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Daniel J. Schroeter. The Sultan's Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. xxii + 240 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $55.00. Cloth.
There is already a vast literature devoted to the Jewish experience in the Arab and Islamic worlds, including translated primary sources, scholarly studies of various communities, biographies and autobiographies, surveys of Jewish-Arab and Jewish-Muslim relations, literary and linguistic studies, gender studies, legal studies, studies of modernization and political development, memoirs of life before 1948, even memoirs-cum-cookbooks. More is certain to be written, given the vast paper trail left by Jewish communities as well as the politically charged nature of contemporary Jewish-Arab and Jewish-Muslim relations. Among this huge library a handful of remarkable books stand out, able to evoke time and place as well as highlighting the ambiguities, contradictions, and ironies of Jewish life. Daniel Schroeter's The Sultan's Jew is one such book. Focusing on the life of an important merchant, Meir Macnin (d.1835), Schroeter is able to reveal an enormous amount not only about a Jewish community, but also the worlds it inhabited: Moroccan, Mediterranean, and European. A model of historical interpretation, it is also a delight to read: compelling, concise, and utterly devoid of jargon.
The Sultan's Jew follows the author's earlier book, Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco (Cambridge, 1988). Based substantially on Macnin family papers recently discovered in Paris, it forms the first part of a projected two-volume study of the transformation of the Moroccan Jewish community in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With its emphasis on the complexities and paradoxes...