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

the personal archives on which I rely. 24 Yet we are not spared the need to consider how these
collections were constructed in the first place; the fact that families were the ones who preserved
legal documents says much about the importance of legal documents in daily life as well as the
decentralized nature of the legal system in Morocco. Although the central government certainly
played an important role in Morocco’s legal system (as we will see in Part Two), the sharī‘a
courts and batei din operating at the local level were largely independent of state oversight.
Perhaps most importantly, my research shows that despite the scattered nature of Jewish
and Islamic legal documents, these sources exist in sufficient numbers to reconstruct the
functioning of batei din and sharī‘a courts in pre-colonial Morocco. Drawing on both Jewish and
Muslim sources allows us to better understand the intersection, overlap, and competition among
the two types of legal institutions.
Batei Din
Jews used batei din for a wide variety of legal matters. I draw here from a sample of 267
shtarot (legal documents) and pisqei din (legal rulings) from seven different collections to give a
sense of the functioniong of batei din. 25 While this collection is not necessarily representative of
24
This scholarship is closely related to the archival turn in historiography, which describes the increased interest in
studying the composition and nature of archives rather than (or in addition to) using them as sources for history. On
this, see, e.g., Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive : une impression freudienne (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1995); Irvin
Velody, “The Archive and the Human Sciences: Notes towards a Theory of the Archive,” History of the Human
Sciences 11, no. 4 (1998) (as well as the rest of the articles in this special issue); Ann Laura Stoler, Along the
Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009),
esp. Chapter 2.
25
These collections include that of the Direction des Archives Royales in Rabat, Morocco (in the file Yahūd); the
collection at the University of Leiden, which belonged to the Corcos family of Marrakesh (call numbers Or.26.543
(1), Or.26.543 (2), and Or.26.544); Paul Dahan’s private collection; the special collections library of JTS (Archive
#87, Morocco Jewish Communal Records); the collection of North African Jewish Manuscripts at Yale (housed in
the Judaica Collection); the National Library of Israel (held in the kitvei yad section of the library and called Shtarot
u-Ma‘asei Beit Din from Morocco, filed under the box number ARC. 4* 1532); the collections at Yad Ben Zvi in
Jerusalem (held in the collection of Te‘udot); and the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, also in
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