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

The nature of these sources prevents us from fully answering a number of questions
which arise in the course of this chapter. In particular, there is rarely enough information given
about either the Jewish petitioners or the local Makhzan officials who were given orders
regarding Jews’ complaints. While some Jews appear repeatedly in connection with cases of
unpaid debts, most appear only once—making it difficult to surmise anything about the socio-
economic background of the Jewish petitioners. Similarly, the Makhzan officials are rarely
identified by their full names or their places of residence, which renders it hard to trace the
geographical contours of the cases.
Although I focus on Jews’ use of the Ministry of Complaints, I nonetheless draw
comparisons between their experience and that of Muslims. The number of entries concerning
Jews suggests that they petitioned the Ministry of Complaints as often as Muslims, if not
somewhat more frequently. Jews appear in approximately six percent of the total number of
entries in the Ministry of Complaints registers. 12 Although population statistics for nineteenth-
century Morocco are notoriously unreliable, estimates put Jews at between one and five percent
of the total population. 13 While I hesitate to draw firm conclusions from such partial data, the
available evidence suggests that Jews turned to the Ministry of Complaints in relatively similar
proportions to Muslims.
proportion was representative. Nonetheless, the figure of 17% is instructive in comparison to the 1% of intra-Jewish
cases found in the Ministry of Complaints registers.
12
This percentage is based on a calculation of the average number of cases per page for each register (since each
register is a different size), which produces: 10.8 cases per page for K 157, 7.2 cases per page for K 171, 7.9 cases
per page for K 174, and 11.8 cases per page for K 181. Multiplied by the number of pages in each register, this
yields an approximate total of 8,358 cases.
13
Many scholars have settled on three percent as the best estimate (see, for instance, Daniel J. Schroeter, “Yishaq
Ben Ya’is Halewi: A Moroccan reformer,” in Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East, ed. Edmund Burke
(London: I. B. Tauris, 1993), 44). Estimates of the total number of Jews in Morocco at the turn of the twentieth
century range from 40,000 to 200,000 (Laskier, The Alliance Israélite Universelle, 22: Aubin, Morocco of To-Day,
359), out of a total population of between one and fifteen million (El Mansour, Morocco in the Reign of Mawlay
Sulayman, 5).
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