Toshavim and megorashim תושבים ומגורשים

Toshavim (תושבים, "residents") are the native Jews of the Maghreb, in Moroccan Arabic bildiyyīn, "of the country"; they spoke Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Berber. Megorashim (מגורשים, "the expelled") are the refugees from the Castilian pogroms of 1391 and then the mass wave after the Alhambra Decree of 31 March 1492 and the Portuguese expulsion of 1497; in Arabic they were rūmiyyīn, "Romans, Europeans, foreigners"; they spoke Judeo-Spanish and, in the north, Ḥaketía.

How many arrived is unknown. Estimates for Morocco after 1492 differ by a factor of five: from twenty thousand to a hundred thousand. No reliable count exists, and no single figure should be printed. The testimony of the first years is grim: 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.

The separation held in daily life. In Fes the two communities had separate synagogues, separate courts, separate slaughter and separate liturgy. The most consequential divide was over nefiḥah, the inflation-test of the lung in examining an animal: a difference of standard meant each group could not eat the other's meat, and so each needed its own slaughterers, its own butchers, and in effect its own communal economy. Liturgically it was the old Maghrebi nusaḥ ha-toshavim, preserved in the Fes synagogue Ṣlat al-Fāsiyīn, "the synagogue of the Fassis," against the imported 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. The toshavim rite survived longest in the south: in the Atlas, the Tafilalt, the Draʿa and at Debdou. In some cities the institutional amalgamation came only around 1880.

The standard reference-book sentence—"the megorashim eventually predominated"—compresses a two-century process into a phrase and hides the main point: in law and in practice these were two communities. The inverse is equally wrong: 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 the megorashim's minhag, which is why a pre-1492 Maghrebi rite is recoverable today mainly from Ṣlat al-Fāsiyīn and from the southern communities.