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

While Muslims appealed to the Makhzan for many of the same kinds of issues—such as
theft and murder—there are ways in which Jews and Muslims differed in the types of petitions
they sent to the Ministry of Complaints. Jews were much more likely to petition the Makhzan
concerning unpaid debts than were Muslims because Jews acted more often as money lenders.
Muslim shurafā’ (descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad), on the other hand, show up in the
Ministry of Complaints registers for extra-judicial matters such as asking for charity, something
which Jews never did. 14
The Ministry of Complaints registers suggests that a petitioner’s religious affiliation was
not of primary importance in determining how the Makhzan responded to his appeal. This does
not mean that the state did not distinguish between Jews and Muslims—on the contrary, as with
sharī‘a court documents, the Makhzan scribes who recorded the registers normally signaled Jews
with the epithet “al-dhimmī” or “al-yahūdī,” whereas they simply wrote the names of Muslim
males without any identifying features. 15 Yet as we will see, the fact that Jews were subjects of
the sultan, and thus entitled to seek redress from their sovereign, was generally more
determinative than the fact that they were Jews in defining their experience with the Ministry of
Complaints.
14
There are entries of this kind throughout the registers: see, for instance, BH, K 157, p. 37, 29 Ramaḍān 1306 and
p. 56, 12 Dhū al-Qa‘da 1306. Presumably Jews were ineligible for state charity as Jews. This hypothesis is further
supported by the fact that the only letter I found from a Jew asking the sultan for charity was from a Jewish convert
to Islam (DAR, Yahūd, 34661, Muḥammad b. Muḥammad al-‘Ūfīr and his wife Raḥma al-Islāmīya to Mawlāy ‘Abd
al-‘Azīz, 7 Shawwāl 1315).
15
In this context, “al-dhimmī” can be translated as “the Jew,” since Jews were the only indigenous dhimmīs in
Morocco. Christians were described as al-naṣrānī or al-rūmī, and their nationality (al-injilīzī, al-franṣīṣī) was often
also specified. Since Christians in Morocco lived under extraterritorial privileges granted by the treaties of
capitulation, their legal status was not that of dhimmīs who had accepted the sovereignty of Islam. As discussed in
Chapter Two, there does not seem to be any pattern to the use of dhimmī vs. yahūdī, though dhimmī appears far
more in the Ministry of Complaints records.
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