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

Shalom’s knowledge of Islamic law and legal procedure sufficient to trust him as their
representative, even in a sharī‘a court. It is possible that those Muslims who employed Shalom
as their agent felt that he was more knowledgeable about Islamic law than they were, despite the
fact that he was Jewish. 121 This is perhaps one of the most eloquent testimonies to the fact that
sharī‘a courts were in many ways as accessible to Jews as they were to Muslims.
Litigious Documents
Although the Assarrafs—and indeed Moroccan Jews more generally—mostly went to
sharī‘a courts in order to notarize documents before ‘udūl, they also “went to court” in the more
traditional sense of the term as both plaintiffs and defendants in civil litigation. (Sharī‘a courts
did have some sort of jurisdiction over criminal cases, though these were mostly adjudicated by
Makhzan courts, which I discuss in Part Two.) Understanding how litigation played out in the
Moroccan context and Jews’ experience in litigious cases allows us to see how sharī‘a courts
served as fora for resolving legal disputes among Jews and Muslims.
Although litigious entries make up about twenty-five percent of the Assarraf collection,
many of these entries represent only parts of longer cases. This is because hearings took place
over a period of days, weeks, months or even years, and each appearance in court produced a
separate entry (some of which were recorded on the same document as the initial hearing while
others were written on separate documents). Of the 485 litigious entries in the Assarraf
collection, there are only seventy lawsuits for which the initial claims are preserved. The other
121
See also an example of a Jew acting as legal representative for a Muslim from early twentieth-century Jerusalem:
Cohen, Yehudim be-veit ha-mishpat, ha-me’ah ha-19, 191-3.
101