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

allegation or deposition in a case (called the maqāl in Arabic). The rest of the litigious
documents usually followed the initial allegation in a case and were recorded on the same sheet
of paper as the maqāl; these include the plea of the defendant, the rulings of the court (such as
requesting more evidence, demanding proof, etc.), and testimony concerning facts of the case. 15
A Year at Court with Shalom Assarraf
The frequency with which Jews appeared in sharī‘a court naturally depended on a
number of factors, especially profession and social class. The Assarraf collection offers a
glimpse of how Shalom Assarraf used his local sharī‘a courts over nearly forty years. I focus on
Shalom’s use of the court because he appears far more often than any other individual in the
documents from the Assarraf collection: Shalom is mentioned in 1,013 out of a total of 1,930
separate entries. 16 His son Ya‘aqov is a distant second with only 458 entries to his name. It is
possible that the family acquired more sharī‘a court documents which did not end up in the
collection in Professor Tobi’s possession. Yet missing documents would only mean that Shalom
frequented the sharī‘a court even more often than our collection indicates.
15
I counted a total of 235 such litigious documents that were not guarantees (about 12% of the total).
16
By “concerned,” I mean that Shalom was defendant, plaintiff, or party to a contract and was thus present when the
document was drawn up. This is somewhat less clear for individual documents in which a guarantor is provided for
Shalom’s adversary in court; in these cases, Shalom is mentioned by name though it is not always made explicit that
he was present when the document was drawn up. Nonetheless, I am treating even these documents as instances in
which Shalom was also present at court, since the fact that he came into possession of the document implies that he
was present during the proceedings.
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