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is perhaps best attested by the fact that Moroccan Jews in some cities (such as Fez and
Marrakesh) operated their own prisons. 107 The shaykh al-yahūd in these cities (who acted as the
secular head of the Jewish community and was responsible for relations with the Muslim
authorities) had the power to imprison Jews who broke the law. For instance, in a document in
Judeo-Arabic from 1816, a group of Jews testified that they accepted Shmuel b. ‘Ayūsh as their
shaykh, and that Shmuel would have the authority to “judge over great and small, and to
imprison (yaḥkum fi-’l-kabīr wa-ṣaghīr wa-yusajjin).” 108 In many other contexts, including
medieval Cairo and in the Ottoman Empire, Jewish leaders relied on Islamic authorities to
imprison those they wanted punished. 109 Although far more research is required to fully
understand how these Jewish prisons worked in Morocco, it seems safe to hazard a guess that
their existence was due in large part to the generally high level of decentralization which
characterized the Moroccan state before French colonization.
Given the relatively greater degree of autonomy afforded to Jews in Morocco, one might
expect that Moroccan Jews would turn to non-Jewish legal institutions less frequently than their
coreligionists in other contexts. We have too little information to make any systematic
107
Avraham ben Mordekhai Ankawa, ed. Kerem Ḥemer: Taqqanot Ḥakhmei Qasṭilyah ve-Ṭuliṭulah (Jerusalem: Ha-
Sifriyah ha-Sefaradit Benei Yisakhar, 2000), Number 53; John V. Crawford and Charles H. Allen, Morocco: Report
to the Committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (London: British and Foreign Anti-Slavery
Society, 1886), 21; Gerber, Jewish Society in Fez, 88; Gottreich, The Mellah of Marrakesh, 73. Few sources exist
on these Jewish prisons; at this point, it is not clear whether they existed outside of Fez and Marrakesh or whether
they existed for a specific period of time or were a feature of Morocco throughout the early modern period.
108
PD, 8 Kislev 5577.
109
Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, v. 2, 35; Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community, 73; Yaron Ben-Naeh,
Jews in the Realm of the Sultans: Ottoman Jewish Society in the Seventeenth Century (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2008), 191. Although Ben-Naeh notes that there are mentions of prison cells which seem to have belonged to Jews,
he concludes that in general Jewish leaders had to rely on the Muslim authorities to implement physical
punishments, including imprisonment. See also the observations of a rabbi from Fez who visited the Ottoman
Empire in the sixteenth century and noted that Jewish judges there had far less authority than in Morocco because
they could not enforce their own punishments (Hacker, “Jewish Autonomy in the Ottoman Empire,” 170). Simḥa
Assaf argues that a number of medieval Jewish communities had their own prisons, including in Spain and Poland
(Simḥa Assaf, Ha-‘Onshin aḥarei ḥatimat ha-Talmud : Ḥomer le-toldot ha-mishpat ha-‘ivri (Jerusalem: Defus ha-
Po‘el ha-Tza‘ir, 1922), 25-30). However, it is not always clear that the prisons discussed in the teshuvot and
taqqanot on which Assaf draws were Jewish prisons; he does not entertain the possibility that Jews relied on non-
Jewish authorities to enforce prison sentences.
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