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

frequency of Jews’ petitions across Morocco, the context and content of these appeals show
similar patterns.
I call these petitions “collective” because they were usually signed by a group of Jews
(such as “the Jews of Casablanca” in the petition with which this chapter opened). It is likely
that these letters were written by the Jewish elites of given towns who held leadership roles and
claimed the authority to speak on behalf of their communities. 5 These petitions were written in
Arabic, a language in which few Jews were literate (most knew Judeo-Arabic); it is probable that
Jews hired Muslim scribes when they wanted to present a petition to the state. Though the
scribes whom Jews engaged undoubtedly played an important role in shaping the language,
form, and even content of petitions and other legal documents, I have found little evidence which
sheds light on the nature of their involvement. 6
I address petitions submitted by individual Jews separately from those submitted by
groups of Jews in large part because of the nature of the complaints. When individual Jews
wrote to the Makhzan, the vast majority of their complaints concerned unpaid debts; only a
quarter of the cases from the Ministry of Complaints registers concerning Jews had to do with
theft or murder. Collective petitions, on the other hand, almost never concerned debts or theft
and only a small number of them were about murders. Rather, the majority of the collective
petitions were efforts to gain redress from the abuse of government officials. On the other hand,
individuals rarely petitioned the Makhzan concerning abuse by officials—I found one such case
5
On the leadership structures of Moroccan Jewish communities, see Gerber, Jewish Society in Fez, Chapter 3:
Zafrani, Mille ans de vie juive au Maroc, 125-28: Deshen, The Mellah Society, Chapter 4.
6
On the role of scribes and the constructive of narrative in petitions in an early-modern European context, see
Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). For a similar critique in a Middle Eastern context, see Ze’evi, "The Use
of Ottoman Sharī‘a Court Records,” 50-2.
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