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

unmentioned in the secondary literature.) Scholars drawing on sources from the Cairo Geniza
have shown that during the medieval period Jews in North Africa, Egypt, and the Levant brought
matters involving other Jews to sharī‘a courts to be notarized or adjudicated according to Islamic
law with some frequency. 4 This was also true of Jews living in the Ottoman Empire, where Jews
(much like their Christian neighbors) regularly brought their intra-religious contracts and
litigation to the kadı courts. 5
In some ways it is unsurprising that the legal practices of Moroccan Jews were related to
those of their coreligionists in different places and times. Yet as discussed in the Introduction,
Moroccan Jews had relatively more autonomy than did Jews in other contexts—as indicated by
the fact that Jews had their own prisons in at least a few Moroccan cities. One might think that
the relatively greater degree of control over their own affairs which prevailed among Jews in
Morocco would make them less inclined to use non-Jewish courts for matters which could be
adjudicated in Jewish courts. Yet Islamic legal documents show that Moroccan Jews brought
their intra-Jewish cases to sharī‘a courts. Since quantitative analysis is difficult for any of these
historical contexts, it is hard to know how much more or less Moroccan Jews availed themselves
of Islamic legal institutions for intra-religious matters than did Jews in medieval Cairo or the
Ottoman Empire. Nonetheless, the fact that even Moroccan Jews engaged in the sort of
jurisdictional boundary crossing found in circumstances where Jews had much less ability to run
their own affairs suggests an important degree of continuity across both space and time. This
continuity is closely related to the nature of legal pluralism across historical contexts, since the
4
Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, v. 2, 398-401; Gil, A History of Palestine, 168; Khan, Arabic Legal Documents;
Menahem Ben Sasson, Tzemiḥat ha-qehilah ha-yehudit be-artzot ha-Islam: Qayrawan, 800-1057 (Jerusalem:
Magnes Press, 1996), 309-15; Libson, Jewish and Islamic Law, 111.
5
Jennings, “Zimmis in the Sharia Court of Kayseri”; Gerber, “Arkhiyon beit-ha-din ha-shara‘i shel Bursah”; Cohen,
Jewish Life under Islam, 115-19; Al-Qattan, “Dhimmis in the Muslim Court”; Wittmann, “Before Qadi and Vizier,”
Chapter 1.
120