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

Europe and the Americas more generally, marked an important turning point in the nature of the
Moroccan Jewish community. 12
In what follows I examine Jews’ legal strategies during this turbulent time in Moroccan
history. Although some of my sources date from the early part of the nineteenth century, the vast
majority are from the period between 1850 and 1912. It is necessary to end in 1912 because of
the changes brought about by French colonization, not only socially and economically but, more
importantly for our purposes, in the organization of law. (I touch briefly on the nature of law in
colonial Morocco in the Epilogue.) Despite the fact that the period I cover was one of immense
change in Morocco, not all aspects of the Moroccan legal system underwent profound
transformation during this time. The changes affecting Morocco in the second half of the
nineteenth century form the backdrop for the questions I ask about legal history, rather than the
focus of those questions.
Law in the Islamic Mediterranean
The aim of this dissertation is to capture the quotidian lives of Jews and Muslims as they
navigated their way through the different legal venues that existed in pre-colonial Morocco.
Through a focus on the strategies of legal actors and an examination of the interactions among
the various legal orders in pre-colonial Morocco, this dissertation proposes a new approach to the
socio-legal history of the Maghrib and, by extension, the Islamic Mediterranean. While the
12
This is not to say that Moroccan Jews were not connected to Jews beyond Morocco before the nineteenth century;
on international ties among Moroccan Jews, see, e.g., García-Arenal and Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds. The
changing nature of the Moroccan Jewish community in the late nineteenth century is beyond the scope of this
dissertation, but see, e.g., Susan Gilson Miller, “Gender and the Poetics of Emancipation: The Alliance Israélite
Universelle in Northern Morocco, 1890-1912,” in Franco-Arab Encounters: Studies in Memory of David C.
Gordon, ed. David C. Gordon, L. Carl Brown, and Matthew Gordon (Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1996);
idem, “Saints et laïcs dans le Tanger Juif du XIXe siècle,” in Mémoires juives d’Espagne et du Portugal, ed. Esther
Benbassa (Paris: Publisud, 1996); Jessica Marglin, “Modernizing Moroccan Jews: The AIU Alumni Association in
Tangier, 1893-1913,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 101, no. 4 (2011).
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