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

intra-Jewish cases to these courts less often by the 1930s. However, more research is required
before this hypothesis can be verified. 24
* * *
While there is little question that French colonization marked a significant rupture in the
nature of the Moroccan legal system, legal strategies of individual Moroccans showed
remarkable continuity. Both before and after 1912, Jews and Muslims continued to seek out the
legal forum that would best serve their interests, which often entailed crossing jurisdictional
boundaries. Yet this dissertation raises almost as many questions as it answers. Further research
in the legal history of the colonial period could constitute an entire dissertation in itself. More
broadly, this study demonstrates the richness of available documentary evidence for Moroccan
social history. Many of the sources on which I draw could and should be tapped for studies of
women in Moroccan society, the economy in the nineteenth century, the history of the family,
and the development of Jewish and Islamic law, among other topics. My hope is that scholars
will conduct further research on Moroccan history using the remarkable legal sources I have
employed here.
Finally, my methodology holds promise not only for the history of Jews in North Africa
or even the Islamic Mediterranean, but also for Mediterranean and Jewish history more broadly.
My interest in law as it was experienced by legal consumers is an approach which would
enhance the field of socio-legal history. Attention to the interactions among different legal
orders in a legally pluralist system is a promising subject of inquiry for law as it was practiced—
not only in the Islamic world, but also wherever Jewish courts existed alongside non-Jewish
ones. Employing legal pluralism as a framework can help scholars go beyond the question of
24
This would also match what Daniel Schroeter has observed for Ighil n’Ogho, where it took the French many years
before they successfully changed the notarial practices of the courts there: Schroeter, “Views from the Edge,” 184.
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