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

including courts—which were of primary importance in Jews’ lives. 55 The scholarship on
Moroccan Jewish legal history similarly emphasizes the great degree of legal autonomy afforded
Jews, as well as rabbinic leaders’ success in preventing non-Jewish courts from eroding their
authority. 56
The most direct challenge to previous paradigms of Jews’ relationship to non-Jewish law
comes from historians working on Ottoman legal history. 57 Joseph Hacker makes a particularly
55
One reason that Goitein’s view of Jewish courts hewed more closely to that of his predecessors is that Goitein
generally did not incorporate the Arabic-script sources into Mediterranean Society. On these sources, see esp.
Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents in the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993).
56
See esp. Chouraqui, Condition juridique, 119-21; Zafrani, Les juifs du Maroc, esp. 117; idem, “Judaïsme
d’occident musulman. Les relations judéo-musulmanes dans la littérature juridique. Le cas particulier du recours des
tributaires juifs à la justice musulmane et aux autorités représentatives de l’état souverain,” Studia Islamica, no. 64
(1986): 129-31; idem, Two Thousand Years of Jewish Life in Morocco (New York: Sephardic House, 2005), 126,
75. Haim Zafrani echoed Goitein’s formulation, writing that Jews in Morocco constituted “a state not only within
the Islamic state but sometimes beyond its frontiers” (ibid., 6). Shlomo Deshen discusses the limits of the authority
of Jewish courts, but not in the context of being threatened by gentile legal institutions: Deshen, The Mellah Society,
51-3. Jane Gerber offers a more nuanced view in her discussion of the ways in which Moroccan rabbis were at
times forced to accommodate the use of non-Jewish courts in order to preserve the authority of their own legal
institutions (Gerber, Jewish Society in Fez, 60-2). Yet even Gerber, much like Goitein, ultimately concludes that
batei din functioned with a “large degree of autonomy granted under Islam” (ibid., 101). Eliezer Bashan comes to a
similar conclusion: Bashan, Yahadut Maroko, 80-4, esp. 82-3.
57
In fact, Amnon Cohen was the first Jewish historian to make extensive use of Islamic court records (sijillāt):
Amnon Cohen, Yehudei Yerushalayim ba-me’ah ha-shesh-‘esreh le-fi te‘udot Turkiyot shel beit ha-din ha-shara‘i
(Jerusalem: Hotza'at Yad Yitzḥaq Ben Tzvi, 1976) (translated as Jewish Life under Islam: Jerusalem in the Sixteenth
Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984)) and idem, A World Within: Jewish Life as Reflected in
Muslim Court Documents from the Sijil of Jerusalem (XVIth Century), 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Center for Judaic
Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 1994). (See also Haim Gerber, “Arkhiyon beit-ha-din ha-shara‘i shel Bursah
ke-meqor histori le-toldot yehudei ha-‘ir,” Mi-qedem u-mi-yam 1 (1981), which is more of an introduction to the
sources than a full-fledged analysis of social history.) However, Cohen is not particularly interested in legal history
per se; rather, he uses the sijillāt primarily as a lens onto the social history of Jews in early modern Palestine
(although he devotes one chapter to legal history: Cohen, Jewish Life under Islam, Chapter 6). Cohen went on to
publish an extensive collection of documents pertaining to Jews from the Ottoman sharī‘a court of Jerusalem,
though again these publications focus on the documents as sources for social history and do little to interpret their
bearing on the legal history of Jews in Ottoman Palestine: Amnon Cohen and Elisheva Ben Shim‘on-Pikali, eds.,
Yehudim be-veit ha-mishpat ha-muslami: Ḥevrah, kalkalah, ve-irgun qehilati be-Yerushalayim ha-Otomanit, hame’ah
ha-16 (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1993); idem, eds., Yehudim be-veit ha-mishpat ha-muslami: Ḥevrah,
kalkalah, ve-irgun qehilati be-Yerushalayim ha-Otomanit, ha-me’ah ha-18 (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1996);
Amnon Cohen, ed. Yehudim be-veit ha-mishpat ha-muslami: Ḥevrah, kalkalah, ve-irgun qehilati be-Yerushalayim
ha-Otomanit, ha-me’ah ha-19 (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2003); Amnon Cohen and Elisheva Ben Shim‘on-
Pikali, eds., Yehudim be-veit ha-mishpat ha-muslami: Ḥevrah, kalkalah, ve-irgun qehilati be-Yerushalayim ha-
Otomanit, ha-me’ah ha-17, 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2010). In his focus on social history, Cohen’s
use of sharī‘a court records followed a broader trend in Ottoman historiography: see, e.g., Raymond, Artisans et
commerçants au Caire; Abraham Marcus, The Middle East on the Eve of Modernity: Aleppo in the Eighteenth
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