The Judge (Part 3)

There was one Jewish chamber in the religious court in Bousaid, the city nearest the valley that Harun Margi grew up in. The Kings had, since time immemorial, allowed the various religious communities under Their domain to settle their disputes according to their own law. With the coming of the Western legal system with the French and the Spanish, the courts that tried age-old murders and robberies and the variety of felonies that had only come about with the modern world were secularized. The Ministry of Justice even removed the Quranic verses from their statement of values and principles.

The declining religiosity of the other members of the King’s government scared Sheikh Toufik Abdelkrim, Minister of Islamic Affairs. After making his name as a member of the religious resistance to the Vichy occupation, Sheikh Abdelkrim had begun to gently push for a religious government after the war. Recognizing the potential power of his message amongst the many people who had been left destitute and homeless in the great cities of the country, Interior Minister Idrisi and the King had offered him a chance to head a new Ministry instead of a revolution. When the smoldering wreckage of his car accompanied his refusal, he realized his mind had been made up.

To placate Sheikh Abdelkrim, the Minister of Justice and Minister Idrisi allowed the new civil court system, which would hear cases of contracts and divorces and estates and other things that everyone knew had been handed down from God since time immemorial, to be maintained as religious.

There were hundreds of Islamic courtrooms up and down the mountains and the valleys all the way to the ocean or the desert. Even the smallest village had one, often in the train station or the post office, which Postes Watany had often subleased portions of for cafes. The ones in the large cities were palaces of justice the equal of any in the developed West, presided over by the most esteemed scholars of the age. A wildly popular soap opera had been made about the lives of the young judges who traversed the mountain passes, dispensing a day of justice a month in the smaller towns. The career of the actress Aisha Saadi had been launched by her star turn as a Judge struggling to help mountain villagers reject the land grabs of a Polish real estate speculator.

In a couple of the mountain towns on the border, there were animist courthouses, built on old burial mounds, where a holy man would dance himself into a trance in a smoke-filled room, and then render judgements on mineral rights worth millions of dinars to corporations and the sheepherders who eked out a survival existence in the hills. There was also a single Christian chamber in the north, in Ciudad Moros, which had been especially receptive to Spanish colonialism. In Ciudad Moros and in Bousaid and in Quart and in and in Dar Al-Aswad, the capital, were Jewish ones. The King was especially keen to demonstrate his toleration of other religions, news of his torture chambers, newspaper closures, and refusal to open to democracy was beginning to travel the long and winding road to the ears of lawmakers in nations that produced aid and arms. Freedom of religious practice was one of the few things that kept the arms flowing, he told Minister Idrisi, and Idrisi in turn reminded Sheikh Abdelkrim that his position depended on the continued power of the King, so the Ministry of Islamic Affairs continued to sanction these courts.

In 1965, when he returned from Yeshiva University, Harun Margi spent a year apprenticing under Bousaid’s Jewish Judge, Yusuf Benyisroel. The old man, who had been reading and interpreting Halakha, rulings of Jewish law, for four kings, retired with the encouragement of Interior Minister Idrisi, and made Aliyah to Israel, and Harun Margi was The Judge now, and not even 30 years old.

Being The Judge gave him a respected place among the Rabbinate of North Africa, but it did not give him the wisdom of the sages. His knowledge of Torah was second-to-none, but old farmers and middle-aged businessmen and squat little housewives could all out-argue him in French, a language he never had much of in the first place. He couldn’t ask them to conduct their own proceedings in his native Tamazigt, most of the Jewry of the city was bilingual in French and Arabic, and preferred to argue in French.

He had not been a judge for a whole year in June of 1967. One morning started with a bitter divorce. The Judge reminded both parties of the verse in Deuteronomy which calls for the bird to be left alone if it is sitting on eggs in the nest, that they should remember that they are both birds sitting on nests. He was finishing the speech when a Gendarme came into the courtroom.

The Judge called the Gendarme up to the bench, and learned that war had been declared. The Gendarme told him that the court would not sit until the war was over and, holding The Judge’s hand, asked for God's mercy.