304 r Jessica Marglin
Although not a source of contempt, everyone considered poverty
shameful for those who experienced it. The shame of the poor forms a
trope in the taqanot, whether because they could not afford certain plea-
sures in life or because they were unable to reciprocate the generosity of
friends and relatives.^36 Humiliation clung closest to those who fell into
temporary poverty. Jews who had some sort of income felt acutely the
indignity of being unable to afford lavish celebrations or send appropri-
ate gifts. Those who were permanently destitute, on the other hand, were
unlikely to even consider such luxuries in their struggle to merely stay
alive.^37 Letters from the community of Meknes to the Alliance Israélite
Universelle (AIU) explicitly recount the humiliation of Jews who were
plunged into poverty by political turbulence.^38 The experience of poor
Jews in medieval Cairo exhibits a similar pattern, with the suddenly im-
poverished far more ashamed than their permanently destitute coreligion-
ists.^39 Although the permanently poor were undoubtedly also humiliated
by their poverty, those hovering on the edge of destitution experienced a
different quality of shame, one that compounded the lack of riches with
the loss of social status.
Jewish attitudes toward the poor in Meknes often reflected the Muslim
context in which they developed, as did their organization of charity. Yet
Jewish leaders’ strategies of poor relief also exhibited significant differ-
ences related to characteristics of their leadership structure.
Meknes’s Jewish Leadership and the Organization of Charity
How did the Jewish leaders of Meknes respond to poverty? What can the
organization and regulation of charity tell us about their leadership? As in
Jewish communities across the world, the leaders of Meknes’s Jewish com-
munity considered it their religious responsibility to provide relief and
sustenance for those defined as “poor” both locally and abroad. Yet be-
yond this religious injunction, the control of charity constituted a strategy
by which Jewish leaders asserted and reaffirmed their temporal authority.
In reconstructing how charity operated among the Jews of Meknes,
I draw comparisons with Jewish and Muslim communities throughout
the Middle East. In general, the Jews of Meknes, like other Jewish com-
munities in the region, centralized the distribution of charity more than
did Muslims. Indeed, in his study of eighteenth-century Aleppo, Abra-
ham Marcus contrasts non-Muslims’ tendency toward centralization with