Harem of Jewish slave traders to supply eunuchs to harems depended on whether they could acquire castrated males. European artists and writers envisioned and presented the Oriental harem in a romanticized, albeit historically inaccurate manner. The dark eunuch was held as the embodiment of the sensual tyranny that held sway in the fantasized Ottoman palace, for he had been "clipped" or "completely sheared" to make of him the "ultimate slave" for the supreme ruler. In the Ottoman court, white eunuchs, who were mostly brought from castration centers in Christian Europe and Circassia, were responsible for much of the palace administration, while
A Night in a Moorish Harem the book failed, as did another in New York in 1931. A Night in a Moorish Harem A Night in a Moorish Harem is an erotic novella published in 1896 under the pseudonym "Lord George Herbert". It is written in the first person in the persona of a shipwrecked British sailor, recounting the night he spent in a Moroccan harem with nine concubines of different nationalities. The literary topos of the harem is a typical example of Western literary orientalism. In December 1923, two New York booksellers, Maurice Inman and Max Gottschalk, were arrested for selling "" and convicted in