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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35.1 (2004) 174-175



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The Sultan's Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World. By Daniel J. Schroeter (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002) 240 pp. $55.00

Ostensibly a biography, this book is actually a wide-ranging socioeconomic and political history of several discrete but nonetheless interconnected phenomena: the dynamics of Muslim-Jewish relations in Sharifan Morocco, the relationship of Moroccan Jewry to the larger Sephardi world, and the interface between Morocco and Western Europe during an axial period of transition that extended from the late eighteenth century into the early nineteenth. Schroeter draws the diverse strands of this complex tapestry together with a masterful combination of meticulous, critical scholarship and artistry.

The principal subject of the book is Meir Macnin, a Jew from Marrakesh who became the most important of all the tujjar al-sultan (the royal merchants) who served the 'Alawi rulers of Morocco, Mulay Sulayman and Mulay 'Abd al-Rahman. In addition to being the chief intermediary for trade between Morocco and Europe, he also frequently acted in a diplomatic capacity, particularly in England where he lived from 1800 to about 1817 and returned on occasion until his death in 1835. At the height of his career, Macnin was declared, in a decree read aloud to the entire European consular corps in Tangier, to be Mulay [End Page 174] 'Abd al-Rahman's "Consul and Ambassador to all the Christian Nations" with the authority to appoint representatives in the various countries. But as Schroeter astutely points out, such power and authority were relative and indeed precarious. For all of their prestige and despite their government-protected opportunities for profit, the tujjar al-sultan were highly vulnerable individuals. They never really acted as free agents. Funded by royal loans in cash and kind, living in homes leased by the Makhzan (the Moroccan state), they were subject to vagaries of the ruler's commercial policies, whims, and frequent need for cash. Confiscation of their property, imprisonment, or worse hung over their heads like a sword of Damocles.

The Jewish royal merchants were doubly vulnerable since they were ahl al-dhimma, tolerated minority protégés of the Muslim ruler who often referred to such agents as "Our Jews." Like the Jewish factors of the European nobility in the Middle Ages, they could be the convenient lightening rod for popular animus in times of social unrest. In Schroeter's view, the overall nature of this Muslim-Jewish relationship in the Moroccan context was one of ambivalence. In the first chapter of the book, he provides an excellent historiographic and sociological survey of the long-running and often polemical academic debate on realities of dhimma in Islamic societies.

Schroeter uses the life of Macnin as a window upon his times. We see Macnin in London during the period when "a significant number of Jews were assimilating into the mainstream of English society" (76). Many of these Jews were part of the Sephardi elite, and he was readily accepted into their midst. He was appointed an officer of the Bevis Marks Synagogue, though he himself never learned English well and had a rather unsavory reputation for his business practices and debts among British gentiles. Schroeter provides informative vignettes and cameo portraits of other members of the Sephardi mercantile class in Britain and Morocco, and the ties of business and marriage that bound them together. Macnin operated within a Sephardi social and economic network with hubs in London, Amsterdam, Marseilles, Gibraltar, Livorno, the commercial entrepots of North Africa, and the Levant, as well as the New World. In Schroeter's view, this was the very twilight of this Sephardi world order. With emancipation, European Sephardi Jews identified with their nation-states and not Nossa Nação (Our [Sephardi] Nation) and, like their compatriots, came to view the Jews of the Muslim world as "Orientals."


University of Oklahoma


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