314 r Jessica Marglin
in order to prevent further outbreaks of cholera such as the one suffered
two years earlier.^105 Jewish leaders often organized such public health proj-
ects in cooperation with European diplomats.^106
The AIU had an impact on the way charity was organized in Meknes
even before its first teachers arrived in the city. Although the AIU’s main
purpose was educational, at times of crisis the organization collected
emergency funds from wealthy European Jews and sent them to commu-
nities in need. In the late nineteenth century, the Jewish leaders of Meknes
began writing to the AIU asking for such funds and received sizeable do-
nations at least twice.^107
In 1902, the communal leaders of Meknes asked the AIU to found a
school in their city. The school would, they hoped, relieve the financial
hardships experienced by so many of the community’s poorer members.^108
But the AIU’s arrival sparked a fierce controversy between Meknes’s lead-
ers and the AIU. The debate was about more than charity, as the AIU
broadly challenged the authority of Meknes’s communal leaders.^109 Yet the
fact that the ensuing storm centered on questions of charity reveals the
extent to which the control of poverty relief was intertwined with com-
munal authority in Meknes.
The controversy erupted over the community’s pledge to contribute
30 duoros monthly to the AIU school, a sum that came from the tax on
kosher meat which normally went to the poor and the scholars of the
city. Although the community leaders of Meknes initially agreed to dedi-
cate this sum to the cause of the AIU school, the vocal complaints of the
city’s scholars and other recipients of relief soon made them regret their
decision:
Bands of poor devils, no doubt counseled by Rabbi Shlomo Ber-
dugo and Menachem Benabou, crisscrossed the Mellah, crying, “We
want the thirty duoros, we are dying of hunger, we no longer want a
school that takes our bread and gives us nothing.”^110The communal leaders even wrote to the AIU pleading with the Central
Committee to release them of their monthly obligation, claiming that “the
poor are crying out, saying, ‘Give us bread!’”^111
The two camps—that of M. and Mme. Valadji (the schoolteachers),
the AIU Central Committee in Paris, and a few Meknesi Jews on the one
side, and the leaders of Meknes, scholars, and the poor on the other—
understood the significance of the thirty duoros very differently.^112 From