Out now with
Yale University Press is Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco by Jessica M.
Marglin, University of Southern
California. From the publisher:
A previously untold story of Jewish-Muslim relations in modern Morocco, showing
how law facilitated Jews’ integration into the broader Moroccan society in which they lived.
Morocco went through immense upheaval in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the experiences of a single Jewish family, Jessica Marglin charts how the law helped Jews to integrate into Muslim society—until colonial reforms abruptly curtailed their legal mobility. Drawing on a broad range of archival documents, Marglin expands our understanding of contemporary relations between Jews and Muslims and changes the way we think about Jewish history, the Middle East, and the nature of legal pluralism.
Praise for
the book:
“Jessica
Marglin has achieved nothing less than a complete revision of the way that we
view the Moroccan legal system in the late nineteenth century from the
viewpoint of its Muslim and Jewish clients.” -Susan Gilson Miller
“This is an
important book that deserves a wide readership. Through a vivid portrait of a
Jewish family’s entanglement with the law in pre-colonial Morocco, it puts to
rest die-hard tales about colonial modernization and the perennial animosity
between Muslims and Jews.” -Francesca Trivellato
“With great
erudition, insight, and empathy, Marglin dexterously charts a cultural world of
precolonial North Africa in which individuals navigate a complex legal
landscape. This is an essential book for scholars of North African and Middle
Eastern Jewries, Morocco, the cultural history of law, and the legal history of
culture.” -Sarah Abrevaya Stein
"Jessica
Marglin's pathbreaking book sheds dramatic new light on the social, economic,
and legal history of nineteenth century Morocco. Marglin deftly reconstructs
the everyday ties by which Muslim and Jewish law and litigants accommodated
each other in an unequal but integrated society." -James McDougall
More
information is available here.
