318 r Jessica Marglin
10.k.1, Community of Meknes to AIU, 1 Adar 5668 (1908); AIU Maroc XXXII E 549,
Moyal to AIU, June 21, 1911.
- See Ben Hasin’s letter, in which he lists 100 householders of “the elderly, religious
scholars, and the weak” who received communal charity on a regular basis. Amar, Taqa-
not, 421. - Ibid., 421–23. Although Ben Hasin’s letter dates from 1900, the similarities be-
tween the categories he uses and those of Jewish communities elsewhere make it likely
that these definitions were relevant throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
See Ben-Naeh, “Poverty,” 154. - Amar, Taqanot, 423.
- A taqanah from 1881 instructs that funds collected every six months were to be
distributed to “those passing and to those staying.” Ibid., 258; see also 276. - See Ben Hasin’s letter in which he includes “the elderly, religious scholars, and the
weak,” all of whom received charity, in one category. Ibid., 421. - Hoexter, “Charity, the Poor, and Distribution of Alms in Ottoman Algiers,” in
Poverty and Charity in Middle Eastern Contexts, ed. Michael David Bonner, Mine Ener,
and Amy Singer (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 150. - Ruth Roded, “Great Mosques, Zawiyas, and Neighborhood Mosques: Popular
Beneficiaries of Waqf Endowments in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Aleppo,”
Journal of the American Oriental Society 110, no. 1 (1990): 32–33; Amy Singer, Construct-
ing Ottoman Beneficence: An Imperial Soup Kitchen in Jerusalem (Albany: SUNY Press,
2002), 28; Eyal Ginio, “Living on the Margins of Charity,” in Poverty and Charity in
Middle Eastern Contexts (note 23 above), 169; Adam Sabra, Poverty and Charity in Me-
dieval Islam: Mamluk Egypt, 1250–1517 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
- Miriam Hoexter notes that the inclusion of learned men in the category of the
poor extended to Jews and Christians in the Middle East. Hoexter, “Charity,” 151. See also
Ephraim Frisch, An Historical Survey of Jewish Philanthropy: From the Earliest Times to
the Nineteenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 116–17. - A letter from the AIU schoolteacher sent to open the (failed) school in Meknes in
1902 claimed that of the 219 recipients of charity at least 36 were rich scholars. He enu-
merated another 27 relatives of scholars who were not poor but received charity anyway.
AIU Maroc XXXII E 561, Valadji to AIU, January 14, 1902. - Hoexter, “Charity,” 148. See also Sabra, Poverty and Charity, 174.
- See, e.g., Powers, “The Maliki Family Endowment,” 384; Singer, Constructing Otto-
man Beneficence, 31; Hoexter, “Charity,” 148. See also Sabra’s chapter on awqāf in Mamluk
Cairo: Poverty and Charity, chap. 4. - See especially Frisch’s chapter on the ruling principles and ideals behind Jewish
charity: Frisch, An Historical Survey of Jewish Philanthropy, chap. 4. - Ben-Naeh, “Poverty,” 175–76.
- For instance, the community referred to “the poor” (ha- ̔aniyim) as a permanent
social category, such as in specifications of fines that would be donated to the poor. See
Amar, Taqanot, 29, 85, 217, 385.