The revolt in Fes: a Jewish vizier, an attack on the mellah, and the end of the Marinids

Sultan ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq II, the last Marinid, broke the power of the Wattasid viziers in 1458 and appointed as vizier Hārūn ibn Baṭāsh (Aharon ben Batash)—a Jew, who filled offices with his co-religionists. In a Muslim capital this was deeply unpopular.

The trigger, as transmitted, was that the vizier's kinsman Shāwīl ibn Baṭāsh, acting as governor, insulted and struck a sharīfa, a woman of the Prophet's lineage; a preacher called for jihad, and the sharifian notables of Fes el-Bali rose. On 18 May 1465 ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq II was lynched at a slaughterhouse, during Ramadan (the Moroccan historian Aḥmad Ibn al-Qāḍī gives 23 May). Power passed to Muḥammad ibn ʿImrān, head of the shurafāʾ of Fes—the first sharifian regime in the city and the ideological seed of Saʿdi and Alaouite legitimacy. The mellah was sacked.

And here comes the strongest single correction in the Moroccan chapter. "The entire Jewish community of Fes was massacred in 1465; eleven survived"—so printed, among others, by the Encyclopaedia Judaica, and it is not supported. Mercedes García-Arenal established that no Jewish source earlier than the nineteenth century mentions the massacre at all. For an event of that magnitude in a community with a continuous chronicle tradition—the Ibn Danan family chronicles run through precisely these years—that silence is decisive. Moreover a flourishing Jewish community is documented at Fes in the 1470s, within a decade. And the narrative itself comes through Arabic sources with a sharifian-legitimist agenda: in them the pogrom serves to justify the overthrow of ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq—see what it came to, a Marinid handed Muslims over to Jews.

The defensible formulation: a violent attack on the mellah accompanied the revolt of 1465; the community was severely damaged and there were forced conversions—but the figure of near-total extermination is a late and unsupported amplification, and within ten years the community was functioning again. And further: 1465 is not the immediate passage to the Wattasids—between them lies the six- or seven-year sharifian interregnum of Muḥammad ibn ʿImrān; the Wattasids took Fes in 1471 or 1472.

On the "Jewish vizier" separately. Hārūn ibn Baṭāsh's office and prominence are attested, but the sources on him are thin and hostile, and the figure of the arrogant Jewish minister whose insolence provokes a righteous revolt is a standing motif in the chronicles of the Islamic world: exactly the same was told of Granada in 1066 and Joseph ibn Naghrela. The story of Shāwīl and the sharīfa should be read as narrative cast in the mould of a motif, not as reportage.