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

court approximately once a week, either to have a legal document drawn up and notarized by
‘udūl or to pursue a lawsuit in which he was involved. 19
Let us follow Shalom through a few months at the local sharī‘a court to get a sense of
how these averages played out in reality. In the year 1283 AH (1866-7), Shalom appeared before
‘udūl—and occasionally before a qāḍī as well—a total of 42 times. Most of these appearances
were in order to notarize bills of debt. For instance, he went before ‘udūl to testify that a Muslim
owed him money—and receive a legal document attesting this—on Wednesday, May 16, 1866;
again on Friday, June 1; twice on Wednesday, June 20; 20 again on Thursday, July 19; again on
Thursday, August 9; and once again on Wednesday, August 15. Then, on August 29, Shalom
sued Ibn al-Dīn (?) b. ‘Āmir al-Ḥasāwī al-‘Agabī in the sharī‘a court, claiming that al-Ḥasāwī
owed him 125 mithqāls. 21 On Thursday, September 13, a Muslim guaranteed the appearance of
another Muslim in court with Shalom—presumably one against whom Shalom had a claim of
some sort. Before May 4, 1867 (the last day of 1283 AH), Shalom would return to the court 33
more times—for debts, lawsuits, guarantees, and once to release a Muslim associate from further
claims (though I will not bore readers with the details of each of these appearances).
The fact that Shalom Assarraf appeared before ‘udūl or a qāḍī on average once a week
during his most active years as a businessman should not be surprising given that scholars have
long noted that Jews used sharī‘a courts for commercial transactions involving Muslims.
19
Of course, it is also possible that Shalom went to a sharī‘a court even more often than these documents show,
since this collection may be incomplete (perhaps because Shalom did not always conserve a paper record of his
activities in court and/or because some of these documents have subsequently been lost).
20
I did not record the names of the debtors for these particular documents, thus there is no way to know whether
both bills of debt were for the same person. Although I found some instances in the Assarraf collection in which a
Jewish creditor drew up multiple bills of debt for the same debtor on a single day, I also found many cases in which
the creditor appeared before ‘udūl to notarize debts owed by different debtors on a single day.
21
In fact, Shalom claimed that al-Ḥasāwī owed him the money for a debt originally owed by al-Sahalī b. ‘Abdallāh
al-Ḥimyānī; presumably al-Ḥasāwī had agreed to guarantee the debt, although this was not specified in the
document itself.
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