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many of those who espouse the neo-lachrymose view single out early modern Morocco (from the
fifteenth century until French colonization in 1912) as being one of the least secure places in the
Islamic world for Jews. 36
The legal status of Jews is particularly important to the neo-lachrymose view of Jews’
experience in the Islamic world. Scholars often invoke Islam’s conception of religious hierarchy
and its concomitant restrictions on non-Muslims—especially the inadmissibility of testimony by
non-Muslims—as proof that Muslims treated Jews badly. 37 Most historians of the interfaith-
utopic persuasion either claim that the technicalities of religious hierarchy were most often
observed in the breach or largely avoid the question of legal history altogether. 38
Most of the historiography on Moroccan Jews to emerge in opposition to the neo-
lachrymose narrative has come from Moroccan historians. 39 In the case of Morocco, the myth of
interfaith utopia is more subtle than a direct assertion that Jews were always well-treated under
Islamic rule. Nonetheless, a rose-tinted historiography is evident in the view advocated by many
Moroccan scholars that Jews and Muslims (and by extension, Jews and the Makhzan) generally
2007); Morris S. Goodblatt, Jewish Life in Turkey in the XVIth Century, as Reflected in the Legal Writings of
Samuel de Medina (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1952); Mark Epstein, The Ottoman
Jewish Communities and Their Role in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Freiburg: K. Schwarz, 1980).
36
Norman Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Sourcebook (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication
Society, 1979), 102, 312-16; idem, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, 14; Laskier, The Alliance Israélite
Universelle, 20, 34; Lewis, The Jews of Islam, 148, 68; Bashan, Yahadut Maroko, 60; Martin Gilbert, In Ishmael’s
House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 96-103, 16-17, 32-4;
Bensoussan, Juifs en pays arabes, 37.
37
Chouraqui, Condition juridique, 59-61; Bat Ye‘or, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam, 56-57; Gilbert,
In Ishmael’s House, 32. The implication of this viewpoint is that Jews were only treated with justice once the legal
system was reformed by European colonizers. On this, see also Bernard Lugan, Histoire du Maroc
(Perrin/Critérion, 2000), 253-4.
38
See, e.g., Haim Zafrani, Deux mille ans de vie juive au Maroc : Histoire et culture, religion et magie (Casablanca:
Editions Eddif, 2000), 14; Menocal, Ornament of the World, 72-3. An exception is Kemal Çiçek, “A Quest for
Justice in a Mixed Society: The Turks and the Greek Cypriots before the Sharia Court of Nicosia,” in The Great
Ottoman-Turkish Civilization, ed. Kemal Çiçek (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye, 2000); Çiçek uses the history of Christians
in the kadı court of Cyprus to argue that Christians were treated well by Ottoman officials and came to trust in the
local Islamic institutions even more than in their own church.
39
Concerning Morocco and North Africa more broadly, many Maghribi historians are reacting to the prevalence of
narratives which emphasize the oppression and degradation of Jews, narratives which originated with travel
accounts of Europeans starting in the seventeenth century: see Zytnicki, Les Juifs du Maghreb, 25-35.
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