The Jewish Gift and the Student Sultan: Ritual, Satire, and Urban Order in Precolonial Fez

This article reconstructs Sulṭān al-Ṭolba, a spring festival in precolonial Fez in which students elected a temporary sultan and staged a week of satirical government, as a ritual economy of debt, extraction, and redistribution. Jews appeared within this economy as contributors of gifts and objects of satirical exaction, a position defined by obligation and mockery rather than exclusion. The article asks why this visibility disappeared from later memory, and traces how the Ibn Mashʿal legend, a violent origin story that reduced Jewish presence to a tyrant, displaced this urban order. It argues that ritual performance should serve as historical evidence.