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

These and other incidents in which Jews turned to the Makhzan with complaints about
foreign subjects and protégés disrupt the linear understanding of the relationship among Jews,
foreigners, and the Moroccan state. 53 Jews did not only appeal to foreign consuls and
international Jewish organizations to save them from an oppressive state. At times, Jews
petitioned that very state for redress against foreign subjects and protégés. Nor were Jews
exclusive in their strategies of appeal; they often chose to cover all their bases by petitioning
both foreigners and the Makhzan at the same time.
Reexamining Cause Célèbre I: Safi
In the second half of the nineteenth century, two cases became causes célèbres among
foreign officials in Morocco, Jewish organizations in Europe, and beyond. The incidents were
reported in newspapers around the world as evidence of the barbarity of the Moroccan state and
the sorry condition of the persecuted Jews living there. While most instances in which Jews
appealed to foreigners for aid against Makhzan officials were too minor to have left much of a
trace in the archives, the broad interest in these two cases produced a relatively long archival trail
which can be used to reconstruct the incidents in some detail. It is precisely these details which
belie the simple picture of oppressed Jews being saved by enlightened Europeans.
The Safi case is undoubtedly the better known of the two, largely because it occasioned
the visit of the British Jewish philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore to Morocco in 1863-4.
Briefly, the affair revolved around the death of a Spanish customs official in Safi in the summer
53
For more instances in which Jews appealed to the Makhzan concerning offenses committed by foreign subjects
and protégés, see DAR, Fez, Muḥammad Bargāsh to Mawlāy Ḥasan, 12 Sha‘bān 1296 (concerning a Spaniard who
had eight Jews unjustly imprisoned by falsely accusing them of robbing his house; the Jews complained to the qā’id
of Fez, who then transmitted their complaint to Muḥammad Bargāsh); DAR, Safi, 24082, Ibn Hīma to Sayyid
Aḥmad, 29 Ramaḍān 1297 and Mawlāy Ḥasan to Muḥammad Bargāsh, 29 Shawwāl 1297 (in Mūdirīyat al-Wathā’iq
al-Mālikīya, Al-Wathā’iq, v. 4, 511-13) (concerning a Jew named Ḥaim b. Bakkash who complained to Ibn Hīma,
the governor of Safi, that he had been beaten by a British Jew named Jack b. Rūmīya).
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