.
