Pinto is the name of several families who originated in the small town of Pinto, whose Jewish community was subordinate to that of Madrid. Some Pintos arrived in Morocco from the Iberian Peninsula, particularly from Seville, in 1492 and 1496 and from the Canary Islands during the 16th century. The latter were former Marranos who settled in Agadir and Marrakesh, where they ranked among the spiritual and lay leaders of the Jewish communities of those towns. R. Jacob (d. c. 1750), a disciple of R. Abraham Azulai and a well-known kabbalist, wrote a lengthy commentary on the Zohar. His son, R. Abraham (d. after 1800), was a dayyan in Marrakesh. The latter’s commentary on the tractate Ketubbot is often mentioned in the work Sefer Hesed ve-Emet (Salonika, 1803). There are many manuscripts of his responsa and haskamot. R. Hayyim (d. before 1840) was chief rabbi of Mogador, where he was revered as a saint. Pilgrimages are still made to his grave. Abraham ben Reuben (c. 1750) was one of the leaders of the Jewish community of Agadir. A financier, he wielded considerable influence; the sultan of Morocco entrusted him with economic missions to Europe. During the 19th century the Pintos were prominent in the communities of northern Morocco, especially in Tangier and later in Casablanca, where their commercial importance was considerable down to the present day.

Mogador, now known as Essaouira, an Atlantic seaport in western Morocco , midway between the towns of Safi and Agadir . The word Mogador is a corruption of the Berber term for "self-anchorage." The city was occupied by the Phoenicians and Carthaginians in the 5th century B.C.E. From the Middle Ages to the 17th century there were sugar-cane refineries in the vicinity of Mogador whose operation was brought to a halt in the latter half of the 18th century. The town became a bustling seaport in 1764 under the Alawite Sultan Sidi Muhammad ibn Abdullah, who sought to transform it into a rival port to Agadir and have it serve as his main port for international commerce. The sultan chose 10 or 12 of them, especially from the Corcos, Afriat, Coriat, Knafo, Pinto, and Elmaleh families, for the task and granted them the status of tujjār al-sultān (the "king's merchants"). In sharp contrast to ordinary Jews who dwelt in the cramped Jewish ghetto (mellah), the sultanate offered them the most luxurious dwellings of Mogador within the more prestigious casbah quarter. They not only became the leading merchants of the sultan's court – parallel to a tiny elite of Muslim tujjār – but were entrusted with the role of mediation and diplomacy with European consuls and entrepreneurs. Not only were they influential in Moroccan economic affairs, but their functions extended to include the leadership of the local Jewish community. From their ranks the Jews chose the tujjār as presidents, vice presidents, and treasurers. The extraordinary and privileged Jewish tujjār elite controlled all of the major imports of Mogador and other Moroccan trade centers where their influence was gradually extended. These included sugar, tea, metals, gunpowder, and tobacco. The tujjār also managed such vital exports as wheat, hides, cereals, and wool, items which became government monopolies at the time, resulting from the makhzan's fears of the political and social consequences of European penetration. Some tujjār were in fact dispatched by the Palace to European trade centers as economic attachés and were given interest-free loans to undertake major trade transactions and augment the sultan's profits. Unlike the rest of the Jews, they were not required to pay the traditional poll-tax (jizya) commonly imposed on non-Muslim minorities throughout the Muslim world, and they received full protection – legal and political – from the makhzan (Moroccan government) from those in Muslim society who sought to harass or undermine them. The tujjār declined in influence after the 1890s with the aggressive penetration of the European powers into the Sharifian Empire of Morocco. By the early part of the 20th century, and certainly following the formation of the French protectorate (1912), they disappeared from the scene. A new elite of Jewish entrepreneurs, recruited by the French, Spaniards, Italians, and British commercial houses replaced them, as did foreign merchants who settled in Mogador and other parts of the country, controlling commerce until Moroccan independence in 1956. Spiritually and religiously, the Mogador community was led over the years by the old established rabbis and dayyanim such as R. Abraham Coriat, R. Abraham b. Attar, R. Mas'ud Knafo, and R. Hayyim Pinto. Mogador Jewry was relatively well educated. Their musicians were renowned throughout Morocco. The town had exceptionally beautiful synagogues, with the community being dotted by numerous battei midrash and yeshivot. During the 19th century the Jewish population grew from 4,000 in the 1830s and 1840s to approximately 12,000 in 1912, only to decline to 6,150 in 1936 and to once again rise slightly to 6,500 in 1951. This is attributed to the decline of commerce and other economic activity during the French Protectorate era in Mogador (and other inland or coastal cities which in the past enjoyed prosperity) in favor of Casablanca and Agadir. The immigration trends of the 1950s and 1960s caused the Mogador community to dwindle. Once Morocco's most important commercial seaport, a phenomenon largely attributed to Jewish initiatives, Mogador became a sleepy and relatively unimportant town. In the early 1970s most of its Jewish community members resided in the Americas, Europe, and Israel. By 2005, the community had all but disappeared.