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Table 5.1
15%
Types of Cases
Debts Theft Murder Miscellaneous
8%
It is important to note here that Jews rarely appealed to the Ministry of Complaints
concerning intra-Jewish matters. 10 Of the approximately five hundred cases, I found only five
that concerned complaints against other Jews (about 1%). However, I do not think that this
percentage accurately reflects the frequency with which Jews turned to the state to resolve legal
disputes with other Jews. Other correspondence preserved in the Makhzan archives contains a
much higher proportion of intra-Jewish cases which Jews sought to resolve by appealing to the
state. 11 I thus rely less on the registers of the Ministry of Complaints records in discussing the
ways in which Jews used the Makhzan to resolve their intra-communal disputes.
6%
one presumes he means debts for the most part, though he does not specify—and only 10% to “crime, theft, and
sexual offences” (Mansoureh Ettehadieh Nezam-Mafi, “The Coucil for the Investigation of Grievances: A Case
Study of Nineteenth-Century Iranian Social History,” Iranian Studies 22, no. 1 (1989): 59).
10
On non-Muslims petitioning the Ottoman state concerning other non-Muslims, see Ursinus, Şikayet in an Ottoman
Province, 28-30.
11
In my research in the DAR, I found a total of seventy-five cases in which individual Jews appealed to the state
(including cases of debts, theft, murder, and other matters); thirteen of these concerned intra-Jewish matters, or
approximately 17%. However, the incompleteness of the archives makes it impossible to know whether this
184
71%