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

which it was convened, and the power dynamics among different Jewish communities in
Morocco at the time.
In most instances, Jewish and Muslim courts provided different services and coexisted
alongside one another without threatening each others’ authority. Jews primarily used Jewish
courts for intra-Jewish matters, and—as I discuss in the following chapter—they primarily used
sharī‘a courts for matters involving Muslims. Yet this arrangement did not mean that Jews
stayed within the confines of their autonomous jurisdiction, or that Jews mainly availed
themselves of the services of Jewish courts to the exclusion of Islamic legal institutions. On the
contrary, as the next two chapters show, Jews regularly frequented sharī‘a courts. In order to
fully understand how Jews navigated all the legal institutions available to them in nineteenth-
century Morocco, it is necessary to look beyond the Jewish communal institutions that have
heretofore constituted the focus of most Moroccan Jewish legal history.
The Assarrafs and their Archive
The Assarrafs were one of Fez’s wealthiest and most prominent merchant families.
However, their importance to this dissertation—and to historians more generally—lays not so
much in who they were, but in the richness of the archive they left behind. Like most Jewish and
Muslim families in Morocco, the Assarrafs preserved the legal deeds documenting their
commercial, personal, and litigious affairs in their own family archive. However, unlike the
private archives of most Moroccan Jewish families, much of the Assarrafs’ archive has survived
intact and has made its way into the hands of Professor Yosef Tobi, a private collector in
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