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The bildiyyīn were Muslims of Jewish origin in the Moroccan city of Fez. Some of them claimed descent from ancestors who had converted as early as the thirteenth century, mainly in 1276, when there had been popular outbreaks against Jewish courtiers and officials of the Marinid dynasty in Morocco, but in most cases the conversions took place in the first half of the fifteenth century.The members of this group were called bildī (Ar. from the city) because they did not have a traditional nisba (Ar. lineage or tribal surname), although many of them had the nisba al-Islāmī. They were also der…

Isaac Almosnino was a physician and merchant born in Fez (ca. 1572) to a well-known family of Hispanic origin with many physicians and rabbis in its ranks. He was the grandson of Abraham Almosnino, physician of the Saʿdi (Saadian) sultan Mawlāy ʿAbd Allāh (r.1557-1574) and one of the rabbis who signed the taqqanot (communal ordinances) of Fez in 1554. Together with his brother Abraham, Isaac Almosnino participated in long-distance commerce along with his brother, visiting Italy, Egypt, Syria and Iran. Almosnino was taken prisoner by the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa (India) where…

The Pallaches were a Sephardi family perhaps descended from the Bene Palyāj mentioned by the twelfth-century chronicler Abraham Ibn Da’ud as “the greatest of the families of Cordoba.” The family name had numerous variants, among them Palacios, Palacio, de Palatio, al-Palas, and Palaggi. Following the expulsions from Iberia, members of the family went both to North Africa and to the Ottoman Empire. Several members of the family served the Saʿdian sultans of Morocco as merchants, diplomatic envoys, translators, and personal secretaries from around 1608 till the en…