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

Legal pluralism does not explain when and why Jews turned to non-Jewish legal
institutions; rather, it gives us analytical tools for understanding how Jews coped with the
existence of multiple legal orders which we can use in tracing Jews’ legal strategies in
nineteenth-century Morocco (and beyond). Legal pluralism also allows us to move away from
the spectrum of greater or lesser autonomy which asks only about Jews’ degree of independence.
Rather, legal pluralism focuses our attention on the ways in which Jewish legal orders coexisted,
cooperated, and converged with the other legal orders present in a given society.
Methodology
This study relies primarily on three different source bases corresponding to the three parts
of the dissertation. 97 In Part One, where I examine sharī‘a courts and batei din, I rely mainly on
legal documents produced by these courts. The sharī‘a court documents are entirely in Arabic,
while the batei din documents are mostly in Hebrew with some partially in Judeo-Arabic and
Haketia (the Moroccan dialect of Judeo-Spanish). 98 Part Two, which looks at the role of the
Makhzan in the Moroccan legal system, relies principally on correspondence among Makhzan
officials preserved in Moroccan archives. 99 In Part Three, which traces the functioning of
consular courts and the impact of consular officials on Jews’ legal strategies, I draw primarily on
97 I introduce the sources more fully in each section.
98 Both Judeo-Arabic and Haketia are written in Hebrew letters. Many Jews in the north of Morocco (where exiled
Jews from Spain had numerically overwhelmed local Jews upon their arrival in the fifteenth century) spoke Haketia,
although the linguistic map of Haketia speakers and the evolution of the language remain unclear. The term Haketia
comes from the Arabic verb ḥakā, meaning to talk, tell, or relate. Jews in the rest of the country spoke dialects of
Judeo-Arabic which were closely related to the local dialects of colloquial Arabic spoken by Moroccan Muslims.
On Moroccan Judeo-Arabic, see, e.g., Norman Stillman, The Language and Culture of the Jews of Sefrou, Morocco:
An Ethnolinguistic Study (Manchester: University of Manchester, 1988); Joseph Chetrit, Diglossie, hybridation et
diversité intra-linguistique : études socio-pragmatiques sur les langue juives, le judéo-arabe et le judéo-berbère
(Paris: Peeters, 2007). On Haketia, see Alegría Bendelac, Los nuestros : Sejiná, Letuarios, Jaquetía y Fraja : un
retrato de los sefardíes del norte de Marruecos a través de sus recuerdos y de su lengua (1860-1984) (New York: P.
Lang, 1987).
99 This correspondence is all in Arabic.
33