Massacre of the mellah during the overthrow of the Marinids

The last Marinid sultan, 'Abd al-Ḥaqq II, had entrusted his administration to a Jewish vizier, Aaron ben Batash, and the fiscal pressure exerted on the cities was attributed to him. The revolt began in Fès, led by the sharifs and the notables of the medina.

The sultan and his vizier were put to death, and the crowd turned on the mellah, established a generation earlier. Hebrew accounts and Moroccan chronicles agree: the community was almost entirely annihilated, and the survivors owed their lives only to conversion.

The violence spread to other cities of the kingdom. Moroccan Judaism recovered in the following century, strengthened by the expellees from Spain — the *megorashim* — whose arrival would transform the communities of Fès, Meknès, and Tétouan.