The Takkanot of Fes: exiles and natives, two hundred and fifty years apart

After the Alhambra Decree of 31 March 1492 and the Portuguese expulsion of 1497, the megorashim, "the expelled," came to Morocco. How many is unknown: the estimates differ by a factor of five, from twenty to a hundred thousand, and no single figure should be printed. The first years were hard: the refugees were at first driven out of Fes by the townspeople, who feared famine; some died of starvation, others were enslaved by the local population and freed by decree of the governor.

In 1494 the rabbis of the megorashim began issuing takkanot—and the corpus went on growing into the eighteenth century. This is not a single enactment but a rolling communal code of roughly 1494–1753: matrimonial property and inheritance on the Castilian model, the ketubah, monogamy, commercial law, ḥazakah—the tenancy right in mellah premises—communal taxation, slaughter, rite. For three and a half centuries the corpus circulated in manuscript alone; it was first printed by Rabbi Abraham Ankawa in Kerem Ḥemer, vol. 2, Livorno, 1871.

The separation from the toshavim—the native Jews of the Maghreb, in Arabic bildiyyīn—held in daily life: separate synagogues, courts, slaughter and liturgy. The most consequential divide was over nefiḥah, the inflation-test of the lung: a difference of standard meant each could not eat the other's meat—hence separate slaughterers, separate butchers, and a separate communal economy. Liturgically it was the old Maghrebi nusaḥ ha-toshavim, preserved in the Fes Ṣlat al-Fāsiyīn, "the synagogue of the Fassis," against the Castilian-Sephardi rite of the Ṣlat Ibn Danan line.

A common minhag for the two Fes communities was accepted only in the eighteenth century—the separation had lasted some two hundred and fifty years; in some cities the institutions merged only by 1880, and the toshavim rite survived longest in the Atlas, the Tafilalt, the Draʿa and at Debdou.

Hence two corrections. "The Spanish exiles were absorbed within a generation" is false; the standard reference-book sentence "the megorashim eventually predominated" compresses a two-century process into a phrase and hides the fact that these were, in law and in practice, two communities. And the inverse is false too: the megorashim imposed nothing—they legislated for themselves, and the toshavim resisted for generations; but their demographic and scholarly weight meant that by the nineteenth century "Moroccan minhag" largely means their minhag.