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Introduction

Networks of Jewish Life in Venetian Crete

Soon after Passover in 1363, scandal consumed the Jewish community of Candia, the capital of Venetian Crete. A Sicilian Jew who had been living in Candia had spread a rumor that the Jewish women of the island were promiscuous. Having slept with Jewish prostitutes in the Jewish Quarter, he libeled all the Jewish women of Candia “and did not differentiate between the respectable and the easy women, between the married and the penetrated women, or between widows and prostitutes.”¹ So recorded the community leaders who gathered to compose a Hebrew ordinance, or taqqanah, in an attempt to stop the Sicilian’s slander from affecting the community’s reputation. Their explicit goal was to protect the honor of God, the Torah, and those who keep God’s commandments, and, finally, “the general honor of our praiseworthy community.”² To solve their problem, they demanded that the Sicilian leave town. They did not care where he went: “He should go from here to wherever the wind carries him,” just as long as he put a good distance between himself and their town.³

Thinking pragmatically about their problem, the Candiote Jewish officials added a provision to the taqqanah. If the culprit refused to leave or if he ever reappeared in town, they ordered the elected head of the community, the condestabulo, to turn him over to the Venetian government (“may their glory be raised”) to be punished for adultery and slander. The authors further clarified that the condestabulo should do so without fearing that he would be committing a sin. This last legal datum is striking. “Informing”—that is to say, denouncing Jewish misdeeds to a non-Jewish authority—provoked great anxiety among rabbinic authorities during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. So grave was the misdeed of informing that, according to rabbinic law, the informer at times even merited capital punishment.⁴ In this taqqanah, however, the Candiote Jewish leadership not only established that the condestabulo could not be considered an informer but even went so far as to decree that, should the condestabulo not turn over the libelous Sicilian to the Venetian government, the leader himself would be publicly shamed before the Jewish community for eschewing his sworn duty. Relying on the colonial island’s justice system was not just an option; it was a mandate.

The case of the slandering Sicilian is not unique in the history of Jewish Candia. In a number of other circumstances when the reputation of the community as a whole was on the line, the taqqanot of Candia demanded that the leadership hand over Jews to the Venetian government for trial and punishment. Should a Jew be found buying and selling stolen goods on the black market, for example, the condestabulo was ordered to turn over “that man or that woman” to the secular authorities, since his actions undermined confidence in Jewish economic practices. In this case too, the ordinance threatened the condestabulo with public shaming were he to shirk his duty, whether “out of flattery or [personal] relationship or love or pursuit of bribes.”⁵

What makes the case of the slandering Sicilian unique is that we know its outcome. Collected among Taqqanot Qandiya is a list, ostensibly authored by its sixteenth-century editor, Elia Capsali—community leader, rabbi, and historian—recounting a number of the community’s condestabuli and their great accomplishments. The list records that a condestabulo named Malkiel (Melchiele) Casani “made a terminazion [agreement] regarding those who slander the virgin girls of Israel, that they would be punished and flogged around the city and will stay in jail. And it was done, and one Sicilian was punished, and they flogged him and incarcerated him, and this was done with the agreement of most of the distinguished men and masters of Torah in our community.”⁶ Not only was the Sicilian turned over to the authorities, but the condestabulo also worked with the Venetian government to come to an agreement over his punishment—an agreement known as a terminazion, as our text records, transliterating a legislative term directly from the Venetian dialect into Hebrew letters.

The world depicted in this Hebrew source seems unexpected in the context of taqqanot, a religiolegal genre common to the medieval and early modern periods. Taqqanot were rules relevant to the here and now of their production, binding only on the local community that produced them and aimed at a local Jewish readership (or listenership, as they were read aloud in the synagogue as well as recorded for posterity).⁷ Moreover, taqqanot are often understood by scholars as texts intended to act as a potent symbol of the semiautonomy that the medieval and early modern Jewish community was said to enjoy, a corporate authority granted by a sovereign government for the sake of Jewish self-rule.⁸ Taqqanot were indeed rules passed by the community, for the community, exemplifying the independence of the community. By putting out a set of taqqanot, the community leaders announced their own jurisdiction over religious life and practice in their town.

Yet this sense of self-sequester, idealized autonomy, communal unity, and rabbinic jurisdiction is not manifest in the texts from Venetian Candia. Though certainly focused on the language of Torah and rabbinic sensibilities, the Candiote community’s leadership appears deeply involved with the sovereign government of Crete, not only turning over perceived criminals to be dealt with by secular channels but working side by side with the state to levy punishments. Though the authors of the Taqqanot wrote in Hebrew and generally spoke Greek, they also incorporated Venetian terms for state structures (such as terminazion and condestabulo) into their official Hebrew texts. We even read of Jewish leaders formalizing an internal financial penalty against potential wrongdoers through a Latin state notary.⁹

Taqqanot Qandiya does more than reflect relations between Jews and the state. The statutes also portray a community integrated into the broader town and thoroughly enmeshed in a wide range of economic exchanges with their non-Jewish neighbors. In the ordinances discussed so far, contact is portrayed negatively, as dangerous and illegal interactions on the black market and potentially in the sex trade. But other entries refer to Jewish-Christian contacts through patronage of artisan crafts and the hiring of apprentices. Nor were Jews immune from the moral complexity of Candiote society, as references to adultery and prostitution—here and elsewhere—suggest.¹⁰ Moreover, the entry of a Sicilian into Candiote Jewish society hints at some of the ways that the Jews of Candia were connected to the wider Mediterranean world.

By convention of the genre, taqqanot tend to emphasize the values of segregation, piety, and localism. At the same time, these Hebrew sources demonstrate that, during the late Middle Ages, the Jews of Candia inhabited a social reality that was linguistically, politically, and institutionally woven into the social tapestry of the majority Christian town in which they lived, and tightly tied into the Mediterranean networks in which Crete functioned as a major hub. From the elite leaders who ran the governing board to its rank-and-file members, the Jews of Candia were thoroughly enveloped in the structures of Cretan colonial society and its governmental institutions.

In fact, it is through the lens of one of these institutions—the Venetian colonial justice system on Crete, and particularly the extensive surviving court records from the island’s supreme judiciary—that we are able to discern with real clarity, beyond the echoes of Taqqanot Qandiya, the contours and entanglements of the Jewish community of Venetian Candia. Because the Jews of Candia were subjects of the Venetian empire, their lives were also intertwined with the institutions of the colonial society. But the conventional view of colonial institutions as tools for subjugation and control cannot fully describe how they functioned in the lives of Venice’s colonial subjects. In Crete, Jewish subjects harnessed some colonial institutions and maneuvered through them for their own benefit and interests. Most importantly, regular litigation by Jews against other Jews in these Venetian courts became a primary outlet for the airing of intracommunal and interpersonal disputes. Knowledge of Crete’s colonial justice system, and the malleability of the system itself, allowed this secular court to become a key venue for Jews—male and female alike—both to articulate personal identity and to work the system for their own, individual benefit.

This book tells the story of Jewish individuals and families on Crete as they engaged with their various social and legal networks, within and beyond the Jewish community. It focuses primarily on the century between the Black Death (1348) and the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks (1453). These events, which reshaped the contours of the Jewish community on Candia as they shaped Cretan society more broadly, bookend a period of relative peace. This allows us to witness Jews making daily choices without external threats of war or famine. To be precise, peace reigned from the end of the St. Tito revolt in 1363–64, though I have decided to begin my investigation a bit earlier so as to track more closely with the dating of the sources I use.¹¹ With the fall of Constantinople came an influx of Greek refugees into Crete, and a drastic uptick in Greek anxiety, which manifested in the form of a rebellion, the so-called Siphi Vlastos conspiracy of 1453–54, and others in its wake. At least in the short term, this event changed Venetian policies toward Greek subjects and Orthodoxy in Crete, ending the century of relative quiet.¹² Comprehensive analysis, however, also requires some consideration of Jewish life in the beginning of Venetian rule in the early thirteenth century and its state of affairs in the sixteenth century.

Two overarching claims about Jewish life in Candia during this period are made in this study. The first is that the Jews of Candia encountered and engaged with Latin and Greek Christians not simply out of necessity or as a result of the vicissitudes of daily life, although these certainly played a role. Rather, Jews chose to participate in meaningful encounters through professional channels and legal engagement with Venice’s secular judiciary. This behavior was fostered, even if inadvertently, by Crete’s colonial government, which saw in the island’s Jews a relatively safe ally and buffer against the less conciliatory Greek Orthodox population. Venice’s strategy of colonial appeasement in Crete thus gave local Jews social leeway and legal opportunity that were often unavailable to Jews elsewhere at the time.

The second argument addresses the implications of such engaged interaction: that sustained encounter did not happen only at the fringes of Jewish society and that it left a decided and visible mark on the internal community. Engagement with Christians and with Venetian institutions—above all, the colonial justice system, and particularly in contexts of intra-Jewish litigation—influenced, shaped, and changed the Jewish community of Candia, allowing it to function as a traditional Jewish community without many of the anxieties and reservations of other medieval Jewish communities.

These two arguments are inextricably connected. That is to say, the internal relations of the community as negotiated in the colonial courtroom must be viewed in conjunction with the networks of which these Jews were a part. This interdependence explains why the Jews of Crete chose to behave in a fashion decidedly at odds with traditional understandings of rabbinic ideals, which dictated that all intra-Jewish disputes must be addressed within the confines of the Jewish community. In particular, the beit din, or Jewish court, was supposed to decide matters of Jewish concern. But Candiote Jews often chose to reject this directive, in part because of their relationships with people and governing entities outside the bounds of the local Jewish community. These relations were not simply pragmatic and temporary. They shaped the nature and the experience of the individual Jews who made up the community. The decisions made by these Jews then affected the nature of the Jewish community writ large.

Sources of Jewish History on Crete

The Jews who made up the kehillah kedoshah—the “holy community,” as the Jewish corporate structure called itself—of Venetian Candia (modern Iraklion) during the late Middle Ages were mostly Greek speakers hailing originally from the Byzantine sphere. The community’s story has been only infrequently and incompletely told.¹³ Moreover, the story of Crete’s Jewish individuals remains untold, and this book tells that tale by bringing to life Cretan Jews by looking at their interaction with Venetian colonial justice. The portrait of Jewish life drawn here looks quite different than those typically recounted about the Middle Ages. Though Jewish sources have traditionally portrayed Jews as isolated, self-segregating groups, living almost accidentally within a given sovereign society, medieval communities were often engaged in the wider societies that encompassed them. The Jews of Venetian Candia actively enmeshed themselves in the concentric social spheres of the colonial capital and beyond. They were very involved in the life of the city, both in its capacity as a site of a great deal of formal business and more casually as a hub of other sorts of quotidian interaction. Jews regularly interacted with the Latin-rite (Catholic) Venetians and Greek-rite (Orthodox) native Cretans who lived alongside them.

The fact that this book focuses on the Venetian colonial judiciary as a central institution in the lives of Crete’s Jews stems in significant part from the exceptionally large collection of ducal court records that survived the Ottoman takeover of Crete in 1669.¹⁴ These court records are housed today in Venice’s Archivio di Stato, collected as part of the Duca di Candia series. This study relies on both the records of sentences meted out (Sentenze Civili) and long-form records of cases (Memoriali).¹⁵ Jews appear in a considerable number of these records, acting as litigants, defendants, witnesses, and in other capacities, including agents, executors of wills, and medical patients. Beyond the legal context, references to Jews as neighbors, relatives, orphans, or guardians offer even more information about the Jewish community. Though the judicial records are a rich source, this study is the first to thoroughly address their Jewish-related content.

This book’s emphasis on the justice system, however, does not stem solely from the wealth of evidence but also from the real importance of courts in medieval Mediterranean life. Litigation was a far more common activity in the late Middle Ages than it is today, and many more people were likely to be swept up in late medieval court proceedings than in modern cases. Litigation thus offers us access to a broader cross section of Candiote Jewish society than is initially apparent. Moreover, emphasis on litigation also engages with the Venetian state’s own concern with “justice” as a primary ideological principle through which it ruled in both colonial and metropolitan settings. The world of litigation, legal recourse, and other modes of “justice” formed an essential building block in the development of the Venetian empire and its political philosophy. By asking how Jews fit into this picture of justice and judicial life, then, this study contributes not only to debates over Jewish life but also to considerations of the broader Venetian Mediterranean and medieval empires.

Ducal court records are not the only source available for an investigation of the Jews of Venetian Crete. There are other surviving Latin materials marshaled in this study. Notarial acts form one of these source bases. The Venetian bureaucratic engine was one of the most prolific record keepers of the premodern world. Crete’s thriving markets seem to have been constantly abuzz. Perhaps because any business deal could end up as a legal battle, residents of Candia patronized the city’s many notaries, men who had the technical skills and legal know-how to draw up binding contracts that would hold up in court. Though Greek and Hebrew notaries were active in Candia as well, Venice’s official notaries wrote in Latin, and it is almost solely these Latin registers from the capital that survive in the archival series called Notai di Candia.¹⁶

Business was brisk for these men: for the fourteenth century, the registers of forty-seven notaries survive; in the fifteenth century, forty-one notaries’ materials have endured through war, water, book-boring worms, and time.¹⁷ The systematic exploration of the vast notarial records from the period under study lies outside the scope of this project, but much notarial data from unedited and edited registers have been incorporated, as well as references to notarial acts discussed by other scholars. In addition, material from the town crier’s rolls has been examined.¹⁸ Even a cursory glance at these sources shows how deeply embedded in the economic and social life of the city Candiote Jews had become by the mid-fourteenth century; their mark can be found everywhere.

And of course, there is Taqqanot Qandiya, the set of Hebrew sources discussed above. In this collection, communal ordinances composed and approved by the leadership of the Jewish community in Candia are gathered. Alongside these ordinances that give the source collection its name are other types of communal documents, including a few responsa (halachic decisions written in response to specific questions) and some historical lists, such as the important accomplishments of some of the condestabuli.¹⁹ The collection originates from the first half of the sixteenth century, when the historian and rabbi Elia Capsali gathered and copied the ordinances and the other materials in the format that exists today. To be sure, Taqqanot Qandiya does not allow the historian to hear the voice of all sections of Candiote Jewry; it is the product of a male, elite, and rabbinically oriented subclass of the kehillah. Nevertheless, because of the local nature of the ordinances, responsa, and other included texts, as well as Capsali’s own attention to the historical import of his home community and its concentric spheres (he also wrote Hebrew histories of both the Venetian empire and the Ottoman Empire), Taqqanot Qandiya does provide fascinating insight into not only the religiolegal life of the community but also its day-to-day workings, its institutions, its tensions, and its relationship with Candia’s non-Jewish majority.

An undated manuscript copy of Capsali’s compilation discovered among the collection of David Salomon Sassoon, the famed Anglo-Iraqi collector of Jewish and Samaritan books, remains the only manuscript of Taqqanot Qandiya in existence. It now resides in Jerusalem, part of the manuscript collection at the National Library of Israel.²⁰ Its early pages are unfortunately in illegible condition, and an early attempt at conservation with what looks like contact paper has obscured some other pages. An edition from the mid-twentieth century, however, preserves material no longer visible in the manuscript. Umberto Cassuto and Elias Artom, scholars of Italian Jewry and classical Jewish texts, worked from this codex to create an edition with critical apparatus in Hebrew, and this published version remains the only such edition.²¹ The editors intended their edition, published in 1943, to be the first volume of a two-part study of the Jews of Candia based on these ordinances, but exigencies of war and finances precluded the completion of this project.²²

As a self-consciously prescriptive source, Taqqanot Qandiya offers a lopsided view of the Jews of Candia, emphasizing piety, community, and religious concerns, albeit sometimes honored in the breach. Rabbinic texts have long been the major sources marshaled by scholars studying the history of Jews. When doing social history using rabbinic voices, however, it is difficult not to trip over their decidedly prescriptive nature. An alternate approach that looks only at Jewish life through non-Jewish sources also has severe limits, stemming from the outsider’s perspective they necessarily offer. This study surmounts that obstacle by bringing these kinds of sources into conversation with one another and by analyzing them in tandem. It marshals both primary sources produced by Jews and primary sources about Jews produced mainly by Christians in order to offer not only more angles of view but also a higher-resolution—and therefore clearer and more nuanced—image of the community in question, much as anthropologists do when developing their ethnographies of contemporary social groups.²³

The resulting details of Jewish daily life, family concerns, economic activities, living conditions, and religious communal life are quite diverse. In some ways, what emerges looks like a typical portrait of medieval communal Jews: elites taking up local Jewish office to help liaise between the community and the sovereign; rabbis concerned with maintaining dietary standards and cleanliness in the Jewish Quarter; and wealthy and poor alike anxious to make good marriage matches for their children. But in other ways, this consilience of sources also offers a far less typically visible social landscape. Here we are privy to Jewish individuals concerned with their own interests, as well as those of the community—often contradictory though simultaneous aims. Some Jews were dedicated to religious practice and community leadership at the same time that they were comfortable going outside the community for resolutions to social and religious problems, for extended economic alliances, and even for sexual intimacy. Some happily watched the public courtroom spectacles in the town center, and some strolled around the harbor—even on Sabbath during the time of prayer services, despite the customary expectation that Jews should be in synagogue then.²⁴ Candiote Jews were probably not the only Jews in Europe doing these things; rather, the exceptional sources, and the juxtaposing of both secular and Jewish sources, permit us uncommon entry into the daily lives and concerns of the Jews of a medieval community.²⁵

Jewish Life in Christian Society

Focusing on Candia’s well-documented Jews, therefore, suggests new ways to think about medieval Jewry across the Mediterranean and beyond, particularly by pointing to the importance of historical contingency in Jewish-Christian relations and by identifying a complex convivencia outside the bounds of Iberia. As scholars have moved beyond the old models of reading medieval Jewish history through a lachrymose lens, one influential approach has been to reinterpret violence against Jews through a multifaceted prism of local social, political, and religious realities—and not as the inevitable product of prevalent rhetorical tropes.²⁶

Yet explaining the contingency of anti-Jewish violence can only function as one part of this corrective. The other side of this coin remains essential as well: to recognize that violence was only one mode of interaction between medieval Jews and their Christian neighbors—one that characterized the minority of such contacts in many places across the medieval world. In Crete, as in locales throughout Christendom, quotidian interactions between Jews and Christians look rather different than the list of traumatic encounters emphasized by lachrymose narratives. Political alliances, professional reliance, sexual attraction, and even religious curiosity led Jews and Christians—Greek Orthodox and Latin-rite alike—to encounter each other on terms not defined by animosity and conflict. On a day-to-day basis, Cretan society exhibited a pragmatic acceptance of religious difference.

Scholarship on medieval Jews used to subscribe to the consensus opinion that Jewish life under Christian rule was generally harsh, malicious, and ultimately destined for destruction.²⁷ But more recent scholarship has recognized that any universalizing conclusions about “Jewish life under Christian rule” are untenable.²⁸ Christendom was a diverse and complicated place; local considerations—whether tense relations between the king and his Christian subjects, or policies of economic pragmatism—often played as important a role in informing attitudes and actions toward (or against) Jews as did uniform ideological prejudice. Indeed, internal Christian tension sometimes directly benefited Jews. Conflict between Venice and the pope (particularly over issues of authority and jurisdiction in its colonial sphere) helped protect Candiote Jews from papal and papally appointed Dominican Inquisition tribunals, which were not allowed to hold sway on the island except in rare cases.²⁹

Regular, low-conflict interaction between Jews and Christians in Christendom tends to be identified as part of a phenomenon unique to the medieval Iberian Peninsula, the product of its exceptional cultural complexity in which pragmatic needs and proximity impelled Jews, Christians, and Muslims to accommodate one another. But other regions ought to be observed through a similar filter, and the Venetian territories provide an excellent natural laboratory in which to explore cross-cultural contacts that look like their own version of convivencia.³⁰ As in Iberia, Candia’s reality of three different religiocultural groups—Greek, Latin, and Jewish—seems to have prevented the sort of binary tension (us versus them) that tends to set the stage for violent conflict aimed at Jews. Perhaps the tripartite social reality diffused the force of hatred of the Other by multiplying the targets defined as such. It seems likely that animosity aimed at the Jews in Candia was buffered by the reality of ongoing tensions between Greeks and Latins.

One of the most productive new methods for breaking through old approaches to, and artificial bifurcations about, medieval Jews is to explore the ways Jews utilized sovereign courtrooms as a venue of dispute between Jews. Scholars of Iberia and Provence have noted that Jews, male and female, chose to air their grievances against their fellow Jews not at the beit din, the Jewish court, but before secular, Christian sovereigns—despite rabbinic prohibitions.³¹ The significant implications of this behavior are still being worked out, in this study as in others. Elka Klein’s work on Catalonia has made an important step in recognizing that the reality of Jews in court, particularly women, ought to change our understanding of the daily functioning of Jewish society; as in other realms of medieval Jewish life, Jewish attitudes toward the court system were clearly not in line with rabbinic exhortations.³² Uriel Simonsohn’s work on Jews and Christians litigating in Islamic courtrooms in the early medieval Middle East and North Africa has demonstrated that this phenomenon extends beyond Christendom.³³

Jews who litigated in sovereign judiciaries had diverse motives, and it is increasingly clear that these courts—in Crete, as in the Islamic world—offered certain benefits that made it more appealing to bring civil suits before judges of a different religion than to bring similar suits before the Jewish court: enforcement powers, a balance of professionalism and useful subjectivity, arbitrational neutrality, and even sometimes cultural familiarity. By looking at the kinds of cases Candiote Jews chose to bring against their coreligionists (from property disputes to marriage fights, from salary disagreements to synagogue crises) and the arguments made by Jews in the course of their suits (often marshaling Jewish, religious discourse deciphered and reframed for non-Jewish consumption), modern readers may imagine themselves present in the courtroom, hearing how individuals thought of the intersection of Jewish law and Jewish life, religious and secular interests, and how they crafted their own narratives for an outsider audience.

Through the pen of the courtroom notary, these Jews cease to be caricatures of rabbinic discourse. Indeed, intentional anonymity often renders Jews mentioned in responsa as nebulous “Reubens” and “Simeons,” the medieval equivalents of the modern “John Doe.” Seen through Venetian legal sources, Crete’s Jews are revealed as three-dimensional individuals with competing values and complex social associations. Nevertheless, the image that develops from these sources is not one in which Jewish individualism exists wholly separately from Jewish communal membership. Rather, a major facet of Jewish choice related to the ways in which a Jew situated him- or herself in the community structure. In other words, for some Jews, the courtroom became a place in which they could express their own views on Jewish law and custom—not outside the frame of Judaism but with an eye toward their own agency within the religion. This helps explain why even the leaders of Candia’s Jewish community saw in the secular courtroom an effective venue for resolving Jewish communal disputes and did not see that strategy as a repudiation of their communal responsibilities. In fact, at times, Jewish elites came to the Venetian courtroom to force their coreligionists to uphold the tenets to which their religious community was supposed to adhere. Likewise, Jewish women trapped in unhappy marriages did not use the secular court system to undermine Jewish marriage but to find workarounds that enabled them to stay faithful to Jewish law (oftentimes pushing for their own definitions of Jewish law) while also freeing themselves from marital misery and economic subservience.

As this discussion of unhappy wives suggests, a critical benefit of singling out personal choice, and particularly the ways that individuals used the secular judiciary, resides in what it reveals about Jewish women. Medieval rabbinic texts tend to assign Jewish women discrete, polarized identities as either “good” or “bad.” Responsa categorize women according to male, rabbinic concerns and offer moral judgments on them, based on whether the rabbinic sources approved of their behavior.³⁴ Recent scholarship on premodern Jewish women has illustrated that once they are considered outside the frame of rabbinical texts, women appear in the public sphere engaging in a variety of public and professional activities, not only with other women but also with men unrelated to them, Jewish and Christian alike.³⁵ This study takes seriously the notion of Jewish women as agents of their own lives, both figuratively—as deciders in their own lives—and literally, as self-representing figures in secular courts, as well as economic actors functioning outside the purview of their fathers and husbands.³⁶ The Jewish women of Candia certainly often married according to their parents’ wishes and lived within the communal confines of the kehillah. Within these contexts, however, women in professional and public capacities made decisions for themselves without constant requests for permission of fathers or husbands; and they publicly asserted their own understanding of their identities as females and Jews. The secular judiciary, and its common use by Jews, provided for Jewish women a venue for expressing individual agency, as it did for Jewish men.

To be sure, the history of Jewish-Christian relations must not be seen through rose-colored glasses. Cretan Jewish life during the century from the Black Death to the conquest of Constantinople was marked by some dark moments, including a massacre of Jews in the fortress town of Castronovo by rebels during the St. Tito revolt in 1364.³⁷ Residential confinement in the Judaica, a precursor to the ghetto though never with gates or locks, emerged in stages over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Anti-Jewish rhetoric appears in many official sources. A claim of Jews crucifying a lamb around Easter time led to the arrest of nine elite Jews, and the death of two, in the early 1450s, a case addressed in Chapter 3. This study aims not to disregard crisis but to contextualize it and to underscore the space between moments of trauma.³⁸

Taken as a whole, the history of Jewish life on Venetian Crete represents a successful experiment, in comparison with the broad, mounting anti-Judaism that characterized much of western Europe in this period. It contrasts even with Venice itself. Jews settled without barrier in Venetian Crete, but, except for fifteen years in the late fourteenth century, they were prohibited from living as a community in the Venetian metropole. In that short intervening period, Venice needed moneylenders for its war effort, and thus Jews were allowed to settle. Once the loan crisis was over, and as anti-Jewish enmity rose, Jews were forced to leave in 1395.³⁹ In the early sixteenth century, when Jews once again sought refuge from war in Venice, the government discovered it needed them as a source of revenue and as pawnbrokers. Unable to live with or without them, in 1516 Venice compromised by forcing the Jews into the neighborhood known as the Ghetto, originally a place for casting cannon (in Venetian dialect, ghettare) but soon an epithet that became a synonym for merciless segregation.⁴⁰

Crete was different. For Jews from Germany, Iberia, France, and elsewhere, Crete was known as a haven and became a stable locus of immigration throughout this period. Jews from across western Europe and the Levant trusted that Venetian justice would serve them and their families. As a result, they not only moved to Crete but also involved themselves in the civil systems (including the judiciary) of the island. In many states across medieval Christendom, including in Crete, Christians doubtlessly mistrusted religious difference and regarded it as diabolical, the target of morally and religiously justifiable violence. As such, the ability of medieval Jews to benefit from a justice system that limited the effects of this ideology of intolerance is worthy of emphasis.

Individuals and Community

The reality of meaningful interaction between Jews and Christians does not mean that either side thought of itself as losing its essential identifying markers, particularly religious identity. But religion was not the exclusive marker of identity.⁴¹ Undoubtedly both social reality and colonial law stratified Jews, Greeks, and Latins on Crete according to religious identities. Yet evidence from Crete demonstrates the importance of other axes of identity.⁴² Some key markers existed outside the frame of religion: language group, professional affiliation, gender, and socioeconomic status. Some constituted subcategories within the frame of religion: identification with Ashkenazi (northern European), Sephardi (Iberian), and Romaniote (Byzantine) ideas and origins. These other markers were important identifiers both for Jews who possessed them and for the Christians and Jews with whom they interacted.

Crete’s Jews also acted in the service of their personal identities. In the colonial courtroom, Candiote Jews made choices based on a sense of their own ability to decipher religiolegal concepts without consulting supposed “experts,” argued for their rights as Jews and persons, and even prized their own concerns over the needs of the community. This reality of individuals shaping their identities, making choices, and exerting agency over their own decision-making processes breaks down another untenable generalization about the Jews of medieval Christendom: that premodern Jews were tradition bound and community oriented above all other values.⁴³ The evidence for the Jews of Candia suggests a different picture: an evolving relationship with Christian sovereigns and Venetian colonial law provided for individual Jews a space in which they articulated choices not squarely in line with the dictates of the community, even as they stayed tied to the corporate system of the kehillah and remained dedicated to Jewish law and custom.

The individuality of Candiote Jews becomes more meaningful when considering the broad heterogeneity of the community. On one hand, this complexity stemmed from the ethnic origins of community members. Candiote Jewry was made up of Romaniote (Byzantine) Jews of Greek origin but also newer immigrants from Iberia, Germany, and elsewhere whose arrival (especially in the decades after the advent of the Black Death and the 1391 massacres in Iberia) sparked new challenges and tensions related to Jewish law, social mores, and communal association. This study examines the difficulties inherent in a heterogeneously constructed minority community, something often considered only for communities changed by the Spanish expulsion.⁴⁴ In addition, the Candiote community was made up of individuals and families from vastly different socioeconomic backgrounds, including merchants and tanners, doctors and servants, grocers and masons, cobblers and scribes, teachers and tailors. Though poorer individuals are less visible in the sources, echoes in Taqqanot Qandiya hint that they too engaged in behavior of which the (generally wealthy) leaders did not approve, from choosing affordable food with questionable kashrut to engaging in prostitution.

The individualism and heterogeneity of the Jewish community of Candia call for a reappraisal of the perception of the medieval Jewish community organ as a unified, semiautonomous structure that used its limited corporate powers to build a defensive bulwark between the community and the outside world.⁴⁵ When evidence suggests otherwise, scholars tend to interpret that reality in quasi-religious terms. As Elka Klein noted, “Jewish autonomy tends to be studied in the context of halakhic theory and the degree to which practice fell short of it.”⁴⁶ But this supposed boundary between permitted and forbidden behaviors was not nearly so fixed in Candia’s kehillah. Not only did regular Jews choose to bypass the kehillah in making major decisions, but the leaders of the community drew the sovereign government into communal decisions that were legally within the kehillah’s purview according to Venice’s own rules. The Venetian government considered the Jews as a singular universitas, but the Jews did not necessarily always see things the same way.⁴⁷

By focusing on the importance of individuals and their choices, this study intervenes in a scholarly conversation that extends beyond Jews. If we are all intellectual heirs of James Harvey Robinson, E. H. Carr, and their revolutionary rejections of Great Man History, simultaneously we ought not throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, resigning ourselves to quantitative conclusions and tales in the aggregate.⁴⁸ For the individual tales of humans living ordinary lives with perhaps extraordinary or at least unexpected moments, the microhistorical approach to history reminds us that the daily habits of regular humans are the building blocks of the premodern world we historians are trying to reconstruct.

Venice, Crete, and the World of the Late Medieval Eastern Mediterranean

While this study homes in on the Jewish community of Candia, its implications extend beyond the study of medieval Jews and contribute to scholarly understandings of the broader world in which these Jews lived—that is, the social, political, and cultural spheres of the Venetian eastern Mediterranean in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade. A tale of Jews in the Venetian empire contributes to our understanding of the Venetian project from a fresh perspective. It is to this context that I now turn with some background to the Venetian colonial project on Crete.

The Fourth Crusade redrew the political map of the eastern Mediterranean, marking a substantive rupture in the history of the lands of the Romania (as the formerly Byzantine eastern Mediterranean was known). In October 1202, a Latin Crusader army set out by ship from Venice. This mostly French force intended to capture Muslim Alexandria, but through Venetian intervention (the army was deeply in debt to the Venetian state for its ships) first detoured to Christian Zara (modern Zadar, Croatia), reestablishing Venetian rule in that Dalmatian city by military force and then eventually aiming its weapons at the Byzantine Empire itself. In April 1204, the Crusaders sacked Constantinople, overthrew the emperor, and installed a Latin princeling on the throne.

In retrospect, the Latin Empire of Constantinople, as this coup’s resulting government was known, was an economic and political disaster for those who ruled it, and in 1261 a Byzantine contingent from Nicaea restored an Orthodox emperor to the throne. Nevertheless, the implications of the Fourth Crusade were vast. Most important was the infamous Partitio Romaniae, the treaty in which the Crusader leaders divided the former Byzantine territory among themselves, and the subsequent land trades made in its aftermath. After Constantinople returned to Byzantine hands, the new political realities in the Romania would in many cases remain for centuries.⁴⁹

No state benefited more from, or was more changed by, the Fourth Crusade than Venice. By 1100, Venice had begun to extend its naval power beyond the Adriatic. The goal was commercial expansion, and in the next century, the Republic harnessed the economic potential of the Crusader States for its own goals. Venice secured trading concessions from the Latin rulers of the Levant in return for occasional military assistance, particularly gaining mastery of the Levantine coast in the 1120s.⁵⁰ In the century before the Fourth Crusade, Venetian traders expanded their foothold across the wider eastern Mediterranean, building on inroads constructed before the Crusades. Evidence, including a letter found in the Cairo Genizah, indicates that Venetian merchants were active on Byzantine Crete—buying and transporting Cretan foodstuffs to Constantinople and Alexandria—already by the mid-eleventh century, but around 1126, Venice obtained free trade privileges on Crete from the Byzantine emperor John II Komnenos and thus increased its economic power on the island and along its adjacent shipping lines.⁵¹

The Fourth Crusade thus offered Venice a chance to directly control many of the ports it had long used as purchase points and way stations in its Levantine trade networks. Venice could cut out the middleman, that is, other sovereigns’ laws, taxes, and diplomatic mores. It is in this commercial light that we can understand the locations Venice acquired through the Partitio Romaniae and in subsequent private trades, including Negroponte (modern Evvia), connecting the Aegean Sea to the Greek mainland; the ports of Coron and Modon at the southern tip of the Morea (as the Peloponnese was known); and the Ionian island of Corfu, overlooking the southern entrance to the Adriatic (abandoned and then reconquered in 1401).

Among all these new territories, known collectively as the Stato da mar, Crete quickly emerged as the flagship colony. Venice evidently intended only a minimal occupation of Crete, perhaps just focusing on the port cities, but securing the ports entailed capturing and controlling the island as a whole.⁵² The island’s strategic location, directly between Venetian waters and the Levant, would render it almost as important as Constantinople itself (which Venice chose to influence but not to rule directly).⁵³ In 1264, Doge Ranieri Zeno wrote to Pope Urban IV that Crete, because of its position, was the linchpin in the Republic’s maritime empire. The doge emphasized Crete’s potential role in defending Latin political interests.⁵⁴ But the island’s economic advantages were equally, if not more, fundamental. Crete’s strategic location for protection was but one of its benefits, alongside its strategic location for trade and the island’s natural fecundity.

Recognition of Crete’s central role was not immediate. In the aftermath of the purchase of Crete from the Crusader Boniface of Monferrat, Venice saw the island’s obvious economic potential but had not decided on a method of rule. Genoese pirates (or so Venice construed them) easily took most of the island in 1206. The spirit of rivalry awoke the Venetians; they quickly dispatched forces to chase off their sworn nemeses. When Venice finally defeated the Genoese in 1211, it imported settlers, at first predominantly military men, in the following decades.⁵⁵

Unlike most other holdings in the Stato da mar where feudal barons were allowed to retain control, Venice saw that in order to develop Crete into a central hub of sea power, it needed to retain direct control. To be sure, Cretan land was given in exchange for military service; most of the Greek-speaking rural population lived under feudatories.⁵⁶ But feudal power was highly limited by the island’s governor, the duke of Crete, who would become the most important colonial representative in the Stato da mar.⁵⁷ Venice sent its best and brightest to rule its prized possession: a full 25 percent of the men who served in Crete’s top two positions, duke and captain, were also elected to the prestigious Avogaria di Comun, the primary metropolitan court hearing criminal prosecutions from subject territories.⁵⁸ Others, including Crete’s first duke, Jacopo (Giacomo) Tiepolo (r. 1218–20), rose to the position of Doge of Venice. Venice and Crete, just eighteen days’ sail by ship in brisk summer breezes, remained in sustained contact, and both the metropole and its favored colony were ruled at the top by many of the same patrician administrators.⁵⁹

In its colony of Crete, Venice aimed to replicate itself, a virtual Venice “Beyond-the-Sea.”⁶⁰ To a large extent, Crete modeled itself on the lagoon city in developing its roles as “import-export capital” and ship-building center.⁶¹ At first, Venice even divided the island into six districts (sestieri), reproducing the very urban structure of the metropole. The inefficiency of this system when applied to Crete, however, led to redistricting by the early fourteenth century.⁶² As the center of the Mediterranean naval empire, only Crete was outfitted with an arsenal—as in the metropole—in which to build and repair galleys that could be easily dispatched across the region.⁶³

Unlike the city of Venice, Crete provided fertile land that produced staples for export, including grain, wine, fruit, olive oil, and products from the island’s sheep, including cheese, hides, and wool. Venice’s lack of hinterland in this period made basic foodstuffs essential not only for reasons of profit but for feeding the metropole and the Republic’s army.⁶⁴ But more economically important in the long run, the capital city of Candia was a trade node for goods produced far to the east. The port also served as a hub for Venice’s slave trade from the thirteenth century.⁶⁵ Until the Fourth Crusade, Crete played a secondary role in Venice’s commerce, as most convoys took the route hugging the Peloponnese toward the Levant. But it would become a key point in the Venetian maritime networks after 1204.⁶⁶ Its star would rise even higher after the fall of the Crusader States in 1291, when Candia became the chief way station for Venetian vessels, and would hold this honor through much of the fifteenth century.⁶⁷

A New Social World

While the economic advantages of Crete ensured its status as first colony of the Stato da mar, other considerations made ruling and inhabiting Venetian Crete more complicated. New social realities after 1204 were as important as the redrawn eastern Mediterranean map. Venice had sent Latin-rite settlers from the lagoon to the island, but Crete was no vacuum. Indeed, the maritime holdings were more diverse than Venice’s mainland, or terraferma, territories, both in terms of the multiplicity of languages and religions of the inhabitants and in terms of the complexity of religious interactions especially between Latin and Greek Christians.⁶⁸

In comparison to the island’s native Greek inhabitants, Venetians would never make up more than a small fraction of the population. Greek speakers, loyal to the idea of Byzantium and dedicated to the Orthodox Church, chafed against their Venetian-speaking, Latin colonial overlords who contributed to the demise of the empire. But more than political resentments, the Greeks and Latins—alongside other minority groups, particularly Jews but also Armenians and others—had to learn each other’s cultural sensibilities, holiday calendars, religious attitudes, and social habits.

For Venice, this called for new approaches to rule. It had to figure out how to be a successful colonial sovereign. Such heterogeneity was not only new for Venice and its government apparatus; the introduction of Venice, its agents and allies, into these colonies actually changed the nature of the dominions too. While the traditional narrative tells of a highly segregated, socially stratified colonial society in which Latins and Greeks did not mix, recent scholarship has shown the untenable nature of such claims.⁶⁹ Crete’s Latin and Greek Orthodox populations became entangled through an emotional and biological web of marriage and childbearing that makes it difficult to separate the “Greek” and “Latin” strands. The entrée of Latins, particularly the nascent Veneto-Cretan nobility, onto the island began a wave of demographic and cultural shifting that is still not fully understood.⁷⁰ That Crete served as a locus of interaction between people of different cultures, religions, and ethnicities must inform our understanding of the island and indeed the whole eastern Mediterranean in this period.

The focus on Crete’s Jews in this study allows for a reevaluation of this major social shift. The historiography of Venetian Crete—and indeed the eastern Mediterranean more broadly in its post-1204 context—has tended to characterize the societal reality and its concomitant tensions as a sharp bifurcation, a world of Latin versus Greek that influenced conflicts over politics, language, religion, and social affiliation.⁷¹ Scholars have long noticed that the sources produce an enormous amount of information about Jews but have chosen not to frame that group as a central part of the narrative.⁷² But, in the daily social life of Candia, Jews were a prominent subgroup. Jews and Latins each made up roughly the same percentage of Candia’s demographic—about a thousand people in each community—in comparison to a much larger Greek Orthodox population. In Crete’s social theater, Jews were neither numerically small nor minor in terms of available evidence about them. Expanding the colonial history of Venice so as to embrace the Jews helps delineate the contours of Candiote society more accurately and accounts for a significant amount of evidence that has not heretofore been considered.

This approach also offers a new layer to the ongoing debate over the colonizer/colonized divide, an enduring dichotomy in postcolonial studies that oversimplifies the realities of colonial society.⁷³ Sally McKee broke down the artificial Latin/Greek division in Uncommon Dominion by showing that the social and religious lives of Greeks and Latins intersected and that strict colonial divisions intended to create a formally segregated hierarchy were kept in the breach. Consideration of this Jewish dimension illustrates that other players existed—and that they do not fit neatly within a dichotomous colonial model. Rather, the Jews of Candia were in some ways aligned with the colonized populations: legally they were subjects without citizenship rights, and linguistically they spoke the same Greek as their majority subject neighbors. Yet in other ways they were nested somewhere between the Greek subjects and the Latin colonizers, serving the colonial cause through professional and economic channels, and allying with the Venetian government at important moments (in particular, during anti-Venetian rebellions).⁷⁴ Thus the position of Jews in Candia’s society offers an alternative view of colonial reality that, instead of comprising two groups existing at opposite poles, consisted of groups that occupied various and variable points on a spectrum in relation to their subject status and colonialism.⁷⁵

Indeed, the choice to emphasize the colonially inflected position of this Jewish population and the colonial nature of the justice they consumed is meant to situate this study within the apparent “Jewish Imperial Turn” that some scholars of modern colonial societies have recently identified.⁷⁶ The complexity of Jewish interaction with, and place within, colonial empires has emerged as an urgent scholarly focus among historians of modern Jews. As premodernists become increasingly comfortable, and even adamant about, using the language of colonialism and the scholarly tools of postcolonial theory, there is no reason to limit the lines of inquiry about colonial Jews to the modern period.⁷⁷ Moreover, in discerning the uniqueness of Candia—considering why Jewish behavior, local government, and social reality interacted as they did—I argue that a colonial model best explains the evidence. Colonial justice in Candia, and the society it reflects, may not be wholly other than medieval Iberia or northern Italy, but it is dissimilar enough to help explain why Candiote Jews fared differently than their Spanish or northern Italian counterparts. In short, colonial justice is good to think with, despite any limits we may find in applying such a model.

The social and political realities that obtained on colonial Crete, a setting that necessitated real flexibility of governance to accommodate the varying parties, made the island both squarely part of Christendom, a familiar and well-trodden transfer point for galleys and their crews, and something vaguely other, on the edges of “regular” civilization. That this was a common view becomes clear from a story in Boccaccio’s Decameron in a story from the Fourth Day of his narrative, in which three sisters from Marseille elope to Crete with their lovers, only to find misery and death instead of love and freedom. For wealthy daughters of strict Marseille merchant society, Crete was a haven where they could live openly with their lovers without social repercussion but still reside safely within a familiar social world, going to banquets and meeting other well-bred young people.⁷⁸ This fictionalized depiction of Crete as a hub of civilization hovering on the frontier of Christendom indeed maps onto the wider narrative of Venetian Crete. A frontier-like flexibility appears repeatedly in writings on Candia, benefiting Jews and others. Like the frontier societies of medieval Iberia, and indeed like the colonial societies of the early modern period, social complexity and distance from the center of power enabled social mores to adapt and empowered individuals to move beyond their assumed statuses.

But Crete was also a place where justice could be redefined and where rules could be bent, for better or worse.⁷⁹ Boccaccio himself identified justice as a focus of Cretan governmental policy and believed that the island was a place where arrests and trials were common. He also portrayed the duke himself as an individual located at the center of the wheels of justice: empowered to define what constituted justice according to his whims, employing less than moral tactics under the guise of a sort of accommodationist justice (forcing sex on one sister to save another). Indeed, this tension also appears in many of the depictions of Venetian Crete that emerge from the sources. Justice, portrayed as unbending in the political discourse, met up with a different reality on the ground, where it appeared rather malleable. The claim of “justice” was manipulated for individual interest or as a rationale for undermining specific laws in favor of a perceived greater good.

For Boccaccio’s three sisters of Marseille and their lovers, Venice’s malleable “justice” led to their demise—in the narrative logic of the tale, a fair penalty for “the vice of anger.”⁸⁰ This legal flexibility, however, as we will see, did not always punish those outside the colonial administration but offered particular advantages to other inhabitants of the island—including individual Jews and the Jewish community as a whole. Instead of imposing a uniform law on all subjects, the colonial system of rule in Crete reflected and acknowledged the social diversity of the island, particularly in the division of courts of first instance between Latin and Greek speakers (or between Venetian citizens and Venetian subjects, onto which these language groups mapped) and in its accommodation of local precedents and customary law into its judicial decision making.

Not only was the notion of Venetian justice well known to contemporaries, as the Decameron highlights, but it has also become a central discussion in modern scholarly circles, particularly focusing on notions of justice among the patrician elite in the city of Venice itself. Venice’s emphasis on the tropes of justice and equality, its approach to crime and punishment, and the place of law in its civil life have become a major focus in Venetian historiography, particularly from the fourteenth century.⁸¹ These studies tend to focus on criminal law and thus give a particular view of what constituted justice—a justice reflected through incarceration and punishment, in which violence plays a central role. But the rhetorical language of justice and equality also played a significant role in the civil courtrooms of Venice, where justice represented “a resource that could be used by the populace in pursuit of their own strategies.”⁸² And it played a particularly important role as a colonial tool through which to appease and placate Venetian subjects.

Though some Candiote Jews encountered Venice’s criminal justice system on the island, most Jewish involvement with colonial justice came through the civil court. Thus the particular ways in which justice was interpreted by the judiciary when Jews were involved—including by respecting and incorporating Jewish law into adjudication and providing equal access to the civil courtroom for subjects, Jewish and Orthodox alike—shed new light on the meaning of these concepts so central to Venetian state ideology.

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This study is not intended to be a synthetic account Crete’s medieval Jews. Rather, each chapter offers a new lens onto Jewish life and its relation to the island and the island’s colonial legal system. Chapter 1 introduces the Jews of Candia, their communal structure, and the evolution of the community from the thirteenth century. Chapter 2 looks to quotidian Jewish-Christian relations, considering the role of economics and space in fostering meaningful interactions between these groups. Moving beyond individually driven interactions between Jews and Christians, Chapter 3 considers the role of the state in controlling and fostering Jewish engagement with Christians; influencing and controlling Christian attitudes toward Jews and toward typical anti-Jewish tropes; and in limiting the impact of anti-Jewish claims through the reliance on the Venetian judiciary. Chapter 4 begins a series of three chapters focusing predominantly on Jewish use of colonial justice to dispute against their coreligionists. This chapter asks why the Jews of Crete chose to litigate against each other in secular courts and surveys the general variety of cases that Jews brought against each other. Chapter 5 looks at cases of marital strife in which a spouse (usually the wife) sought redress before the ducal court. Chapter 6 returns to the elite leadership and the ways in which it marshaled Venetian justice, in the process inviting Venetian intervention into the workings of everyday Jewish self-rule.

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In some respects, the Jews of Venetian Crete lived out elements of Boccaccio’s colonial fantasy. They lived in a Mediterranean society that afforded them enough distance from the power center to enjoy a freedom uncommon for medieval Jews. At the same time, Candia was also central enough to access the economic, social, and intellectual currents of the Middle Sea and beyond. This is a tale of the consequences of such a tension, between the center and the periphery, not only in space but in culture and religion. It is also a study of the implications of other familiar tensions: the community and the individual; social pragmatism and religious ideology; political expedience and judicial rigor. But most of all, it is a tale of lives—of individuals, families, and communities—intersecting with each other and with the state in a highly mobile world.