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

only Jews. I also found nineteen documents from batei din which concern Jews and Muslims,
which I address in Chapter Three. However, I did not include these documents in the table
because this aspect of the sample is not random; I was more careful to note instances in which
Muslims appeared in batei din than I was to note other types of documents, and thus they are
over-represented among the Jewish legal documents I discuss.
Most often, Jews sought out the services of sofrim in order to draw up legally binding
contracts with other Jews—that is, they employed the court for its notarial services. 80% of the
documents I examined are notarial, while only 20% are litigious. 27 The majority of notarial
documents concern either property transactions or some sort of debt arrangement. 19% (52 total)
of the documents refer to money owed among Jews, either as a debt or a partnership. 28
Mortgages, a particular kind of debt, make up 6% (16 total) of the documents. 29% (76 total) of
the documents concern either the rental, sale, or gifting of real estate, including rooms in houses,
courtyards, stores, etc. Matters relating to marriage constitute 5% (12 total) of the documents,
including amounts of a dowry, promises of betrothal, and ketubbot (marriage agreements).
Finally, the remaining notarial documents, which constitute 15% (40 total) of the documents,
concern a number of miscellaneous issues, such as releases, powers of attorney, matters relating
to communal charity, wills and other inheritance agreements, divorce agreements, etc.
27
All of the documents involving Muslims were notarial documents relating either to debts or to property
transactions.
28
However, in some collections documents relating to debts seem to be even more common relative to other
documents. This is particularly true of the documents belonging to Ḥaim and Yeshu‘a Corcos of Marrakesh, which
are preserved at the University of Leiden. Although I did not do a systematic analysis of all the Hebrew legal
documents in this collection, there are dozens—if not hundreds—of shtarot attesting debts owed among Jews. The
relatively larger percentage of documents relating to debts in this collection makes sense given that many of the
documents are pasted or copied into record books which the Corcos family used to keep track of their commercial
activities. In addition, the loose documents seem mostly related to these commercial activities (except for a large
number of personal letters in Judeo-Arabic). The commercial nature of this collection, then, explains the higher
proportion of debt documents.
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