The tritel of Fes: a pogrom at the establishment of the protectorate

On 30 March 1912 the Treaty of Fes was signed, establishing the French protectorate. On 17–19 April the Moroccan askars mutinied when the treaty's terms were announced, and the mellah was sacked and burned.

The death toll is disputed: forty-two Moroccan Jews by one count, forty-five killed and twenty-seven wounded per the Encyclopaedia Judaica, "more than fifty" and "fifty" per others. The riot's total dead across all groups were about sixty-six Europeans and about six hundred Moroccan Muslims.

And here is a detail almost nowhere reported, and important: the French General Brulard, believing the Jews were aiding the insurgents, ordered artillery fire onto the Jewish quarter, causing substantial destruction and casualties. The mellah was thus damaged from two directions at once—by the mutineers and by the power that had come to protect it.

The consequences: Sultan ʿAbd al-Ḥafīd abdicated in favour of his brother Yūsuf; Lyautey moved the capital from Fes to Rabat.

The event is usefully set beside 1465. Both times the mellah was sacked at the hour when power changed hands—and both times the cause was not a quarrel about religion but an absence of authority. The mellah stood hard by the palace because Jews were the sovereign's fiscal property and he sheltered them; the consequence of that same placement was that when the sovereign weakened the mellah was sacked first.