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

paid. 19 Yet Jews in nineteenth-century Morocco were similarly inclined to register their real
estate transactions in a sharī‘a court even when no tax on such transactions existed. It seems that
real estate lent itself to extra caution in contexts across time and space; perhaps this was due to
the greater sums often involved in transferring immoveable property, or to the fact that
investments in real estate tended to be more long-term than other types of investments.
Although powers of attorney and real estate transactions were the most common types of
intra-Jewish contracts registered in sharī‘a courts, they were not the only kinds. The Assarraf
collection preserves a contract for the rental of an oven in the millāḥ owned by the brothers
Ya‘aqov, Yehudah, and Moshe Assarraf, to Rafael b. Hārūn al-Sakūrī, 20 as well as a business
partnership between two Jews. 21 In other collections, I found contracts notarized by ‘udūl for the
sale of a donkey among Jews; 22 the guarantee of a Jew’s presence in sharī‘a court; 23 testimony
concerning injuries inflicted by one Jew upon another; 24 bills of debt among Jews; 25 and a
release for all claims between a woman and her recently divorced husband. 26 Commercial
transactions were the most common kind of intra-Jewish contract that Jews had notarized by
‘udūl, though the release document between a recently divorced couple indicates that at times
Jews also turned to the sharī‘a court for questions of family law.
Fundamentally, having intra-Jewish contracts notarized by ‘udūl was attractive because
Islamic law did not recognize evidence drawn up in a Jewish court. Any time that a case might
19
Gil, A History of Palestine, 165: Khan, Arabic Legal Documents, 1.
20
TC, File #4, 2 Jumādā II 1330.
21
TC, File #5, 28 Ramaḍān 1312.
22
DAR, Yahūd, 18197, 9 Rajab 1311; DAR, Marrakesh, 23 Muḥarram 1314.
23
PD, 3 Ramaḍān 1314.
24
PD, 25 Dhū al-Qa‘da 1269.
25
YBZ, 280, 26 Ṣafar 1298 and UL, Or26.543 (1), 9 Jumādā I 1270. On intra-Jewish debts in sharī‘a courts in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ottoman Palestine, see Cohen and Ben Shim‘on-Pikali, Yehudim be-veit hamishpat,
ha-me’ah ha-17, v. 1, 540 and idem, Yehudim be-veit ha-mishpat, ha-me’ah ha-18, 355.
26
YBZ, 280, 6 Rabī‘ II 1256. It is possible that this document amounts to a divorce effected in an Islamic court, but
the wording suggests that the couple had already divorced according to Jewish law and wanted an Islamic legal
document confirming that they had no further claims on each other.
124