IN THE COURTS OF THE NATIONS - DataSpace - Princeton ...

The bills of debt found in the Assarraf collection conform to Islamic legal prescriptions
against the outright charging of interest. 76 While it seems that at times the Assarrafs and other
Jews did charge hidden interest on loans (see the discussion below and in Chapter Five), they
were careful to ensure that their bills of debt did not reflect anything that could be considered
usury. At least according to the official documentation, Jews’ lending practices were largely
similar to those of Muslims. Nonetheless, Jews were overrepresented as moneylenders in
nineteenth century Morocco. 77 Much of the historiography has explained Jews’ predominance as
moneylenders as a result of Islam’s absolute prohibition on lending at interest, while Jewish law
permitted Jews to lend at interest to non-Jews. 78 Yet the legal documents indicate that Jews did
not charge interest openly; if this is so, then the fact that Jews were permitted by their own law to
charge interest was irrelevant since in any case they followed the prescriptions of Islamic law.
We must look for other reasons to explain Jews’ overrepresentation as moneylenders in
nineteenth-century Moroccan society. The fact that, at least for the Assarrafs, lending money
commercial transactions since the services of ‘udūl would presumably have been harder to find than in big urban
centers like Fez. However, there is strong evidence from the pre-colonial and colonial periods that Jews and
Muslims in rural areas did employ the services of ‘udūl: see Boum, “Muslims Remember Jews,” 232-44 and
Schroeter, “Views from the Edge,” 181-5.
76
On legal ways to charge interest, see Abdullah Saeed, Islamic Banking and Interest: A Study in the Prohibition of
Riba and its Contemporary Interpretation (Leiden: Brill, 1996), esp. 37-9. The Mālikī school was generally less
tolerant of such legal fictions (see Mir Siadat Ali Khan, “The Mohammedan Laws against Usury and how they are
Evaded,” Journal of Comparitive Legislation and International Law 11, no. 4 (1929); Joseph Schacht, “Riba,” in
Encyclopedia of Islam, ed. P. Bearman, et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2003)).
77
Schroeter, Merchants of Essaouira, 110, 72-3; Kenbib, Juifs et musulmans, 253-62; Mohammed Ennaji,
Expansion européenne et changement social au Maroc : (XVIe-XIXe siècles) (Casablanca: Editions Eddif, 1996),
60-5. This seems not to have been the case in the medieval period or in most parts of the early modern Ottoman
Empire, where Jews were just as likely to borrow from Muslims as were Muslims from Jews: Goitein, A
Mediterranean Society, v. 1, 256-8; Haim Gerber, “Jews and Money-lending in the Ottoman Empire,” The Jewish
Quarterly Review 72, no. 2 (1981); idem, “Muslims and Zimmis in Ottoman Economy and Society: Encounters,
Cultures and Knowledge,” in Studies in Ottoman Social and Economic Life, ed. Motika Raoul et. al. (Heidelberg:
Heidelberger Orientverlag, 1999).
78
See, e.g., Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 18 vols. (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1957), v. 4, 197-202; Leland Bowie, “The Protégé System in Morocco, 1880-1904” (Ph.D. Dissertation,
University of Michigan, 1970), 242; Michael M. Laskier and Reeva Spector Simon, “Economic Life,” in The Jews
of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times, ed. Reeva Spector Simon, Michael M. Laskier, and Sara
Reguer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 32.
90