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

Casablanca appealed to the sultan to give them justice tells us much about Jews’ relationship
with the state and their strategies when faced with a perceived injustice.
This chapter examines how Moroccan Jews collectively appealed to the Makhzan when
they felt their communal rights had been violated. As discussed in the previous chapter,
evidence preserved in the Makhzan archives shows that Jews felt entitled to the state’s
intervention, and conversely that the state believed it was responsible for providing justice to its
Jewish subjects. In what follows I draw on previously untapped correspondence in order to
reconstruct how groups of Jews appealed to the state and for what reasons. Because the majority
of Jews’ collective petitions concerned legal matters, these avenues of appeal are a crucial piece
of the puzzle in reconstructing how Jews navigated the various legal orders available to them in
Morocco.
My evidence consists primarily of correspondence among Jews and Makhzan officials
preserved in the Moroccan archives. Because the Makhzan did not keep systematic records until
the colonial period, these sources are often fragmentary; we usually have only one side of the
story, and rarely know the outcome of Jews’ appeals. Like the petitions to the Ministry of
Complaints, these collective petitions come from all over Morocco. Nonetheless, some
communities wrote to the Makhzan with complaints more often than did others. The Jews of
Demnat, for instance, petitioned the state repeatedly between 1864 and 1892 to complain about
their treatment at the hands of their governor and, on one occasion, the local qāḍī. It is quite
possible that the Demnati Jews’ recurring complaints stemmed in part from the fact that they
successfully engaged foreign diplomats and Jewish organizations to lobby on their behalf—an
aspect of this story which I discuss in detail in Chapter Nine. Yet despite variation in the
228