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the joint owners of a cow. 81 Such partnership contracts are actually relatively rare in the
Assarraf collection. However, I found many more Jewish-Muslim partnership contracts in other
archival collections—suggesting that notarizing partnerships was a relatively common reason
that Jews went to sharī‘a courts. 82 Some of these contracts specified that they attested a qirāḍ (a
commenda in Latin), a type of partnership common in the medieval period. 83
When a partnership was dissolved, the parties involved generally signed a release (ibrā’a
or barā’a). 84 These documents were drawn up to confirm that the two (or more) parties
concerned had no further claims on one another. They could also attest the payment of a debt.
For instance, a document from July 13, 1884 reads:
The murābiṭ sīdī Abū al-Qāsim b. al-walī al-shahīd ‘Allāl b. ‘Abd al-‘Ālī al-Kandarī (?)
testified that he released Shalom Assarraf and his son Ya‘aqov from all lawsuits, sales,
and oaths concerning the partnerships between them, and he no longer has any claim
against them either small or large. And the two dhimmīs testified that they released him
[Abū al-Qāsim] from all the partnerships between them, both those [attested to] in legal
documents and those not [attested to], and all lawsuits either small or great, and they have
absolutely no claim against him either small or great, in the long-term or in the shortterm.
85
81
TC, File #5, 15 Rabī‘ I 1316. I found five more such partnership contracts in the Assarraf collection.
82
I found a total of 34, or 12% of the documents I examined.
83
See, e.g., UL, Or.26.543 (1), 1 Muḥarram 1303, which concerned a partnership between Yeshu‘a Corcos of
Marrakesh and a Muslim. On the commenda, see Abraham L. Udovitch, Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), Chapter 6. Muhammad Kenbib discusses a type of silent partnership
between Jews and Muslims called “sohba” (ṣuḥba), though I did not find any examples of this arrangement (see
Kenbib, “Muslim-Jewish Relations,” 158; see also Abdellah Hammoudi, Master and Disciple: The Cultural
Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 96). Ṣuḥba partnerships
are also described in letters from the Cairo Geniza (though not in legal documents, which perhaps explains why I did
not find any mentions of this in the course of my research): see Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, v. 1, 169.
84
Releases make up about 5% of the total. In other collections, I counted thirteen releases (about 4% of the total
number of documents examined). For a formula for a standard release document, see Binānī, al-Wathā’iq al-fāsīya,
57. See also Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law, 148.
85
TC, File #1, 19 Ramaḍān 1301. Although the exact wording of releases varied, these documents all conveyed the
idea that the parties agreed they had no further claims on one another. For instance, in a release from 10 Ramaḍān
1294 (TC, File #2), Qudur b. ‘Alī al-Ḥimyānī and Shalom Assarraf and his son Ya‘aqov released one another and
added that any future claims that one of the parties may bring against the other were null and void (bāṭila). The
Assarraf collection also includes legal documents which attest to partial payments of debts but which are not
technically releases: I found eleven such documents in the collection.
92