A Study of Jewish Communal Leadership in Meknes, 1750–1912 r 303many Jewish and Muslim scholars who received charity were relatively
well off.^26
The leaders of Meknes’s Jewish community had a clear sense of who
merited the title “poor” and thus who was entitled to charity. But how
did Meknes’s Jewish leaders relate to poverty, and what did they consider
their responsibilities toward the poor? It is best to begin by examining
the larger Middle Eastern context in which Moroccan Jewish attitudes
toward poverty were situated. In the early modern period—that is, before
European ideas about poverty took root across the Mediterranean—Jews,
Muslims, and Christians in the Middle East viewed poverty as a natural
aspect of society. In Miriam Hoexter’s analysis of Muslim charity in eigh-
teenth-century Algiers, she points out that “the existence of poor people
in the community was conceived of as a permanent fact.”^27 Poverty was
not a blight that an ideal society could theoretically eradicate. On the con-
trary, the very nature of Islamic pious endowments (in Arabic, waqf, pl.
awqāf, or habs, pl. hubūs), which constituted the most important form of
charity among Muslims, rests on the assumption of poverty’s permanence
in Muslim society. Awqāf invariably include the clause that when the line
of beneficiaries dies out, the endowment reverts to the poor.^28
Middle Eastern Jews—including Meknes’s Jewish leaders—similarly
conceived of poverty as a permanent state that God commanded them to
do their best to ease.^29 Although Jews in the Ottoman Empire sometimes
took a negative attitude toward beggars, they ultimately viewed poverty
as an inevitable evil that they were responsible for alleviating.^30 Like most
Muslims, the Jewish leadership of Meknes assumed that poverty would al-
ways exist.^31 In the late nineteenth century, these attitudes toward poverty
began to change.
The view of poverty as a natural aspect of society influenced the way in
which the Jews of Meknes viewed poor individuals. Jews around the world
considered it their religious duty to give charity.^32 Nonetheless, in Europe
and the Middle East, many Jews looked down on the poor as inferior and
deserving of contempt. Ben-Naeh points out that although rabbis in the
Ottoman Empire encouraged Jews to have pity on the poor, it was never-
theless common for the rich to abuse the less fortunate.^33 Meknes’s Jewish
leaders exhibited only concern for the poor in their writings, whom they
portrayed as innocent victims of fate.^34 Their oft-repeated injunctions to
give charity reminded their community that giving was among the most
important responsibilities that Jews must perform.^35