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

Jewish and Islamic legal systems respectively. I thus view notaries as integral parts of batei din
and sharī‘a courts broadly speaking.
Reconstructing the history of Jews’ use of Jewish and Islamic courts in nineteenth-
century Morocco is made more challenging by the fact that neither of these judicial institutions
kept systematic records. Unlike sharī‘a courts in the Ottoman empire, sharī‘a courts in Morocco
did not maintain their own archives. Rather, ‘udūl drew up legal documents (‘uqūd or rusūm)
which they gave to the individual plaintiffs, who then preserved these documents in their own
private collections. 16 The majority of batei din similarly did not keep records of their judgments,
only producing legal documents for the use of individuals who then preserved them in family
archives. 17 The fact that neither sharī‘a courts nor batei din kept official records of their
functioning also means that Jews would not have been attracted to sharī‘a courts because they
kept better records than batei din—an argument sometimes made by scholars trying to explain
16
On the lack of record keeping in Moroccan sharī‘a courts, see Léon Buskens, “Mālikī Formularies and Legal
Documents: Changes in the Manuscript Culture of the ‘Udūl (Professional Witnesses) in Morocco,” in The
Codicology of Islamic Manuscripts, ed. Yasin Dutton (London: Al-Furqān Islamic Heritage Foundation, 1995), 140;
Jacques Caillé, Organisation judiciaire et procédure marocaines (Paris: Librairie générale de droit et de
jurisprudence, 1948), 19. See also DAR, Safi, Italian consul in Safi to al-Ṭayyib b. Hīma, 10 Rabī‘ II 1299/ 1 March
1882.
17
As far as I know, no other scholars have written about the archival practices of Jewish communities in Morocco.
Nonetheless, I have not found any extant registers of court decisions from batei din from before the colonial period;
on the contrary, Jewish legal documents seem to have survived in largely the same ways as Islamic legal documents,
that is, through private collections. Although some archives and libraries are confused as to the nature of certain
documents which they mistakenly label as records of batei din, I am quite convinced that no such records existed in
any systematic way before the colonial period. (See, e.g., CAHJP, P.141/1: this is labeled as a pinqas (register)
from the beit din of Fez, but in fact is a collection of copies of legal documents which one particular family had
made for their own personal use. See also P.141/2 and P.141/3.) The one exception is for the city of Tangier, where
records of the Junta (the communal governing body) were kept starting in the mid-nineteenth century. However, as
far as I am aware, no such records were kept for Tangier’s beit din. If such records were kept, they undoubtedly
remain in the archives of the Jewish community of Tangier, which are closed to researchers. The only indication I
found that other communities might have kept some sort of legal archive is from FO 631/14, A. Nicolson to Maclean
Madden, 24 October 1902 and 21 November 1902, in which the sofrim of Safi were able to find a marriage contract
(ketubbah) of a Jew named Solomon Sananes in their records. However, it is possible that communities like the one
of Safi kept records of matters like marriages and divorces but not of court judgments.
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