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

Introduction
This dissertation examines the ways in which Jews used the different legal institutions
available to them in nineteenth-century Morocco. It focuses on three kinds of non-Jewish legal
institutions: 1) sharī‘a courts, which applied Islamic law (sharī‘a), and operated as courts of first
instance at the local level: 2) the Makhzan (the Moroccan central government) as a legal arbiter,
and especially the central court of appeals created in the 1860s: 3) and consular courts, which
were run by the consulates of foreign nations and were open to foreign subjects and those
Moroccans who had acquired foreign protection. The jurisdiction of these consular courts was
governed by the treaties that Morocco had signed with foreign states, allowing foreigners and
protégés a measure of extraterritorial legal status.
The socio-legal history of nineteenth-century Morocco remains largely unexplored. 1
Although some scholarship exists on the legal history of Jews in Morocco before 1912, this work
has heretofore been based on literature by rabbinic authorities and thus focuses on how elites
envisioned the legal lives of Jews. 2 In contrast, the present study is the first to draw on archival
1
By socio-legal, I mean the study of law as it was practiced in society, rather than the development of law itself.
Socio-legal history seeks to write a social and cultural history of law and legal institutions. For those who have used
a socio-legal approach, see, e.g., Leslie P. Peirce, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Iris Agmon, Family and Court: Legal Culture and Modernity in
Late Ottoman Palestine (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006); Ido Shahar, “Practicing Islamic Law in a
Legal Pluralistic Environment: The Changing Face of a Muslim Court in Present-Day Jerusalem” (Ph.D.
Dissertation, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 2006); Avi Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts: Law and
Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
2
Haim Zafrani, Les juifs du Maroc : vie sociale, économique et religieuse, études de Taqqanot et Responsa (Paris:
Geuthner, 1972); Shlomo A. Deshen, The Mellah Society: Jewish Community Life in Sherifian Morocco (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989). An exception is Aomar Boum’s dissertation, which draws on legal documents
to discuss Jewish-Muslim relations in southern Morocco during the twentieth century (Aomar Boum, “Muslims
Remember Jews in Southern Morocco: Social Memories, Dialogic Narratives, and the Collective Imagination of
Jewishness” (Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Arizona, 2006), 182-276). However, Boum focuses on the
social context of charging interest and what this can tell us about Jews’ place in Moroccan society (see esp. 250-64).
For the legal history of Jews during the colonial period, see André Chouraqui, La condition juridique de l’Israélite
marocain (Paris: Presses du livre français, 1950); Edouard Mouillefarine, Etude historique sur la condition juridique
des juifs au Maroc (Paris: Carbonnel, 1941).
1