This paper re-evaluates foreigners’ interventions in the policy of the Moroccan government regarding its Jewish subjects in the late nineteenth century. Drawing mainly on correspondence among Moroccan state officials held in the Moroccan archives, this paper attempts to situate European (and to a lesser extent American) diplomatic pressure on the Moroccan state to reform its treatment of Jews in the context of relations between Jews and the state. The paper argues that foreigners’ preconceptions about Islam led many consular officials to act on the assumption that Jews were by and large victims of Islamic injustice. This approach often led them to conclude that any Jew punished by the Moroccan authorities was innocent and had not received a fair trial. The Moroccan archives, however, show that often the so-called abuses of the state were in fact the normal functioning of Islamic law. The paper examines a few key incidents as examples of the ways in which the Moroccan state tried to respect the injunctions of Islamic law despite accusations of injustice. Perhaps even more importantly, many Jews recognized the authority of Islamic law, and believed that the Islamic legal system was one which could grant them justice. Jews did not necessarily accept the discourse of Europeans that Western civilization had a monopoly on justice, and thus that Jews’ only path in their pursuit of justice was through European intervention. Nonetheless, there is no question that some Jews appealed to Europeans to put pressure on the Moroccan government in various instances. However, the evidence from the archives suggests that Jews rarely saw foreigners as their only option to attain redress. Jews sought to maximize their chances in their pursuit of justice, and thus often appealed to diplomats alongside their appeals to Moroccan government officials. Asking foreigners for help did not necessarily mean that the Jews concerned believed the Moroccan state was fundamentally unjust. This study draws on legal theories such as forum shopping in order to help understand Moroccan Jews’ choices about avenues of appeal. Rather than seeing Jews’ relationships with foreign powers as exclusive or ideologically based, this paper attempts to paint a picture of Jews as maximizing their chances of success by simultaneously pursuing multiple courses of action.