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

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Qarawīyīn, especially since we know that they often went there for the services of the qāḍī al-<br />

quḍā.<br />

* * *<br />

The peregrinations of Jews like Ya‘aqov Assarraf from sharī‘a court to beit din and back<br />

again in many ways encapsulate the kinds of legal choices which Jews made in nineteenth-<br />

century Morocco. Although Jews frequently turned to their own legal institutions for their<br />

quotidian legal needs, this did not preclude visits to other venues. The remainder of Part One<br />

explores how Jews used sharī‘a courts and what their experience in those courts was like.<br />

Approaching Jews’ legal strategies from a lens which assumes the existence of multiple and<br />

competing legal venues allows us to escape the old paradigm of Jewish legal autonomy.<br />

Ya‘aqov Assarraf clearly was not isolated within the jurisdictional walls of the Jewish legal<br />

system. In order to understand the full range of his legal activities and those of his coreligionists,<br />

we must follow him outside the millāḥ and into the legal institutions of the society in which he<br />

lived.<br />

66

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