The Convergence of Judaism and Islam: Religious, Scientific, and Cultural Dimensions

16. Poverty and Charity in a Moroccan City: A Study of Jewish Communal Leadership in Meknes,1750–1912

16 Poverty and Charity in a Moroccan City A Study of Jewish Communal Leadership in Meknes, 1750–1912 Jessica Marglin The leaders of Meknes’s Jewish community in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries faced a number of pressing issues, such as contentious inheritance disputes and the maintenance of a delicate relationship with the Muslim authorities. Yet undoubtedly caring for the community’s poor constituted one of the most burning responsibilities facing this city’s Jewish leadership. The sheer number of community ordinances (taqanot) passed concerning poverty and charity testify to its centrality in the eyes of Meknes’s leaders. In a collection of seventy-three taqanot enacted between 1750 and 1912, thirty-four concern poverty and charity.1 Understanding the nature of Jewish communal leadership in Meknes requires investigating the challenge that most concerned Meknes’s Jewish leaders —their responsibilities toward the community’s poor. Drawing mainly from taqanot, but also from responsa literature (she’elot u-teshuvot) and other communal and archival records, this essay explores how the Jewish leaders of Meknes responded to the needs of the poorest members of their community.2 In so doing, I address two separate but intertwined issues. I investigate the history of poverty and charity in Meknes and use the lens of poverty relief to examine the nature of Jewish leadership there. A close study of the texts produced by the Jewish leaders of Meknes reveals that the control of charity constituted a strategy with which these leaders asserted and consolidated their authority. While the responsibility 300 r Jessica Marglin to provide for the Jewish poor in Meknes was undoubtedly religiously motivated, charity also served a political function. Far from observing a strict secular/religious divide, Jewish leaders combined the pious and strategic roles of poor relief. Beyond analyzing charity as a political tool, I ground practices of charity in their historical context. Looking at other Jewish communities in the Middle East and Europe, I draw comparisons in order to shed light on the nature of Jewish communal leadership. Beyond the Jewish community , I point out similarities and differences between Jewish and Muslim practices, although I shy away from claims concerning where these norms originated.3 Temporally, I situate changing practices of charity in the transformations sparked by increasing contact with Europe in the late nineteenth century. Meknes provides good ground for such a case study, though the differences among various Moroccan Jewish communities make drawing general conclusions about Moroccan Jews difficult.4 Rather, this inquiry contributes to emerging studies of poverty, charity, and Jewish leadership in the Middle East more broadly. In particular I build upon the work of Yaron Ben-Naeh and Mark Cohen, who as yet are the only scholars to write on poverty and charity among Middle Eastern Jews.5 Although studies of Muslim responses to poverty are more plentiful (especially concerning the legal and religious aspects of charity), relatively few scholars have turned their attention to the social history of poverty and charity. Unfortunately, no such studies exist for the Moroccan context.6 In order to contextualize the case of Meknes, I thus rely primarily on studies of communities elsewhere in the Middle East, particularly the Ottoman Empire . A full-scale comparison with Moroccan Muslim practice would involve original research using Muslim sources, which is beyond the scope of this inquiry. Nevertheless, I draw preliminary conclusions about the relationship between Meknes and Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities in the region. The Jews of Meknes in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Meknes’s greatest claim to fame is its royal status (which it shares with Fez and Marrakech). Chosen by the sultan Mulay Ismail as his new capital in 1672, Meknes reached the height of its renown in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It did not take long for this new capital to A Study of Jewish Communal Leadership in Meknes, 1750–1912 r 301 replace Fez as the center of Jewish learning in Morocco.7 Although by the late nineteenth century both Meknes and its Jewish community had declined in importance, it nevertheless remained a vibrant hub of Moroccan Jewish life. Most accounts agree that by the turn of the twentieth century, the city’s Jews numbered about six thousand.8 The leadership of the Jewish community of Meknes followed patterns found in many other Moroccan cities. At the top of the pyramid, the va῾ad (or the ma῾amad), a council of...