A Study of Jewish Communal Leadership in Meknes, 1750–1912 r 307a lump-sum were unregulated.^60 Yet in the 1820s a series of taqanot fixed
certain holidays during which the Jews of Meknes were encouraged to
donate to particular cities.^61 The community also prescribed donations to
the various qupot in honor of family celebrations. In 1886, for example, the
leaders decreed that every woman who gave birth should donate to Qupat
Rahel Imeinu (the collection box of Rachel the Matriarch), which went to
poor Jews in Palestine.^62
Communal leaders did not control only voluntary donations; they also
saddled their constituents with obligatory contributions, which they col-
lected primarily through an extensive taxation system. At various points
the leadership of Meknes’s Jews levied taxes on kosher meat and kosher
wine, the revenues of which went entirely to the poor.^63 The tax on kosher
meat to benefit the poor (the gabella) dates to the early modern period in
Morocco; in 1603, the rabbis of Fez renewed it in a taqanah.^64 A treasurer
was responsible for collecting these taxes and distributing the funds to the
poor. Ottoman Jews levied similar taxes on kosher meat.^65 Taxation, one
of the most direct affirmations of governmental power, exemplifies the
close connection between authority and charity in Meknes.
Though central to Jewish leaders’ strategy for regulating charity, the
levying of taxes was probably secondary in import to the tax exemptions
they administered. The major tax on the Jews of Meknes was the jizya, the
poll tax required of all dhimmi subjects residing in Muslim lands. Com-
munal leaders exempted men of religion from contributing to the pay-
ment of the jizya. A taqanah from 1800 stridently reprimands those who
tried to make talmidei hakhamim contribute during a year when the jizya
was particularly high.^66 The authors conceded, however, that if a scholar
was engaged in his profession more than in the study of Torah, then the
exemption did not apply. Others were supposed to contribute to the jizya
“as much as they were able,” which meant that those with means paid the
taxes owed by the destitute.^67 In order to enforce this system, Jewish lead-
ers enacted a number of taqanot designed to prevent tax evasion.^68 The
custom of exempting men of religion and the poor from taxes was also
practiced in Fez at least through the seventeenth century and in the Otto-
man Empire through the early nineteenth.^69
While taxes proved the most visible way in which the regulation of
charity reinforced Jewish leaders’ authority, they were equally careful to
manage other sources of poor relief. The pious endowments (heqdeshim)—
buildings or leases on buildings consecrated as sources of income for the