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Muslims’ jurisdictional boundary crossings, the fact that the Assarraf brothers brought such a
matter to a sharī‘a court was not all that unusual. Given the extensive evidence that Jews at
times elected to use sharī‘a courts for their legal dealings with other Jews, the Assarrafs’ choice
to notarize their inheritance agreement in both courts fits into a broader pattern of how Jews used
Islamic legal institutions.
The fact that Jews and Muslims at times elected to cross jurisdictional borders is not
surprising given what we know about legally pluralist contexts across time and space. In
situations in which different jurisdictions overlap and even compete to some extent, individuals
learn to navigate their various legal options in ways that fit their needs. In Morocco, Jews knew
that having certain kinds of intra-Jewish contracts notarized in sharī‘a courts (or in both batei din
and sharī‘a courts) was at times advantageous. Even Muslims sometimes took advantage of
Jewish courts, such as when they wanted to profit from a legal arrangement which only existed
according to Jewish law. Yet shopping among different forums was not the only result of the
existence of multiple legal orders in Morocco. Additionally, Jews could notarize documents in
sharī‘a courts which merely summarized the ruling of a beit din on a given matter, and qāḍīs at
times relied on rabbis as expert witnesses concerning Jewish law. While forum shopping in the
Moroccan context should not be surprising to anyone familiar with legally pluralist societies, the
extent of legal convergence among the Jewish and Islamic legal orders is more unexpected.
Further research on the interactions among different legal orders in Islamic societies is necessary
before it is possible to determine how unusual Morocco was in this respect.
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