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

collection of debts, testimonials concerning inheritance, and the like. 10 Overall, the documents
suggest that the Assarrafs, their associates, and indeed most Moroccan Jews used sharī‘a courts
primarily for notarial purposes. 11 This is not surprising for a number of reasons. Most
commercial relationships did not require litigation in court. Moreover, scholars working on the
medieval and early modern periods have also observed that Jews mainly used sharī‘a courts for
notarial purposes. 12 Finally, Muslims, like their Jewish neighbors, also primarily employed the
notarial services of sharī‘a courts. 13
The remaining documents (about 25%) are litigious—that is, entries related to lawsuits.
All of these lawsuits also concerned some sort of commercial transaction—usually debts—and
thus are intimately linked to the notarial documents which make up the rest of the collection.
Nonetheless, they represent a different kind of experience in court, one in which Jews appeared
as plaintiffs or defendants rather than as neutral parties in contracts. Nearly half of the litigious
documents concern guarantees, an integral part of the litigation process in Moroccan sharī‘a
courts: 14 debtors provided guarantors that they would pay their debts and defendants provided
guarantors that they would appear in court. Other types of litigious documents include the initial
10 I labeled a total of 43 entries as “miscellaneous,” or 2% of the total.
11 The documents I examined from other collections also reflect the primacy of notarial use. Out of a total of 295
documents from three different collections, I counted only six which concerned lawsuits and can be thought of as
litigious; the rest were all notarial documents (again, mostly debts, but also property rentals and sales, partnerships,
releases, etc.).
12 For instance, Richard Wittmann looks at how Jews in seventeenth-century Istanbul used the local sharī‘a court;
although he limits his inquiry to intra-Jewish cases, it is nonetheless significant that the records he examines shows
Jews appearing in court for notarial matters 59% of the time: Wittmann, “Before Qadi and Vizier,” 71. Najwa al-
Qattan also observes that non-Muslims in Damascus used the sharī‘a court for notarial purposes, though she does
not indicate the relative frequency of this type of use: Al-Qattan, “Dhimmis in the Muslim Court,” 429. Amnon
Cohen does not discuss the relative frequency of notarial vs. litigious documents; in his synthesis he emphasizes the
litigious functions of the court (Cohen, Jewish Life under Islam, 110-13). However, his four volumes of documents
about Jews culled from the archives of the sharī‘a court of Ottoman Jerusalem contain many notarial documents.
For the medieval period, see Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, v. 2, 400; Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine, 634-
1099 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 168.
13 Although no extensive research on the socio-legal history of Moroccan Muslims exists, scholars working on the
legal history of the Ottoman Empire have shown that the notarial functions of the qāḍī courts were just as important,
if not more so, than their litigious functions. See, e.g., Peirce, Morality Tales, 88-9.
14 There are a total of 249 entries related to guarantees (about 13% of the total).
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