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

Jews and the Ministry of Complaints
Between 1889 and 1893, the scribes employed at the Ministry of Complaints recorded a
total of 511 cases involving individual Jews. 6 The vast majority of these cases concerned Jews
who were Moroccan subjects; only seven were related to the claims of Jews under the consular
protection of foreign states (I discuss Jewish protégés at length in Part Three). 7 Drawing on this
discrete set of records allows me to discuss what kinds of cases and resolutions occurred most
often, how the Makhzan went about responding to individual petitions, and the kinds of obstacles
that Makhzan officials faced in their attempts to settle Jews’ claims. I discuss examples of
similar complaints preserved in the Moroccan archives which were not included in the ministry’s
registers, though for the sake of brevity I relegate most of these discussions to footnotes. 8
Nearly all claims made by Jews fall under three categories: debt, theft, and murder (see
Figure 5.1). The vast majority of cases found in the registers of the Ministry of Complaints
concern debts (362, or about 71%), for which Jews were almost always the creditors. Incidents
in which Jews were victims of theft constitute about 15% of the total (75 cases), and those in
which Jews were murdered make up about 8% (42 cases); the remaining 32 cases (6%) are either
of an indeterminate nature or concern miscellaneous matters. 9
6
This number includes all claims in which a Jew (or Jews) were involved, either as complainant or as the object of a
complaint. The actual number of entries is higher (541), since some cases had multiple entries devoted to them. I
am not including appeals brought by groups of Jews, which I address in the next chapter.
7
As far as I can tell, the Ministry of Complaints was reserved for petitions from Moroccan subjects, since at least
one register concerning appeals survives which was exclusively devoted to the petitions of foreigners and foreign
subjects (BH, K 551; see the introduction to the volume on p. 4).
8
I found references to only two petitions from individual Jews before the creation of the Ministry of Complaints
(DAR, Fez, 22986, al-Ḥusayn Rafrāfī to Abū ‘Abdallāh Muḥammad b. Idrīs, 28 Muḥarram 1261 and 23074,
Mawlāy ‘Abd al-Raḥmān to his son Muḥammad, 2 Rabī‘ I 1261). In addition, I found two letters pertaining to
complaints from the period covered by the Ministry of Complaints registers, but which did not appear in the
registers (DAR, Marrakesh, Aḥmad Amālik to Mawlāy Ḥasan, 9 Sha‘bān 1307; DAR, Yahūd, ‘Abdallāh al-Bayḍāwī
to Muḥammad Tūrīs, 6 Sha‘bān 1308).
9
By indeterminate, I mean that the nature of the case is not stated in the entry. It is instructive to compare these
percentages to the conclusions drawn by Mansoureh Nezam-Mafi in his study of petitions to the Council for the
Investigation of Grievances in nineteenth-century Iran. He found that 41% of petitions related to financial matters—
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