alive in 1365. Numerous Fessi Jews converted to Islam throughout the premodern period, but the conversions spiked in the mid-fifteenth century. Powerful families, such as the Bannānī, Ibn Shaqrūn, Bannīs, Barrāda, and Gassūs families, adopted Islam. In 1438, under pressure from the shurafāʾ, Sultan Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq made Jewish merchants with businesses in the qaysāriyya (the main market of Fes el Bali) abandon them and move to the mellah near Dar al-Makhzen in Fās al-Jadīd. Many Fessi Jews chose to become Muslims and keep their homes and livelihoods in Old Fes. They formed a group called the bildiyyīn. The last ruler of the Marinid dynasty, Abd al-Haqq II, appointed many Jews to high positions. The appointment of Jews to high positions, such as vizier, angered many Muslims, as they viewed such increases in Jewish power as transgressing the dhimmi status. Abd al-Basit b. Khalil, a medieval Moroccan author, claims that Jews became arrogant with their newfound prestige, using their power to command Muslims. This is a clear disruption to the established social order. Once a rumor began to circulate that the Jewish vizier in Fez, Aaron Batash, struck a Muslim woman, there were public outcries amongst Fez's Muslim population. They demanded the Mufti (Islamic legal expert) to issue a Fatwa (legal opinion) to permit the killing of Jews in the name of the Allah. The Mufti had no choice but to make these killings permissible. Thus, began the 1465 Moroccan revolt, one of the worst pogroms in Morocco's history. The Spanish Expulsion of the Jews By 1249, the Spanish Reconquista had concluded its main phase. During the murderous scenes enacted in 1391 in Spain, Spanish-controlled Seville, and Majorca, the Sephardi Jews of Spain seized the opportunity to emigrate to North Africa in order to escape persecution. A hundred years later, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile issued the Alhambra Decree - an edict ordering the expulsion of practicing Jews from Spain. Consequently, the Jews were driven from Spain in 1492, and later from Portugal in 1496 following a similar decree by King Manuel I of Portugal. The sudden inroad of Jews into Morocco and the whole of North Africa was then repeated on a much larger scale. Following the 1465 Moroccan revolt under the Marinid dynasty, the native Jewish community in Morocco had shrunken substantially, having been massacred and marginalized. The Moroccan Jewry began