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

When ‘Amāra wrote to Sir John Drummand Hay, the British ambassador to Morocco, about the
Jews’ demands, he was not initially very receptive. 42 Later, Jews appealed again to the Makhzan
authorities as well as to the local British consul. 43 Eventually the British consulate withdrew its
protection from Ginsburg. 44
A few years later, the Jews of Fez came to their governor with a complaint about yet
another Spaniard. 45 The trouble started when a man described as a renegade (‘ilj) 46 drew a knife
during an argument with an Algerian Jewish shopkeeper. Other Jews who had witnessed the
incident came to their coreligionist’s defense. They brought the man—who was reportedly
drunk and who wore a red tarbush, a jellāba (Moroccan robe), and yellow babouches (slippers)—
to the gatekeeper to be imprisoned. 47 Al-‘Arabī wuld Abī Muḥammad, the qā’id of Fez, reported
thus on his efforts to interrogate the prisoner:
I asked him where he was from, and he answered me but I did not understand his
language. So someone who spoke his language came and spoke to him, and [the
Spaniard] said that he was a Christian. Then I asked him where he was staying, and he
said he was renting a house from ‘Alāl al-Shūsī [a Jew]… I asked him why he was
42 Hay responded to ‘Amāra’s letter by saying that the British subjects had denied trying to convert any Jews, and
that they reported having been the victims of abuse by Jews (DAR, Yahūd, 17240, John Drummond Hay to ‘Amāra
b. ‘Abd al-Ṣadīq, 8 Muḥarram 1294).
43 See the documents in Bashan, Ha-misyon ha-anglikani, 167-72.
44 Ginsburg, who was born in Poland, had been naturalized as a British citizen, but John Drummond Hay concluded
that this was not sufficient to afford him extraterritorial status in Morocco (see ibid., 69-70). This argument was
highly unusual; Hay’s desire to strike Ginsburg from the list of British protégés was clearly a response to Jewish
(and probably Makhzan) pressure to rein in his activities. Needless to say, this did not spell the end of Ginsburg’s
efforts to convert the Jews in Morocco; Ginsburg continued to travel and proselytize in Morocco until 1886 (ibid.,
100-12).
45 Spaniards were over-represented among the Europeans against whom Moroccan Jews lodged complaints with the
Makhzan. (See the incident from Tetuan discussed above, as well as DAR, Fez, Muḥammad Bargāsh to Mawlāy
Ḥasan, 12 Sha‘bān 1296.) One possible explanation for this is that after the Spanish occupation of Tetuan in 1860-
1, the number of Spaniards living in Morocco increased—especially those who were from the lower strata of
society, who were probably easier targets for Jews’ complaints than were wealthy merchants who enjoyed
connections to both foreign and Moroccan officials.
46 ‘Ilj could also mean “lout,” however, given the fact that the Makhzan authorities originally believed the Spaniard
was Muslim and then “found that he was not an ‘ilj but a Christian (bi-annahu naṣrānīyan wa-lā ‘iljan),” it seems
likely that they are using ‘ilj to mean “renegade” in this context. De Premare’s dictionary of colloquial Moroccan
Arabic translates ‘ilj as both “chrétien renégat converti à l’Islam” and as “homme de rien, individu dégradé,” (De
Premare, Dictionnaire arabe-français, v. 9, 199).
47 DAR, Fez, al-‘Arabī wuld Abī Muḥammad to Muḥammad b. al-‘Arabī, 17 Muḥarram 1299.
344