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Poverty and Charity in a Moroccan City
A Study of Jewish Communal Leadership in Meknes,
1750–1912Jessica MarglinThe leaders of Meknes’s Jewish community in the eighteenth and nine-
teenth 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 Jew-
ish 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 be-
tween 1750 and 1912, thirty-four concern poverty and charity.^1 Under -
standing the nature of Jewish communal leadership in Meknes requires
investigating the challenge that most concerned Meknes’s Jewish lead-
ers—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