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

Perhaps most important, however, is the fact that as a protégé, Shalom Assarraf continued
to utilize all the other legal fora discussed in this dissertation thus far. Acquiring a patent of
American protection did not entirely remove Shalom from the jurisdiction of batei din, sharī‘a
courts, or the Makhzan—even while he gained access to consular courts. The legal lives of the
Assarraf family remind us that all four legal orders operated simultaneously and with
overlapping spheres of authority, and that individual Jews (and Muslims, for that matter) moved
among these distinct legal institutions with relative ease.
Part Three explores the functioning of consular courts in the Moroccan legal system and,
more broadly, the influence of foreigners on Moroccan Jews’ legal strategies. To this end, I
draw on records and correspondence from a number of diplomatic archives (including those of
France, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States), as well as the
Makhzan archives in Morocco. 10 The French, British, and Spanish archives are particularly
crucial to the legal history of protection in Morocco as these three nations had the largest number
of protégés. The archives of the Netherlands and the United States allow for comparison with
states whose diplomatic and commercial representation in Morocco was less significant. 11 My
evidence includes consular court records, though I also draw heavily on correspondence
preserved in the consular archives in order to fill the significant gaps in the records of the
consular courts. 12 Before embarking on an analysis of how Jews appealed to consular courts and
10
These include: the MAE Nantes, the MAE Courneuve, the AGA, the DNA, the FO, and the USNA. The
Moroccan archives consulted include the DAR and the BH.
11
Furthermore, the fact that a country had little political clout in Morocco did not necessarily reduce its ability to
extend protection to Moroccans and thus to participate in the consular court system (for a humorous account of this,
see R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Mogreb El-Acksa: A Journey in Morocco (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1985), 43-4). I could have consulted a number of other archival collections preserved in countries that had
consulates in nineteenth-century Morocco, including Italy, Portugal, Brazil, and Belgium, among others. However,
given the fact that the consular records I consulted include cases involving protégés from all these states, my strong
conviction is that my conclusions would not have changed significantly had I consulted more consular archives.
12
The state of the consular archives makes it clear that either the consular courts in Morocco did not keep consistent
records of their activities, or that such records have been lost. For contemporary observations that the archives were
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