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

property. 178 In this case, the Makzhan official ruled to uphold Jewish law by accepting the
validity of Yitzḥaq’s Jewish legal document—a practice which was not in itself uncommon, as
discussed in Chapter Three.
Jews turned to the Makhzan to resolve intra-Jewish disputes far less frequently than they
did to resolve legal cases with Muslims. The default for Jews in most instances was to use
Jewish courts for intra-Jewish matters. Nonetheless, at times Jews chose to engage the state even
when they could have appealed to Jewish legal authorities. Such strategies suggest that at times
Jews considered the Makhzan to be a more effective forum in which to pursue their claims.
* * *
The registers of the Ministry of Complaints are a rich and hitherto untapped source for
both the quotidian functioning of the Moroccan state and the nature of Jews’ relationships with
the Makhzan. The Ministry of Complaints acted as one forum among many in which Jews and
Muslims could resolve their legal grievances. The Ministry of Complaints, and the Makhzan
more broadly, functioned as a court of appeal when individuals felt that justice at the local level
had not been served. Jewish creditors who could not collect their debts, Jewish victims of theft
who had not been paid an indemnity, and the relatives of murdered Jews who had not collected
178
In principle, Simḥah should also have been able to claim her maintenance from a Jewish court, as under Jewish
law husbands are obligated to support their wives financially even when they are absent from the home (Ben-Zion
Schereschewsky and Moshe Drori, “Maintenance,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred
Skolnik (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2007), 399-401). In the case of failure to support his wife, a husband can
sometimes be compelled to give her a divorce (David L. Lieber, Ben-Zion Schereschewsky, and Moshe Drori,
“Divorce,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (Detroit: Macmillan Reference,
2007), 713). Nonetheless, Islamic law may have proved more inclined to grant Simḥah’s request. Islamic law
similarly obligates a husband to provide maintenance for his wife, but Mālikī law also enables the qāḍī to grant a
woman a divorce if her husband fails to provide maintenance (Rudolph Peters, “Nafaqa,” in Encyclopedia of Islam,
ed. P. Bearman, et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2010)). For other instances of Jews appealing to the Makhzan to resolve a
marital dispute, see: BH, K 157, p. 65, 5 Dhū al-Ḥijja 1306 (In this case, Ya‘aqov al-Fāsī complained that he had
been waiting to marry the daughter of Ibn Ḥayā al-Ṣwīrī (from Essaouira), and had decided to petition the Makhzan
in order to make al-Ṣwīrī agree to let the marriage take place; the sultan ordered that the case be taken to a sharī‘a
court); MAE Nantes, Tanger B 461, Muḥammad al-Ṭūris to Paténôtre, 24 July 1890 (In this case, Avraham Suissa
wanted to take his wife to the beit din but she refused; he appealed to the Makhzan, asking the local authorities to
force her to go with him to the beit din).
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