Reuben and David Ben Qīqī were court Jews in early eighteenth-century Morocco under the Alawid sultan Mawlāy Ismāʿīl (r. 1672–1727). Appointed to the rank of nagid, they were, respectively, the secular leaders of the Jewish communities of Meknes and Rabat. Meknès had been a major Jewish business center since the final quarter of the seventeenth century, when Sultan Mawlāy Ismāʿīl made it his capital. Jewish businessmen—traders, customs officials, and entrepreneurs—had great influence at court. The Meknasi scholar Mordecai ben Joseph Berdugo (1715–1762), known by his Hebrew …