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

Jerusalem. 33 The collection consists of 1,930 legal documents from sharī‘a courts which the
Assarrafs acquired over the course of their commercial endeavors between 1834 and 1929—
though the vast majority of documents are from the years 1854-1912. 34 Of course, there were
many more of the Assarrafs’ legal documents which did not make their way into this collection.
The Assarrafs frequented the beit din in addition to the sharī‘a court, as mentioned above and as
documented by deeds in other collections; yet the Assarraf archives in Professor Tobi’s
collection are from the sharī‘a court alone. 35 The nearly two thousand legal documents in the
Assarraf collection represent a uniquely rich source for the legal history of nineteenth-century
Morocco.
At the end of this chapter, Figure One shows a partial reconstruction of the Assarraf
family tree. Unfortunately, much information is missing—including birth dates, most death
dates, the names of spouses in almost all cases, etc. 36 Nonetheless, the tree gives a sense of some
of the major figures in the family and how they were related to one another.
The most important individuals as far as we are concerned are Shalom b. Yehudah
Assarraf and his son Ya‘aqov, who are mentioned in over three-fourths of the documents in the
collection. Shalom’s father Yehudah b. Ya‘aqov, the original patriarch of the family, appears in
33
Professor Yosef Tobi happened upon the Assarrafs’ archive during a trip to Fez, where he bought the collection
and brought it back to his home in Jerusalem. He has generously shared the collection with a select number of
scholars. The only scholar to have written about the collection before me is Yehoshoua Frenkel, who published a
short article describing the collection and its promise for Moroccan Jewish history: Yehoshoua Frenkel, “Jewish-
Muslim Relations in Fez at the Turn of the 19th Century in light of Juridical Documents,” Maghreb Review 29, no.
1-4 (2004). The documents are kept (in no particular order) in ten unmarked folders, which I have provisionally
numbered one through ten: throughout the dissertation, I use these numbers to identify the folder in which a given
document is found.
34
Two documents are from before 1854 and eleven are from after 1912. In addition, I was unable to read the dates
of seven documents, though the nature of the documents makes it very likely that they are from between 1854 and
1912.
35
In addition, there is no way to tell whether Professor Tobi’s collection represents the entirety of the Assarraf
family archive of sharī‘a court documents, though it is unlikely that additional documentation would significantly
change the conclusions I draw in this section.
36
The only name of a spouse which I was able to find is that of David b. Ya‘aqov Assarraf’s wife, Hannah bat
‘Ayush ‘Atiya (see PD, Register of Shtarot from Fez, entry #7, 12 Tammuz 5694/ 25 June 1934).
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