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Chapter Five: Appeals to the Ministry of Complaints
The Pasha of Meknes [says] that Ya‘aqov Ohana (Ya‘qūb Uḥanā) and some of the Jewish
merchants there [in Meknes] sent a number of riyāls carried by two mules with two mule drivers,
one Muslim and one Jew. The Muslim stole two bags 1 with 1,100 riyāls in them, and buried
them in a room in a funduq [warehouse] in the [neighborhood of] the palace. Then, when they
[the Jewish merchants] had left, 2 the Muslim returned and took the two bags. Since then, [the
Jews] have been searching for [the money], until they were informed that [the Muslim mule
driver] was in the Gharb [a region in northern Morocco] and that he had married in the
jurisdiction of [the qā’id] al-Sufyānī for [a dower of] 200 riyāls with the daughter of Wuld al-
Kaḥala al-Gharbāwī, and with the rest [of the money] he bought cattle and jewelry. So [the
Jews] wrote to al-Sufyānī and he sent [the Muslim mule driver, presumably to Meknes] and he
confessed to some of [his crime]; they interrogated him and he informed them that he left [the
rest of the money] with Ṣahra Wuld al-Kaḥala. Now [the Jewish merchants] ask that the sultan
command al-Sufyānī to give them their due. Our lord [the sultan] says: it is ordered. 3
This episode was recorded in the register of the Ministry of Complaints on April 27,
1891. The case is in some ways extraordinary. A Muslim mule driver—one of the most poorly
paid professions in Morocco at the time 4 —made off with two bags of money belonging to
Jewish merchants in Meknes. He moved dozens of miles away and promptly set about pursuing
a lifestyle worthy of his means. 5 But his taste of the good life was short lived. The Jewish
merchants eventually found out what had happened to their erstwhile employee and wrote to al-
Sufyānī, the governor of the region where the mule driver had moved. Al-Sufyānī sent the mule
driver to Meknes so he could be interrogated about his crime, presumably by the local Makhzan
authorities. The mule driver confessed to the theft, and the sultan commanded al-Sufyānī to
make the mule driver return the 1,100 riyāls that he had stolen.
Yet colorful details aside, this case is much like hundreds of others recorded in the
registers of the Ministry of Complaints in which Moroccan Jews appealed to the state when they
1
Khanshatayn: khansha means “cloth bag” in Moroccan colloquial Arabic (Sinaceur, Dictionnaire Colin, v. 2, 479).
2
Literally, “traveled” (sāfarū).
3
BH, K 174, p. 102, 18 Ramaḍān 1308.
4
On mule drivers, see Le Tourneau, Fès avant le protectorat, 246.
5
On the value of riyāls (Spanish currency popular in nineteenth-century Morocco), see ibid., 283-5.
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