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

written and sent to the minister without the petitioner appearing in person. 97 My own surmise,
based largely on the volume of cases recorded in the Ministry of Complaints registers and the
fact that the cases concerned people from all over Morocco, is that relatively few petitioners
appeared in person.
Although the Ministry of Complaints records do not preserve the petitions themselves,
these petitions were almost certainly written in Arabic. 98 However, very few Jews in nineteenth-
century Morocco were literate in Arabic; we can presume that most employed Muslim scribes to
write their letters for them (probably translated from spoken Arabic). Unfortunately there is little
evidence concerning the nature of these transactions, although scribes unquestionably played a
role in shaping the language and structure of Jews’ petitions.
Once a matter ended up on the desk of the Minister of Complaints it was passed to the
sultan who, in theory at least, adjudicated the claims. 99 The sultan then had his minister—or,
more probably, the minister’s scribes 100 —write to the local official under whose jurisdiction the
case fell with instructions for how to proceed. 101 The registers of the Ministry of Complaints
contain only the responses of these local officials, from which we must infer the contents of the
97
In some entries, instead of giving the name of the person making the complaint, it simply says “a letter whose
author is not named” (kitāb lam yusamma ṣāḥibuhu). See for instance BH, K 181, p. 87, 2 Jumādā II 1309.
98
The archives do preserve collective petitions sent by Jews to the Makhzan which are written in Arabic (and which
I discuss in Chapter Six); it seems safe to presume that individual petitions which ended up on the desk of the
Minister of Complaints were similarly written in Arabic.
99
I surmise this from the frequency with which the sultan’s opinion was recorded (see below). In addition, Michaux
Bellaire noted that in principle the sultan supervised all government business directly; thus the letters nominally
came from him even if they went through the Ministry of Complaints. The secretaries used different sizes of seals
depending on the importance of the case (there were three sizes in all—small, medium, and large): Michaux
Bellaire, “La beniqat ech chikaïat,” 246-7.
100
Each minister had a number of scribes associated with his office (banīqa): al-Manūnī, Maẓāhir, v. 1, 44.
101
This is different from the procedure in the Ottoman Empire (at least during the seventeenth century, and probably
for much of the early modern period), where the sultan sent orders about his subjects’ petitions to the local qāḍīs: see
Jennings, “Limitations of the Judicial Powers of the Kadi,” 152-53.
176