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

and Muḥammad would return the money (although it is not clear what price was ultimately
settled upon). 4 At the very least, Maymon recuperated some of his losses thanks to the lawsuit.
This was due in part to the power of the sharī‘a court to convince individuals to settle cases.
Maymon’s success was probably also due to his uncle’s expertise in Islamic law and legal
procedure; as we shall see in what follows, Shalom was quite familiar with the workings of
sharī‘a courts and undoubtedly drew on this knowledge in helping to get his nephew a fair
settlement.
The fate of Maymon Assarraf’s copper earrings is ultimately of less import than what this
case tells us about how Jews like Maymon and Shalom used the sharī‘a court to facilitate their
commercial endeavors. This chapter and the next explore the ways in which Jews in nineteenth-
century Morocco engaged the services of sharī‘a courts on a day-to-day basis. In this chapter I
address how Jews frequented sharī‘a courts within the limits of the jurisdictional divisions
mandated by Islamic law, which required that all cases involving Jews and Muslims be judged
according to the precepts of the sharī‘a. Inter-religious matters were by far the most common
cases which brought Jews to sharī‘a courts. Although the blurring of jurisdictional lines was by
no means rare, it was nonetheless the norm for Jews to bring most intra-Jewish cases to rabbinic
courts and most inter-religious cases to sharī‘a courts.
The Assarraf collection provides a glimpse of how one Jewish family—and especially the
family’s patriarch, Shalom—employed the services of the local qāḍīs and ‘udūl. In analyzing
this collection, I show that Jews were a regular presence in sharī‘a courts. I also demonstrate
that their experiences before qāḍīs and ‘udūl were not dramatically different from those of
Muslims. Islamic law was largely applied to dhimmīs in the same way it was applied to
4
The settlement is recorded on the back of the lawsuit; I infer that it is a settlement rather than a judgment both
because the document does not include the qāḍī’s decision or the qāḍī’s signature (it is only signed by ‘udūl).
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