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woman in nineteenth-century Morocco. Perhaps a more likely explanation is that Esther came
from an influential and wealthy family and was robbed of precious possessions while traveling
on Morocco’s notoriously dangerous roads.
Cases concerning Jews who were murdered are the least common among the entries in
the Ministry of Complaints registers (forty-two cases, or about 8% of the total). Islamic law
treats murder cases much like theft cases; only the relatives of the deceased (and not the state)
can prosecute the murderers. Murder cases are settled with the payment of blood money (diya)
or retribution killing. 41 Although theoretically the murderers were responsible for paying the
blood money, there is evidence that Makhzan officials sometimes paid murder indemnities out of
their own pockets and only later tried to recover the cost from the murderers themselves. 42 Most
schools of Islamic law, including the Mālikī school, do not permit retribution killing for a
dhimmī killed by a Muslim. 43 Jews’ appeals to the Makhzan concerning murder cases thus only
sought blood money. Additionally, most schools rule that the relatives of the murdered dhimmī
can claim only half the blood money which would be paid for a murdered Muslim. 44 Since
amounts of blood money are not given consistently in the Ministry of Complaints registers, it is
difficult to know the extent to which this principle was observed. Moreover, in those instances
41 Schacht, An Introduction to Islamic Law, 181-87. The private nature of murder crimes also governed their
treatment in the Ottoman Empire: Heyd, Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law, 309: Hickok, “Homicide in Ottoman
Bosnia,” 47-48. Hickok notes that after the eighteenth century reforms gave the state the right to investigate
murders, but before these reforms took effect the governor’s only possibility for involvement was declaring a
murder case to be brigandage, over which he had jurisdiction. For a Jewish legal discussion from Meknes
concerning which relatives can collect the blood money from a murdered Jew, see NLI, Ms. B861 (8=5165-6), p.
173a, Adar 5641/ February 1881, signed by Rafael Ibn Tzur and Ya‘aqov Berdugo.
42 DAR, Yahūd, ‘Abd al-Ṣādiq b. Aḥmad to Mawlāy Ḥasan, Rabī‘ I 1298.
43 Fattal, Statut légal, 116-18. The only school which permits retaliation killing for dhimmīs is the Ḥanafī school.
Fattal notes that Mālik did permit the murderer of a dhimmī to be killed as punishment, however this does not seem
to be the dominant view of the Mālikī school.
44 Ibid., 116-18.
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