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Chapter 1

The Jewish Community of Candia

Late one Friday afternoon in 1546, Elia Capsali—rabbi, historian, and leader of the Jewish community of Candia—walked home from the ducal palace. He had been visiting with his “beloved” friend Carlo Capello, the current duke of Crete.¹ As he exited the ducal palace Capsali found himself on the city’s central piazza. It was still commonly known as the Plateia (Greek for “the town square”) in 1546, even though Venice had officially renamed it St. Mark’s Square centuries before, soon after it settled its military colonists in the town in the early thirteenth century.

The Plateia was the buzzing nerve center of Candia, and as Capsali entered the square, he saw the municipal and business centers of the city, including the main marketplace, currency exchange, merchants’ loggia, and the Latin church of Saint Mark. As he entered the open square, Capsali must have inescapably drawn in the scents of food sellers’ stalls and the acrid tang from smiths’ workshops. Merchants loudly hawked all sorts of wares, from bread to horseshoes, from their rented benches. He might have heard the sudden hushed attention to public announcements made by the public crier in the central arcade, or lobium. At one time or another, he surely saw a criminal doing time in the berlina, the pillory set up in the square.² Though the duke was not sitting in judgment at that moment, since indeed he had been visiting with Capsali, the Plateia was even the spot where the ducal court heard its cases “in the open air” of the square.³ The Plateia was a theater of life in Candia.

To the horror of religious leaders like Capsali, even Candiote Jews loved to watch the spectacle of the market and court proceedings—especially on Saturday mornings, when they should have been at Sabbath prayers.⁴ Though Capsali’s personal visit to the duke, the highest colonial official and governor of the island, was certainly not typical, for at least three centuries before Capsali’s time, every Candiote Jew spent time in the Plateia, probably followed by a walk back to the Jewish Quarter. Such was Capsali’s plan on that day.

Map 2. Venetian Candia c. 1350–1450.

The Candia in which Elia Capsali lived thrived as a cosmopolitan colonial capital. During his lifetime, the city’s cultural life bustled even more than it had a century earlier. Byzantine refugees fleeing Constantinople in the aftermath of the Ottoman conquest of 1453 created a hub for literature, art, and classical philosophy in this Veneto-Greek milieu.⁵ Nevertheless, even in the darker century after the Black Death, Candia served as a key node for travel, trade, and settlement, and had done so since surprisingly soon after Venice settled its first military colonists on the island in 1211. In fact, during the century or so after the Black Death, Crete hit her stride as a trade hub. With the Genoese controlling the hub city of Famagusta (on Cyprus) from 1374 to 1464, Candia became the key stopover point on the Venice-Levantine commercial route.⁶ The first half of the fifteenth century witnessed the peak in Candia’s role as a major emporium.⁷ It was not simply that Candia was a hub for trade in other places’ goods; the city and its hinterland produced highly desired items for export, including wine, cheese, wool, and tanned hides, among other lucrative merchandise.⁸

However bustling, Candia was nevertheless a small city, comprising 192 acres—only three-tenths of a square mile.⁹ Today, a stroll from the Venetian piazza (now popularly known as Lion’s Square), up the old main street known then as the Ruga Maistra (or Magistra), and right up to the harbor—a journey through the entire length of the walled city south to north—takes little more than five minutes. At least in the late sixteenth century, it was densely populated, with a 1583 census estimating the population inside the walls (not including the borgo) at 15,976. Only a relatively small percentage of these residents—fewer than a thousand people—belonged to Venice’s noble class. Most of the city’s inhabitants—over 80 percent—were middle-class Greeks, non-noble Italians, and Armenians. The city’s suburb, the borgo, housed more of this community, especially Greeks but also Venetian elites who preferred some distance from the center of power and others who were priced out of central city living.¹⁰ Jews made up another small but substantial population within the city’s walls: about 950 souls, according to that census.¹¹ To be sure, we must add to this mix those who were not counted: people such as slaves and temporary visitors, including merchants and pilgrims.¹² Nevertheless, Candia remained a small town, physically and demographically. In comparison, even during the plague-ridden centuries after 1348, Venice managed to rebuild its population to above 100,000 souls; a census from 1500 puts the number at about 120,000.¹³

Unfortunately, no similar contemporary demographic assessment has survived for the century following the Black Death. Sally McKee has estimated Candia’s demographics according to status and profession. She argues that “feudatories,” the Venetian elites given land directly from the state, “and their families very likely never reached, much less surpassed, the figure of two thousand individuals” in the late Middle Ages. She also suggests that the “Candiote working population” (capaciously understood) hovered between at least five and eight thousand people.¹⁴

Yet any overarching total remains highly speculative. This fact—and a suspicion of numbers proposed by contemporary visitors—has led scholars to debate Candia’s Jewish population numbers in the late Middle Ages.¹⁵ But the census data for the late sixteenth century seem to me quite consistent with the earlier period. Counting the Jews mentioned in court documents, notarial records, and Hebrew sources from 1350 to 1454 suggests a similar population of at least 1,000 Jewish souls in the city—and probably more—in this century.¹⁶

These thousand or so Jews took part in the vibrant commercial life of the city, producing goods and offering services for Candia, for export, and for the internal Jewish community as well.¹⁷ Some Cretan Jews busily made their livings in professions habitually associated with medieval Jews—moneylenders, merchants, and physicians. They were also notaries, religious scribes, and teachers, positions of high social standing.¹⁸ Often these individuals involved themselves in more than one of these arenas, such as those who were both physicians and creditors. Despite the ubiquity of these high-status, “white-collar” jobs in the sources, many members—perhaps a majority—of the Jewish community in Candia worked in manual labor. Jewish laborers and skilled craftsmen hired themselves out and maintained their own workshops; these include tailors, artisans (faber), goldsmiths (aurifex), cobblers (cerdo), tanners, cork makers, butchers, healers, and dyers (tintor). Kosher food manufacture, including the production of kosher wine, dairy products, and meat, as well as overseeing their production for religious purposes, also employed a number of residents. Some Jews were domestic servants (famulus/famula), most likely serving in Jewish households.¹⁹ Undoubtedly many unskilled laborers also existed among the community.

Though men predominantly filled these professional roles, Jewish women certainly also contributed to their own and their families’ economic coffers across the spectrum: as creditors and merchants, health practitioners, domestics, and textile workers, actively and publicly taking part in the life of the city, as they also filled the at-home roles more commonly prescribed to them: wives and mothers.²⁰

The Development of Candia’s Kehillah

As he left the Plateia on that Friday afternoon in 1546, perhaps Elia Capsali glanced up at the clock on the bell tower to check how long he had before Sabbath began.²¹ Though the clock was relatively new, the square—its organization and central role in the life of the city—remained much as Elia’s ancestors saw it during more than three centuries that the Capsalis, once Byzantine Jews, had lived under Venetian rule. As a man keenly attentive to his family’s and community’s history—Capsali considered himself a historian and keeper of the community’s memory—it could not have been lost on him that his situation was exceptional for a Jew of his time: his access to the halls of Venetian power, freedom in this colonial society, and, indeed, the place of the community he led.²² In his book on Ottoman history, he himself would write of the trauma of other Jews that he had personally witnessed when some of Iberia’s expelled Jews—poor, ragged, and hopeless—washed up on Crete’s shores after the traumatic expulsion of 1492.²³

In contrast to the insecurity of contemporary Sephardim, his community was confidently situated to help these homeless Jews. Despite burdensome taxation, the Jews of Candia were generally financially and politically secure; both the exigencies of Venetian imperial settlement and active negotiation by the island’s Jews had created a safe space in which Jewish life could flourish.

And so it had, for centuries, both before and during Venetian rule. Jews did not come to Crete only as a result of the Venetian conquest. The Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo notes a significant Jewish community on Crete in the first century CE; Josephus Flavius married a woman from this Cretan Jewish community a few decades after Philo wrote.²⁴ Both reference to Jews in a tale recounted by the church historian Socrates Scholasticus and independent epigraphic evidence indicate that a Jewish community was settled on Crete in the fifth century.²⁵ To be sure, we do not know if Jews remained on Crete continuously, and Jewish settlement in this period seems to have been focused in Gortyna, the Roman administrative center on the southern coast of the island.²⁶

Yet evidence certainly places Jews in Chandax (later called Candia) in the ninth and tenth centuries.²⁷ By the time Venice sent its first round of military colonists to hold the island in 1211, a Jewish community had struck deep roots in Candia, inhabiting its own neighborhood in the northwest corner of the city. This was the same district to which Capsali walked home after meeting the duke on that Friday in 1546.²⁸ This Jewish Quarter became known alternatively in Latin, Venetian, and Greek—the most commonly used languages of this multilingual colonial society—as the Judaica, Zudecca, and Obraki. In Hebrew, the quarter and its people were synonymous: both were known as the kahal or kehillah, simply “the community.”

In fact, Elia’s own ancestors were among those who lived in that thirteenth-century kahal. In 1228, Parnas Capsali signed his name to the first set of Jewish communal ordinances, taqqanot, which were meant to organize and unify Jewish life across the Jewish communities on the island.²⁹ Scholars assert that, since the community had long predated the Venetian colonial project, the Jewish communal structure was probably a holdover from Byzantine days.³⁰ Yet the authors of the rules of 1228, according to an introduction by its signatories, believed themselves to be innovators: this was the first unified attempt at bringing together representatives “from all four Hebrew [ivrim] communities” to agree to a set of rules aimed at all the Jews across the island.³¹ Only seventeen years after Venice had established its rule there, a group of elites had amassed enough strength and trust within the community to gather the Jews, “young and old,” in the Great Synagogue of Elijah the Prophet and to impose on them a set of ordinances prepared in advance.³²

In his very signature, Parnas Capsali identified himself as part of this older, elite lineage. Not only did he record the name of his father, Solomon, but he traced for posterity one more generation: his grandfather Joseph Capsali, whom he proudly titled “the Rabbi.”³³ Over the next three centuries, Capsali men remained at the forefront of communal leadership of Candia’s kehillah kedoshah, the “holy community,” as the corporate institution styled itself. While Parnas signed the first set of taqqanot, it was Elia Capsali—ever conscious of posterity and history—who collected these ordinances, along with letters and historical reflections, into a single text, the Taqqanot Qandiya, which survives in one lone manuscript until today.³⁴

Communal Institutions

Between Parnas’s life in the early 1200s and when Elia reached adulthood around 1500, members of the Capsali family and other elite clans developed a comprehensive corporate organization, similar to many Jewish kehillah (community) institutions in the Mediterranean and beyond.³⁵ As in other premodern Jewish communities, elected lay officials in Candia fulfilled the mandate of the corporate institution, whose chief goal was to enable, protect, and enforce local Jewish ritual life. These leaders, headed by an elected condestabulo, ensured that Candiote Jews had access to kosher food, including ritually slaughtered meat, and properly inspected dairy and wine. They organized and fostered liturgical life, with its ritual objects, Torah scrolls, synagogue spaces, and prayer leaders. They also convened a Jewish court, a beit din, although scant information about it survives.³⁶

The kehillah was recognized as a corporate legal body—a universitas—by the Venetian government. As such, the kehillah owned real estate from which it derived income to provide housing for the poor and fund other community needs.³⁷ The leadership’s other primary task was to serve as liaison between the Jewish community and the Venetian colonial government on matters that affected the community as a whole. Its most daunting task was to collect the Jewish tax, which was levied not per capita but on the community as a whole.³⁸ Although some corporate institutions in the medieval world were empowered to deal with Jewish criminal activity, Venetian courts exercised control over all criminal cases.³⁹ The kehillah was allowed to mandate certain rules and ordinances for its members, an authority that other kinds of corporations, such as guilds and confraternities, also possessed. Thus any Jewish law and custom not contrary to Venetian law could be legislated for the community by the kehillah’s leadership. It is into this context of corporate self-rule that the Hebrew ordinances of Taqqanot Qandiya fit.

Like the Capsali family’s enduring role as leaders, in some fundamental ways the community they led would maintain continuity during the generations between Parnas and Elia. The community’s liturgical rite, the majority of its population, and its synagogues would remain “Romaniote”—that is, they identified with the ancestral ways of the Jews of Byzantine origin. Candiote Jews were generally native Greek speakers, and even as the community became more heterogeneous, it continued to follow Romaniote customs, rituals, and liturgy that—unlike Ashkenazi (Franco-German) or Sephardi (Spanish) liturgies—incorporated vernacular Greek into some parts of the service.⁴⁰

In other ways, however, the Candiote Jewish community experienced significant changes between 1228 and the turn of the sixteenth century, not least because Crete’s Jewish population was in constant flux. In particular, outbreaks of plague in the mid-fourteenth century decimated the community, a result of both death and families fleeing the island. In 1389, three representatives of the Jewish community, supported by testimony of three Venetian noblemen who had served on Crete, convinced the Venetian Senate that the collective tax, which had been recently increased, was an impossible burden for a community so weakened in number.⁴¹ An influx of Jews from Iberia, Venice, and elsewhere, however, mitigated this loss soon after. Elia Capsali could have pointed to himself as an outcome of these demographic changes. Despite his well-known local patronymic, his mother came from the Delmedigo clan, an Ashkenazi family that arrived on the island in the late fourteenth century by way of Venetian Negroponte and quickly worked its way into the cadre of local elite Jews.

Given this population boost, Jewish economic fortunes on Crete changed for the better. As the nineteenth-century scholar of Venice Hippolyte Noiret noted, the expulsion of Jews (mainly of German and Italian extraction) from Venice was announced in late August 1394. A year later, the Venetian Senate voted to raise Crete’s Jewish tax, citing not only the general wealth of the Jews but also the immigration of new rich Jews to the island.⁴² The levied tax rose to 3,000 hyperpera, a 50 percent increase over the amount kehillah representatives had negotiated in 1389. If the tax rate correlated roughly to population, the Jewish community in the aggregate apparently remained economically successful over the course of the next century.⁴³

To be sure, after 1492 and into the sixteenth century, faced with the challenge of poor Iberian Jews arriving en masse, and the need to ransom kidnapped Jews from Candia, Coron, and Patras, the Jewish community became so strapped for cash that it sold the silver finials from a Torah scroll; Elia Capsali even sold his personal library to an agent of Ulrich Fugger, the famed German businessman and bibliophile.⁴⁴ But at least until 1492, the influx of Jews from western lands offered Candia’s kehillah some financial relief and demographic strength.

The leadership reacted to the challenges posed from the outside, such as raised taxes, through advocacy and negotiation with the colonial government—by working within the bounds of colonial justice and politics. The successful 1389 embassy to Venice is but one example of the direct approach Jewish leaders took in aiding their community; the support of the Venetian noblemen at that time suggests the value of maintaining close ties with the local administration. Capsali’s visit to his “beloved friend” the duke should be read as part of this strategy, too.

Communal Reforms: 1363

When the challenges faced by the community arose from the internal realities of the kehillah, a different sort of strategy had to be employed. After the demographic crisis of the Black Death, the leadership convened a synod, perhaps recognizing in the moment an opportunity for unity and conformity that, they believed, would best serve the community. This synod of 1363 and its resulting taqqanot illustrate a community in need of a new leadership structure and new rules for relating both to each other and to the Christian communities with which they lived, worked, and even at times socialized.⁴⁵

Their reforming ordinances of 1363 addressed problems with the structure of the system in place. From the century and a half beforehand, we have only the first set of taqqanot from 1228, the ones signed by Parnas Capsali and others, and a revision of the same. The 1228 set are written in rhyme; the revised set are written in prose and reordered, though the same ten ordinances remain. The prose revisions are undated and are ascribed to an otherwise unknown Rabbi Tzedakah. The initial ten ordinances address aspects of Jewish life, such as interactions with Gentiles, ritual purity, and synagogue attendance.

Regarding communal structure, the early ordinances identify communal leaders only as “appointed officials” (ha-memunim ha-reshumim) and assert that they have sole authority to impose excommunication.⁴⁶ An organizational structure that included these memunim (sg. mamun) seems to have lasted until 1363.⁴⁷ Deterioration in the surviving manuscript of Taqqanot Qandiya makes much of these first ordinances unreadable, and so it is unclear whether the community’s “president,” the condestabulo, existed yet in the early thirteenth century. One of the signatories is referred to as the manhig, “leader,” but the designation is imprecise. A century later, however, the office of condestabulo was well established. In the revision of the first ten ordinances by Rabbi Tzedakah, likely from the first half of the fourteenth century, the right to call a ban is no longer the purview of unspecified officials but only allowed with prior approval from “the condestabulo who will be [in that position] at that time.”⁴⁸ The Hebrew text transliterated the Venetian term without a translation, suggesting it had become standard by this point. From 1363 on, this official’s name would often be listed in the introduction or signatory sections of ordinances; the first man identified in March of that year is “our leader, our president [nesiyeinu]” David the son of Judah, “the condestabulo.”⁴⁹

In 1363, however, this synod spelled out a more formalized leadership hierarchy. Each time the community elected a condestabulo (apparently annually), he was directed to choose seven men, “important men from the good men of the community” (hashuvim mi-tuvei ha-kahal), and have them swear on the Torah Scroll to uphold the rules of the community.⁵⁰ By choosing seven “good men,” the leadership enacted a familiar medieval custom with origins in the Talmud.⁵¹ In a taqqanah dated a month later, though apparently part of the same synodal texts, the legislators referred to additional leadership roles, positions more unique to the Cretan context: the condestabulo was given a panel of aides called hashvanim (councillors), the number of whom is not specified.⁵²

The seeming precision of these new ordinances does not always bear out in the sources. In 1369, an ordinance is signed by the condestabulo and eight memunim, using the old term and an unexpected number—neither the seven “good men” mentioned above nor any councillors.⁵³ But by 1407, the condestabulo’s privy council was indeed comprised of three men known as hashvanim, and this remained the standard arrangement for the next few centuries.⁵⁴ The condestabulo’s councillors were chosen internally within the community, although by the mid-fifteenth century Venice also recognized them as officials of the Jewish community: ducal court records refer to the condestabulo and his three camerarii (chamberlains or advisors).⁵⁵ The community leaders continued to tweak the structure of the institution over time; in 1489, they decided that a single scribe, officially appointed by the current condestabulo, should be the only one to write official communal documents, since documents coming out of the kehillah seem to have been intentionally or accidentally misrepresenting the aims and words of the leadership.⁵⁶

Many of the ordinances published by the reforming synod of 1363 repeat injunctions from earlier times, concerning mandatory gatherings, limitations on excommunication, maintaining the ritual bath, and the need for men to come pray in the synagogue. Despite their antique content, their repetition indicates the perceived importance of this synod and underlined the synod’s goal of reunifying the community under common rules. In contrast to these repeated statutes, other ordinances were decidedly new and suggest novel social challenges faced by the community. Three ordinances seek to control the production, import, and purchase of kosher foodstuffs. Three others attempt to stem desecration of the Sabbath. Two ordinances sought to curb cheating in business deals with Christians.

These new ordinances suggest a community large enough to produce and regulate kosher food but also a community diverse enough to have members for whom Sabbath was evidently a lower priority. They also point to increased commercial relations with Christian neighbors—and, apparently, a concomitant rise in an attitude among some Jews that ethics need not apply in business transactions with individuals outside the kehillah. Although these are not unusual complaints to find in texts written by medieval Jewish communities, these new ordinances suggest an evolving focus and new challenges for the Candiote leadership.

Two new ordinances from 1363 point to a novel difficulty: Jewish prostitutes, Jewish pimps, and whorehouses in the Jewish Quarter of Candia. At least in part, this sprang from poverty, since the statute records that some of the prostitutes attempted to secure housing in the Jewish community’s poorhouse.⁵⁷ The authors of the taqqanah, however, were not concerned with the sources of the problem. Rather, they sought only to root out the practice: first, by forbidding landlords to rent apartments to known prostitutes, and second, by publicly shaming those involved—including the clientele.

In the very next ordinance, the authors expressed dismay over the implications of prostitution in terms of the reputation of Candia’s Jewish women. Knowledge of Jewish prostitution in the city had apparently spread far and wide, particularly because of Jewish visitors who patronized the prostitutes and then told others of their existence.⁵⁸

Faced with crisis and disorder—unruly excommunication, unethical business practices, shirking the Sabbath, Jewish whorehouses—the leadership responded by erecting legal frameworks it hoped could reunify, solidify, and reorient the community under its leadership. Although the ordinances themselves were not revolutionary, the very act of calling a synod to pass new statutes aimed at the community as a whole, and the emphasis on the structure of the Jewish leadership, speaks to the belief among the elite that Jewish life needed to be reformed and that the community needed to be reminded of its unity. The new taqqanot achieved a measure of success, in as much as they were meant to form the basis for communal self-rule. The structure set out in the ordinances of 1363 remained mostly in effect; they were frequently reissued in the following centuries. No consistent reform project would ever replace it. Instead, individual ordinances were penned at key moments of perceived social and religious need.

Jewish Life and the Jewish Quarter

After taking leave of the duke, Elia Capsali began his stroll home from southern end of the city. The Plateia sat inside the main land gate, an enormous vaulted archway known as the Porta di Piazza, which led south from the town proper to its extensive suburbs, the borgo.⁵⁹ But the borgo primarily housed the Greek Orthodox population of Candia, and Capsali headed in the other direction. Walking to the northwest corner of the walled city where the Jewish Quarter was located, Capsali had to head north from the Plateia, up the Ruga Maistra, the major north-south thoroughfare that tracked through the center of the town, from the southern land gate to the northern gate at the harbor. Along the Ruga he saw Jewish stalls set up among the homes and stores that lined the street.⁶⁰ He also likely saw garbage neatly piled up next to each home and stall: since the 1360s, residents and shopkeepers on the boulevard were required to sweep up on Friday mornings in preparation for a communal trash cart, which would collect it on Saturday morning while Capsali would be in synagogue.⁶¹

At some point before the road hit the port, Capsali turned west and entered into the labyrinth of neighborhoods that made up much of the walled city. Before reaching the Judaica, navigating the narrow alleys, he passed by Jews rushing to bake their savory pies, a dish known even in the Hebrew text as a torta, in bakehouses shared with their Christian neighbors. Even though this had gone on for centuries, Capsali regarded it with such pious dismay that soon after, he built kosher ovens on his own property, at his own expense.⁶²

Capsali entered the Judaica through the southeastern gate, erected in the 1390s and decorated with the Lion of St. Mark and Venetian coats of arms.⁶³ He strode down that neighborhood’s main street, nicknamed Stenón (Greek for “narrow”).⁶⁴ The tall buildings that marked this quarter as different from other neighborhoods—buildings of three or four stories, as opposed to the usual single-story homes occupied by most non-Jewish Candiote residents—would have shaded him on this late summer afternoon.⁶⁵

By Capsali’s day, the Judaica was a city within the city—enclosed by walls, some of which were also the exterior walls of Jewish homes. The south and east sides were shut up with walls in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. On its west and north sides, the Judaica abutted the water, where the seawall overlooked Dermata (Tanners’) Bay, west of the city’s main port. Lines of Jewish mansions faced the northern waterfront.

Did the noxious odors from Dermata Bay tanneries, constant threats from the sea, and narrow crowded streets make Capsali’s neighborhood undesirable, as some have claimed? Perhaps not.⁶⁶ Lorenzo da Mula, a Christian visitor to Candia in 1571, wrote that the Jewish Quarter (or at least its parts closest to the water) was the “most beautiful part of the city.”⁶⁷ Likewise, the keen-eyed visitor Meshullam of Volterra, in Candia in 1481, noticed other negative parts of Jewish life in the city but did not disparage the Jewish Quarter itself. Of course, perhaps these visitors saw what they wanted to see or saw what their guides showed them.

On the way home, Elia may have walked past the Jewish slaughterhouse or through the web of streets known as the “Cobbler’s Area.”⁶⁸ The quarter’s synagogues, its mikvah (ritual bath), and its public well were not far from his route. Although the mikvah and the public well kept the same place over the course of the three centuries between the first taqqanot and Elia’s own tenure as condestabulo, the number and locations of the synagogues did not stay constant. The oldest synagogue that had been in use in 1228, the one named for the Prophet Elijah, seems to have closed down at some point after 1369. But another major synagogue appeared around 1400, when the Delmedigo family founded the Allemaniko (“German”) synagogue.⁶⁹ An unidentified synagogue, created in the 1260s, closed down in 1421 as the result of a Jewish convert to Christianity—and descendant of one of the founders of the synagogue—successfully suing in the ducal court for control of the land.⁷⁰ The taqqanot indicate that in 1369 and 1406 there were three synagogues worth mentioning; in 1424 a number of synagogues existed, but there were two major ones (hashtayim hagdolot).⁷¹ But a taqqanah likely from the 1530s lists four, with its representatives: the Great Synagogue, represented by Samuel Cohen Ashkenazi; the Synagogue of the Priests, represented by Moses Delmedigo; the Synagogue of the Ashkenazim, represented by Aba Delmedigo; and the High Synagogue, represented by Solomon Cohen Balbo.⁷² Already by 1369 and still in 1518, the Seviliatiko Synagogue, ostensibly the commonly used name for the Great Synagogue, was a major focus, where communal synods at least sometimes took place.⁷³

The synagogue was a meeting house as well as a house of prayer. In the early part of the fifteenth century, the Synagogue of the Priests filled the role of a communal center, a place where community leaders “sat time and time again” to debate their responses to communal problems, such as the ongoing crisis in which Jewish-owned stores remained open for business too close to the start of Sabbath, and also sold goods during the intermediary days of holidays (hol hamo’ed).⁷⁴ In the later years of the fifteenth century, the leadership met at the Great Synagogue (Beit Knesset HaGadol) to discuss religious crises such as the laxity in separation between fiancés and their betrothed before the wedding.⁷⁵

Jewish Migration and Settlement in Candia

The Jewish community of Crete grew and evolved during the Venetian period because of a steady flow of Jewish immigration. Nevertheless, many of the Jewish families in Candia were not newcomers. Naming patterns suggest that many Candiote Jews in this century were of Byzantine origin or at least had been in the Greek milieu for a long time.⁷⁶ Some families had lived on Crete before the Venetian conquest. A member of Casani family, Anatoli the son of David, for instance, wrote liturgical poetry on Crete in the twelfth century.⁷⁷ His family remained among the Jewish elite during Venetian rule. Other migrants arrived on Crete from within the contemporary and former Byzantine Empire and from Venetian colonies such as Coron and Negroponte.

Others came from farther afield, some with little in their pockets. In 1428, a Majorcan Jew agreed to serve a Candiote physician on his travels to Venice in return for food, lodging, and a salary of three hyperpera per month.⁷⁸ Others arrived with far greater resources. And just as their socioeconomic status varied, their origins did as well. Surnames suggest a wide variety of places of origin: Turco (from Ottoman lands or Asia Minor), de Damasco (Damascus), Ciciliano (Sicily), Tzarfati (northern France), and even one Jew oddly named Saracenus. Many other non-Byzantine Jews came to Crete from Iberia and German lands.⁷⁹

Venetian rule on Crete coincided with periods of upheaval in many other parts of Christendom, marked by plague, riot, and massacre, especially in Iberia and Germany. This turmoil provoked a Jewish exodus from the traditional centers of settlement in western Europe. Northern France expelled its Jews in 1182 and 1306 (only to allow the Jews to return in 1189 and 1315) and again in 1395. England definitively drove its Jews out in 1290. German Jews suffered the Rindfleisch and Armleder massacres in 1298 and 1336, respectively, and the Black Death provoked a sharpened set of anti-Jewish legislation, financial disabilities, and mob hostility across Europe that began in 1348 but continued in various incarnations for another century.⁸⁰ The massacres and burnings of the so-called Pestpogrom in the immediate aftermath of the plague gave way to devastating economic persecution around 1390, when the Luxembourger king Wenceslas IV canceled Jewish debt.⁸¹

Likewise, Jews began to flee Iberia in this same period. Before 1348, anti-Jewish violence certainly took place, as David Nirenberg has illustrated.⁸² With the advent of the plague, however, Catalonia and Navarre became “the center of violence and killings” of Jews, and the Inquisition “accompanied the crescendo of violence,” seeking out German and French converts to Christianity who had returned to their Judaism upon moving to Iberia.⁸³ The many Jews who sought refuge in Castile, however, were not to have peace in the following decades, as vitriolic anti-Jewish preaching led to mob riots and massacres across Iberia in the summer of 1391. Beginning in Seville, the riots spread to Valencia and Catalonia, and from there across the peninsula; many Jews were killed and others were forced to convert en masse.⁸⁴ In the first half of the fifteenth century, popular preachers such as Vincent Ferrer continued to rouse the masses to attack Jewish quarters and force Jews to convert under fear of death and pressed the governments of Iberia to pass ever-harsher anti-Jewish legislation.⁸⁵ Long before the expulsion of 1492, many of those who were able to fled Iberia, as did Jews from the German lands.

Though northern Italy was generally a locus of Jewish immigration, at various times Jews found the peninsula unwelcoming, particularly when mendicant preachers riled up town leaders and residents.⁸⁶ The Franciscan friar Bernardino di Siena (d. 1444) stoked hostility against Jews (even if temporarily) in bustling commercial towns such as Florence, Padua, and Siena.⁸⁷ Some Italian cities, such as Genoa and Milan, simply forbade Jewish settlement altogether; others expelled Jews in the late fifteenth century.⁸⁸ Venice finally allowed Jewish moneylenders to settle in the city and its adjacent mainland (terraferma) in the decades after the Black Death, most explicitly from 1382. But Venice soon turned out its Jews, at the end of the century.⁸⁹ In 1394, for economic reasons—there was no longer an urgent need for moneylenders lending credit in the city—the government decided that it would not renew the charter granted to the Jews when it expired in 1397.⁹⁰ From that time, individual Jewish moneylenders were allowed into the city for no longer than fifteen days. Jewish merchants and doctors were allowed in sporadically according to other sets of rules. All Jews had to wear a yellow circle on their clothing. Enormous fines were levied on practicing their religion in the open during their short stays in Venice, for example by holding prayer services.⁹¹ Families left for more welcoming towns, and Venice ceased to be a tempting destination for those seeking to relocate from regions further west.

As western Europe turned more hostile to Jews, Crete came to be regarded as a haven, where Jews escaping expulsion (or worse) could start over. The Venetian government evidently had no problem with immigration to Crete. Likewise, there was no attempt by the Jewish community to control the influx, as some Ashkenazi communities in previous centuries had done.⁹²

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have often been seen as a period of increasing economic disabilities for Cretan Jews, part of the crisis spreading across Christendom. Undoubtedly this period witnessed residential, financial, and professional limitations for the community in Candia. Beginning in 1325, Jews in all Venetian colonies were required to live in Jewish quarters only. Residential rules tightened in 1391, when the Signoria ordered that some of the homes considered part of the Judaica, but across the street from Christian homes considered not part of that district, had to be walled off. This culminated in a final enclosure of the Judaica in 1450 at the request of the adjacent Dominican monastery of St. Peter Martyr.⁹³ Meanwhile, in 1423, Venice prohibited Jews in all of its domains from holding real estate outside Jewish quarters.⁹⁴

Jewish trade was also limited in this period. Generally, Jews were allowed to use shipping lines to Venetian colonies in the Levant, but they usually could not secure rights to ship goods to the metropole.⁹⁵ Moreover, for about two decades beginning in 1429, Venice prohibited its vessels from transporting Jews or their goods to any Mamluk-held territory, thereby extending a papal ban against Christian ships conveying Jews and Jewish-owned goods to the Holy Land.⁹⁶ Jewish economic outlets in Venice’s colonies were increasingly restricted, which probably led more Jewish capital to be directed toward moneylending.⁹⁷

In addition, during the 1430s and 1440s, when Venice needed funds for its war efforts, Cretan Jews found themselves taxed heavily and forced to make war loans. In 1389 the community’s ambassadors successfully convinced the Senate to lower the Jewish tax to 2,000 hyperpera. But by the 1430s, the community was forced to pay 4,000 hyperpera in taxes, 12,000 ducats to help pay Venice’s war debt, and another 3,000 measures of wheat.⁹⁸ Furthermore, Crete’s Jews were legally compelled to wear the yellow badge beginning around the turn of the fifteenth century. This regulation, though, apparently did not meet with great success.⁹⁹

Nonetheless, despite policies aimed at limiting Jewish residency, cutting Jewish market share in overseas trade, and burdensome tax increases and other obligatory payments, these impediments seem relatively minor in comparison to the Jewish experience in other parts of Europe. In particular, the residential limitations appear not to have provoked much anguish, especially since they were sometimes honored in the breach. Segregation thus did not mean isolation or alienation, nor did it discourage new Jewish settlement in Candia. Moreover, it is likely that the Jewish tax rose not simply as a result of Christian mistreatment but also, at least in part, as a result of surging Jewish settlement.¹⁰⁰

Perhaps more importantly, the Jews of the Stato da mar lived in Venice’s colonies without a specific legal charter or condotta, which Jews in many other parts of Europe and even in the terraferma holdings needed for legal settlement. Residence, thus, was not provisional but seemed more secure in its permanence.¹⁰¹ The lack of condotte also meant exceptional economic freedom, in contrast to Jews who had to abide by specific charters in Italy and elsewhere. Although the prohibition on landownership and the shipment restrictions had the effect of limiting trade (especially in luxury items and spices), Crete still offered Jews a wide variety of professional opportunities. Likewise, although Jews were never given citizenship, their status as legal residents and formal subjects of Venice provided Candia’s Jewish merchants certain advantages, such as legal protections when abroad, use of Venetian warehouses, and even, at times, access to state-sponsored shipping.¹⁰²

Crete thus became a choice destination not only because its government allowed entry to refugee Jews but also because it offered significant attractions to businessmen seeking to expand their trading networks. Crete’s position at a crossroads between the Italian peninsula and the Levant made the island, and particularly the town of Candia—arguably the most important way station in the Mediterranean, at least until the rise of Famagusta on Cyprus toward 1500—an attractive and lucrative destination for Jews.¹⁰³

Paths Toward Integration

Although the majority of Jews, and indeed the most powerful Jews, in Crete throughout the Venetian period identified as Romaniote—following the Byzantine-Jewish liturgical and ritual rites—the immigration described above brought a heterogeneous mix of predominantly Ashkenazim (German Jews) and Sephardim (Spanish Jews) to the island. Their integration into Candiote society can sometimes be tracked through their interaction with the kehillah’s leadership, their business contracts, and their dealings with Venice’s colonial court.

Most of the Sephardi Jews named in Latin and Hebrew sources on Crete appear after the massacres of 1391, and it seems likely that most arrived fleeing those terrible events. Some Sephardim, however, came earlier. A Catalan Jew, resident of Candia, contracted to sell honey in Candia as early as 1339, working alongside his business associates, Jews from Sicily and North Africa.¹⁰⁴ The widow Archondisa, in her will from 1358, recorded her late husband as Elia catellanus, although her name suggests that her own origins lay in the Greek-speaking world, a marriage pattern common for Sephardi men and Romaniote women.¹⁰⁵ Another Elia Catellan, son of Solomon, already lived in Candia in 1386 when he made his will.¹⁰⁶

Of the Sephardim who settled in Candia before the annus horribilis of 1391, the Astruc (or Astrug) family’s tale appears in sharpest relief, nicely suggesting the possibilities available to Iberian Jewish immigrants. Members of the Astruc family, most likely from Catalonia, settled in Candia in the mid-fourteenth century and quickly amassed wealth and prestige.¹⁰⁷ They used strategic marriages and business partnerships to secure their new positions as elite members of Candia’s Jewish community. By 1359, Solomon Astrug (as the name is spelled in the Latin sources) had married and was in the midst of divorcing a well-connected Romaniote wife, Elea, daughter of a wealthy Greek Jewish businessman, Liacho Mavristiri, and soon married into another Greek Jewish family.¹⁰⁸

Solomon Astrug built up a successful moneylending business and bought lucrative real estate.¹⁰⁹ He also made useful contacts in the colonial government. During the early 1390s, when the ducal court limited Jewish residence outside the Jewish Quarter, the court exempted Solomon Astrug—the only Jew identified by name—from selling his residential buildings outside the neighborhood. He had no problem paying a high fee for this favor.¹¹⁰ With their father’s wealth to back them, Solomon’s seven children flourished in Crete and for generations this lineage helped lead the Jewish community.¹¹¹ One descendant named Solomon even served as the condestabulo in 1446.¹¹² Other Iberian families in the next century would follow Astrug-like paths toward social integration and political leverage. Of course, money paved the way, and only a relatively small number of Sephardi Jews achieved the communal triumph of the Astrugs.¹¹³

While most Iberian Jewish immigrants appear to have come to Crete in the aftermath of the traumatic events of 1391, the contours of German Jewish migration to the island are less clear-cut. As in the case of Sephardi newcomers, there were certainly some German Jews in Crete before the Black Death. One Elia Allemanus contracted to buy wine there in 1271, only sixty years after Venice had colonized the island.¹¹⁴ Migration from the German lands was in full swing by 1378.¹¹⁵ In that year, a German Jew named Ysacharus (probably Issachar), ill and expecting death, recorded his testament. He was not an official resident of Candia but rather was currently living there with his wife, Hebela; a son remained temporarily in Ashkenaz. Ysacharus had arrived too recently to have learned a language in common with the Latin notary hired to compose his will, so he asked two Jewish landsmen to translate for him. These two men, each identified as German (theotonicus) and as official residents (habitator) of Candia, were able to navigate in local languages. Undoubtedly grateful for their assistance, Ysacharus labeled these men as being among “the better” German Jews living in Candia, indicating that more compatriots lived in the city.¹¹⁶

German Jews came to Crete by way of a number of different routes. Some came via Venice and north Italy. Maria, the widow of Heschia Theotonicus, lived both in Candia and in Venice in the 1390s, although her daughter and son-in-law, Samuel Theotonicus, were members of Crete’s Jewish community.¹¹⁷ Local Jewish leaders wanted Maria to pay Jewish taxes in Crete, though Maria held property, paid taxes, and was currently resident (so it was argued) in Venice itself in April 1391. Even during this short period in which Jews were allowed to settle legally in Venice, some Ashkenazi Jews—including Maria’s son-in-law Samuel—preferred to put down roots in Crete, although Maria’s husband seems to have remained in Venice until his death. Jews from German lands began to migrate to Venice’s mainland holdings in the thirteenth century. The example of the widow Maria and her family suggests that some turned from the mainland to the even broader possibilities available in Crete.¹¹⁸

While some Ashkenazim chose to leave Venice even when they were temporarily allowed to live there, more German Jews who had been living and working in Venice immigrated to Crete after August 1394, when Venice refused to renew the Jewish charter. This quasi-expulsion brought “an influx of wealthy Jews” to Crete, likely including many Ashkenazi Jews.¹¹⁹ The route of some of these Jews from Germany to Venice sometimes took them via Spain. In the later decades of the fifteenth century, Moses Cohen Ashkenazi migrated to Crete, where he quickly became embroiled in a famed debate over Kabbalistic notions of reincarnation with the local-born Cretan rabbi Michael Balbo.¹²⁰ In fact, Moses Ashkenazi spent time in Iberia, then traveled to Venice with his father, and from there moved to Candia.¹²¹

Other Ashkenazi Jews came through Venice’s other colonies before settling in Crete, as did the Delmedigo family.¹²² The actual connection between Germany and this family, the most famous example of a family of Ashkenazi origin in Crete, is lost to history. Latin legal material, however, indicates that the brothers Judah and Shemarya Delmedigo came to Candia by 1359 after significant residence in Negroponte.¹²³ They must have spent enough time in the Italian sphere to have adopted the last name Delmedigo, meaning “of the doctor.”

Both Moses Cohen Ashkenazi and the Delmedigos thought of themselves as Ashkenazi and were considered as such by their coreligionists in Candia. Abba Delmedigo the Elder, for example, supposedly founded a synagogue in Candia called the Allemaniko (“German”) around 1400.¹²⁴ In his Kabbalistic-philosophical fight with Moses Cohen Ashkenazi over competing ideas of reincarnation, the Romaniote Michael Balbo emphasized the alien character of his opponent’s ideas by highlighting his foreign birthplace.¹²⁵ But their affiliations and practices did not always align with our assumptions of Ashkenazi behavior; if we can rely on the Delmedigo family’s seventeenth-century prayer book, the family (at least by then) prayed according to the Romaniote rite.¹²⁶ This apparently was not a novelty: in the sixteenth century, members of the Delmedigo family acted as communal representatives for both the “Synagogue of the Ashkenazim” (the Allemaniko) and the “Synagogue of the Priests” (also known as the Chochanitiko), one of the old Romaniote synagogues.¹²⁷

Just as the Delmedigos came to lead Cretan Jewry, other Jews of German origin also joined the elite ranks of the Cretan kehillah, including Lazaro Theotonicus (Eliezer Ashkenazi Katz), who in 1411 acted as condestabulo and spearheaded a project to build a new sewer to protect water quality.¹²⁸ In a taqqanah, Elia Capsali identified a rabbi and scholar named Yitzhak (Isaac) Ashkenazi as his revered teacher.¹²⁹

Some German Jews had gained status in the community before the fifteenth century. In 1369, Malkiel Cohen Ashkenazi signed an ordinance of Taqqanot Qandiya, an act that indicated he had achieved a certain status within the community.¹³⁰ Malkiel, however, was a respected member not only of the Jewish community’s elite but also of the wider town’s elite. Melchiele Theotonicus, as he is called in the Latin sources, was a doctor in independent practice who was also employed by the Venetian judiciary to treat injuries and testify about them in court. The German Jewish surgeon identified as Magister Iaco appeared before a Latin notary to translate for the dying Ysacharus as he dictated his will in 1378.¹³¹ Ashkenazi immigrants to Crete thus included respected physicians who were part of the colonial system and its institutions already in the 1360s and 1370s.

A small number of Iberian Jews also joined the leadership roster in Crete. In addition to the Astrug family, only two identified Iberian Jews appear in leadership positions. Isaac Catellan, son of Elia son of Solomon, acted as hashvan in 1444; his father had been in Candia by 1386 and thus was not of the post-1391 migration.¹³² Emmanuel Sephardi, a doctor, signed a taqqanah in 1439.¹³³

Connections Beyond Candia

As Candia’s immigrants settled the city, they often remained tied into broader networks on the island, in the Venetian sphere, and in the broader Mediterranean world. In his youth, Elia Capsali had been sent to study in the Ashkenazi yeshiva in Padua and then lived in Venice. In studying abroad in an Ashkenazi setting, he emulated his father, Elqanah, who also studied in Padua, and his uncle Moses Capsali, who had apparently even attended yeshiva in Ashkenaz itself. By 1450, Rabbi Moses Capsali had moved to Constantinople, where he served as chief rabbi of the city under the Ottomans.¹³⁴

The port city of Candia was, then, a place of transience and travel. Unsurprisingly, Jews from all over the island were in regular contact. Significant Jewish communities lived in Rethymno and Canea (modern Khania), although Candia boasted a larger population. Ducal court records and notarial registers from Candia also mention Jews based in other fortified towns and, to a smaller extent, villages of the hinterland, including Castronovo, Castro Belvedere,¹³⁵ and Castro Bonifacio.¹³⁶ The last of these fortress towns even housed a kosher slaughterhouse (becaria iudeorum) in 1439, when a predatory castellan tried to exploit it for profit.¹³⁷ In 1419, some Jews clearly lived in the village of Casale de Evgenichi; a local Jewish man and woman were murdered there (an event about which we know very little).¹³⁸

In the fourteenth century in Castronovo, the Jewish community fell victim to Greek rebels during the great St. Tito revolt of 1363–64. Regarded by the rebels as agents of Venice, the Jews were massacred in the summer of 1364.¹³⁹ Jews did not abandon Castronovo, however; the surgeon Joseph Carfocopo was living in Castronovo in 1369, only a handful of years after the massacre, while another Jewish surgeon, Moses Gradnelli (or Gadinelli), resided there sixty years later.¹⁴⁰ Two Jewish families, the Chersonitis and the Stamatis, lived there in 1370.¹⁴¹ Two other Jews from the town appear in the ducal records in May 1373, after one seriously wounded the other.¹⁴² A decade later, enough Jews lived in Castronovo for a judicial sentence regarding payment for water use to simply refer to them collectively, “the Jews residing in Castronovo.”¹⁴³ Although the Jewish population was expelled from Castronovo and Bonifacio at some point in the fifteenth century, once again this was not permanent, and evidence of Jewish settlement in both those locales reappears in the following century.¹⁴⁴

Many Jews had interests in more than one town on the island, including some who owned property in more than one location.¹⁴⁵ Branches of the same family often lived in different cities, especially in both Candia and Rethymno. Members of the Capsali family lived in Rethymno;¹⁴⁶ and in the 1420s, Magister Monache, a doctor and resident of Candia, had his son settle in Rethymno, at least in part so that they could take up two ends of the cloth trade that linked the two towns.¹⁴⁷ Sometimes marriage connected families across the island. Herini, the widow of Sambatheus Chasuri, lived in Candia when she dictated her will in March 1348, but her two brothers, named as executors of her will, resided in Canea.¹⁴⁸ Likewise, Liacho, a Jewish cobbler, called Candia home, though earlier his father, Lazarus, had lived in the district of Milopotamo, west of Candia.¹⁴⁹

Most of the evidence of Jewish settlement from areas outside Candia exists because these Jews journeyed there from their hometowns, often to petition the ducal court. While in Candia, these Jews relied on the institutions of the Judaica for food, shelter, and other needs, such as prayer services. Taqqanot Qandiya attests to connections between the elites of Candia and other cities. Jewish leaders from Rethymno appear as signatories on various ordinances, and one from Rethymno was adopted whole cloth in Candia.¹⁵⁰ As such, it is not surprising that the Jews of these cities worked together to promote common communal interests. When fighting a steep tax increase levied on the island’s Jews during the 1440s, the universitas of Candiote Jews joined with representatives of the universitas iudeorum of Rethymno to appeal before the ducal court.¹⁵¹

Shared Venetian sovereignty also facilitated regular and easy connections between Jews living in Crete and those in other parts of the Stato da mar, particularly Negroponte.¹⁵² Jews moved back and forth between Crete and Negroponte; marriages between Jews from the two islands were not uncommon.¹⁵³ Even the prominent Delmedigo family evidently moved to Candia after a stint in Negroponte.¹⁵⁴ Beyond the Venetian sphere, marriage, trade, and resettlement took place between Cretan Jews and those nearby on Rhodes, controlled by the Hospitallers from 1309 until the mid-fifteenth century.¹⁵⁵ Jewish traders from Rome, Barcelona, and Majorca came to Crete, sometimes to partner with their Cretan Jewish counterparts. Jewish traders set off from Candia to sell their wares in Sardinia, Tunis, Alexandria, and Constantinople.¹⁵⁶ The great Venetian wine trade to Alexandria enabled Jews like Elia Capsali of Rethymno (a relative of the Candiote leader) to reap profit exporting both kosher and conventional Malvasia di Candia (Malmsey), a rich varietal derived from Greek grapes.¹⁵⁷ In Constantinople before 1453—and indeed after as well—Candiote Jewish traders exchanging Cretan wine and cheese for leather hides often stayed in the Venetian quarter, where they met Catalan and Genoese Jewish merchants.¹⁵⁸ Finally, Cretan Jews had a profound connection to Jerusalem, a place where Candiote men and women went on pilgrimage but also sometimes to stay, to die, and to be buried.¹⁵⁹ The holy city loomed large in their imaginations. Some sent money “to the great Jewish men who are in Jerusalem,” as one 1348 testator put it. Some named their children after it—such as Çigio, the daughter of Chaluda Balbo, whose name is most likely the feminized form Tziona—Zion.¹⁶⁰

Anxiety, Acceptance, and Other Jews

Jewish community leaders welcomed newcomers, whether refugees or businessmen, from east and west, absorbing them into the kehillah kedoshah. These newcomers brought practical skills and knowledge, and (at least, ideally) contributed to the Jewish tax once they had set up in business. Naturally they arrived in Candia with their own experience of Jewish rite and tradition, as well as their own approaches to Jewish law. On one hand, the Jewish hierarchy demanded adherence to local Jewish custom from newcomers, a theme that sounds throughout Taqqanot Qandiya. At the same time, newcomers worked their way into the Jewish leadership hierarchy and into the tight cohort of Jewish elite families who had traded power among themselves for generations.

But some Jews caused the Jewish leadership a sense of anxiety. Only three times in Taqqanot Qandiya are wrongdoers identified by name, and in each case, they are outsiders. “A Sephardi Jew, and his name is Abraham Tofer [i.e., the tailor],” provoked a 1439 ordinance demanding all marriages take place before ten witnesses.¹⁶¹ The ordinance not only stresses improper marital behavior but highlights the individual and, even more so, his Spanish origin. Likewise, when a rumor spread that Candiote women were promiscuous, the taqqanah targeted a specific man, “the Sicilian, Shalom.”¹⁶² In 1531, when another Jew libeled the reputation of Candiote Jewish women, the taqqanah identified him as “Judah Kirkus … who came to live in our land” from Egypt.¹⁶³ It was outsiders—Jews, but outsiders and newcomers nonetheless—who were presumed to threaten the reputation and sanctity of the Candiote community.

To be sure, blaming reprehensible behavior on newcomers was not confined to these specific instances. Elia Capsali, among others, engaged in this practice. Writing in the 1530s about a practice he despised—selling certain honors on the holiday of Simhat Torah instead of awarding them to learned and pious men—he blamed the behavior on “new people who have recently come, whom your ancestors could not have imagined” (an expression he borrowed from Deuteronomy 32:17). Later he complained of “immigrants [gerim] from a far land” who thought they could purchase themselves good reputations.¹⁶⁴

Remarkably, the most egregious Jews, from the perspective of Taqqanot Qandiya, were outsiders but still residents of Crete—in particular, the Jews of the fortress town of Castronovo. Jews from this nearby community sparked long-lasting anxiety among the pious leadership. Two statutes from 1363 offer a clear set of complaints against them. Castronovo’s Jews sold supposedly kosher meat that could not actually be trusted; their dairy products were equally suspect.¹⁶⁵ Such behavior touching on both religion and the economy was deemed “evil,” and the rabbis feared that Castronovo’s Jews would act “in secret” to trick Candiote Jews into eating impure foods.¹⁶⁶ Only if their cheeses were officially certified could Jews from Castronovo sell to their coreligionists in the city. The spatial rhetoric that divides “us vs. them” is striking: the Castronovans and their ilk are “outside of our community” (mi-hutzah le-kehilateinu), in contrast to Candiote Jews, who are “men of our place” (anshei mekomeinu).

To be sure, rabbinic attitudes likely did not align with those of the common flock. Not all Jews saw their coreligionists in Castronovo as beyond the pale; some were eager to buy their unapproved foodstuffs—a fact that sparked the taqqanah in the first place. Likewise, some Candiote Jews were pleased to marry their children to Jews from Castronovo, as Solomon Torchidi did in 1451 when he betrothed his son to an affluent girl from Castronovo.¹⁶⁷ In general, though, for the authors of the taqqanot, these Jews were regarded as problematic and had to be carefully watched.

The key issue was control: the Candiote rabbis wanted to take charge of ensuring the kashrut of the Judaica’s food, while Castronovo’s Jews—and likely its own leaders—judged themselves perfectly capable of producing fare without the imposition of the capital’s rabbis. This tension over control came up again in 1567, when the Candiote leadership reacted with horror that the local religious leadership in Castronovo excommunicated a member of the community. In a letter recorded among the taqqanot, the Candiote leadership reminded the Jews of Castronovo that only Candia’s rabbis had that right—bestowed on them by Venice itself, they claimed—and that their behavior, if continued, would provoke a wholesale excommunication of Castronovo’s Jews by the Candiote kehillah.¹⁶⁸

A well-known mid-fifteenth-century letter from the chief rabbi of Constantinople, Candiote Moses Capsali, further attests to tensions between the town and country Jews, as well as to the problems of newcomers bringing their own traditions. A writ of divorce was given by a husband to a wife in a place identified in Hebrew as “Kastell” or “Kasteel,” likely referring to one of the fortress towns (castelli)—perhaps even Castronovo itself.¹⁶⁹ Yet Capsali does not ultimately blame Cretans. Rather, he writes: “And all this has happened to you because of new people who have recently come, whom your ancestors could not have imagined, until they have overcome you with sins, to lead you in the customs of their lands, which your fathers and your fathers never knew. And who would say that the customs of the rest of the communities [kehillot] were better than the customs of the holy community of Candia and the rest of the holy communities on the island?”¹⁷⁰ He also remarks on the widespread nature of the newcomer problem. In his current home of Constantinople, “a few of the wise men [hakhamim] from other lands came, and they were wise in their own eyes” for they tried to persuade the local Romaniote community to follow their alien ways. Capsali boasts that he and others proudly “stood in the breach against them.” Local customs, he repeatedly stresses, are the sole legitimate customs.¹⁷¹

Nevertheless, while Moses Capsali could speak generally of interlopers promoting their innovations, he too was powerfully influenced by outsiders: when the innovations came via Ashkenaz, they were desirable.¹⁷² Answering another query from the Candiote rabbis, Moses Capsali wrote about choosing a hazzan (literally, “cantor”) for each synagogue.¹⁷³ On Crete as elsewhere a hazzan functioned as the chief executive officer for that synagogue during his tenure—a powerful, high-status, and lucrative job. Vexed by Venetian government intervention in the choosing of Candia’s hazzanim, Capsali expounded the proper method.¹⁷⁴ Instead of suggesting that they go back to the old ways, though, Capsali told the Jews of Candia to follow another example: that of the Jews of Ashkenaz. Their practices are better, wrote Capsali, and in the course of his responsum he referenced the Ashkenazi liturgy and even quoted a story from Cologne, borrowed from the Ashkenazi rabbi Eliezer ben Joel HaLevi of Bonn. In idealizing Ashkenaz, Capsali reinterpreted Candiote practice, an increasingly prevalent trend as Candiote Jewish elites sent their sons to study at the Ashkenazi yeshiva in Venetian Padua. Ashkenazi ways inflected Crete’s broad, community-wide halachic practices, including kosher slaughtering of animals, and also affected a certain segment of Candia’s Jewish philosophical perspectives.¹⁷⁵

Crete’s Jews, however, absorbed cultural influences from beyond Ashkenaz. Sixteen Hebrew manuscripts of text collections copied for patrons and reflecting their own interests have survived from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Crete.¹⁷⁶ These manuscripts suggest an elite interested in a wide variety of topics, including biblical commentary, mysticism, homilies, and Jewish law (halacha), as well as Euclidean geometry, Hebrew grammar, Spanish poetry, Aristotelian philosophy, and medicine. These elite texts, particularly the explicitly religious works, highlight the impact of Iberian and Provençal scholars and scholarly trends on Crete’s Jews.¹⁷⁷ In addition, responsa evidence indicates that already in 1300, some Candiote Jews sought religious rulings from Solomon ibn Adret of Barcelona; links between Crete and Barcelona’s rabbis continued throughout the century.¹⁷⁸ No matter what anxiety individual Sephardi Jews, such as Abraham the tailor, brought to Candia, Sephardi ideas—mystical, medical, or otherwise—held sway among the island’s Jewish leaders.

This mixture of Jewish cultural traditions, as well as the ongoing connection between Jews in Candia and those farther afield, is attested in a will composed on behalf of Joseph Missini, a wealthy community leader who died in Candia around 1411.¹⁷⁹ The Missini surname suggests that the family was not local to Crete (likely from Messinia, the region encompassing the southwest extension of the Peloponnese/Morea). But the family appears to have been on Crete for at least a generation (perhaps more) before Joseph was born and was deeply ensconced in its Jewish community and its Romaniote traditions.¹⁸⁰ The Jewish community in Candia played a large role in Joseph’s life. He served a successful term as condestabulo.¹⁸¹ He had even represented Cretan Jewry before the government in Venice, when he and others successfully convinced the senate to lower Crete’s Jewish tax in 1389.¹⁸² Beyond this performance, Joseph himself appealed to Romaniote practices at times in his life.¹⁸³

When Joseph dictated his will to a Latin notary in August 1411, he provided large bequests both for his extended family and for the Candiote Jewish community at large, including through the funding of the salary of a scholar of Jewish text and law to whom would be bequeathed Missini’s own library. He also left money to educate Jewish boys and to furnish dowries for impoverished Jewish girls.¹⁸⁴ He was clearly concerned with the local benefit his considerable wealth could bestow.

Joseph’s generosity extended beyond Candia, however. He also bequeathed charity for the Jewish poor in Rethymno. Moreover, he stipulated that a third of his significant investment profits was to be given to German and French rabbis living in Jerusalem.¹⁸⁵ For Joseph, as for many of his Candiote coreligionists, Jerusalem was not an abstract or distant land of hope but a final destination on a well-known sea voyage. Joseph’s dedication to Jews both at home and abroad, and to both Romaniote and Ashkenazi Jews, points to a Cretan Jewish community deeply tied into broader Jewish networks in the Mediterranean and beyond. Such connections to the Ashkenazi world began at home. Missini had brokered a marriage between his daughter, Crussana, and Israel Theotonicus.¹⁸⁶ As a fixture of the Judaica’s elite, he likely sympathized with Ashkenazi intellectual and halachic ideas at the same time that he married his daughter to a German immigrant. Nevertheless, when pressed to comply with the Ashkenazi ban on bigamy, Missini refused to assent and remained married to a second wife, according to Romaniote tradition.¹⁸⁷ For Missini this was a normal negotiation of legitimate value options, not a contradiction.

* * *

Almost a century and a half after Joseph Missini led the Candiote community, on the Friday in 1546 when Elia Capsali walked home from the ducal palace, it was now Capsali who was in charge—and had been for a number of decades already, since his first stint as condestabulo around 1515. On that afternoon, Elia Capsali entered his sizable yard and passed into his family’s residence compound, where he prepared for the incoming Sabbath. His prosperous family probably owned their own home; most inhabitants of the Judaica rented from rich Jews or from Venetian Christian feudatories.¹⁸⁸ But thoughts of business and property could be left for another day. As the sun began to set late on Friday, he gathered with his family for the Day of Rest, prayed the evening service, and, like his ancestors before him and his fellow community members around the neighborhood, enjoyed Sabbath dinner.

Yet the calm communality of this Sabbath-inspired domestic scene veils Elia’s own reality of integration into the wider, non-Jewish society of Crete and beyond. Capsali, like the earlier authors of Taqqanot Qandiya, did not live in isolation. Jewish internal heterogeneity in Candia met a parallel reality of an interdependent wider society across the colonial city. The reality of daily encounters between the city’s Jews and their Latin and Greek coresidents—interactions that were sometimes positive, sometimes not—had been part of Cretan life since before Venetian rule, and they only mounted during the colonial era. Capsali’s ancestor Parnas, among the first signatories of the taqqanot, recognized the reality and necessity of daily commercial exchange, as he and his cohort voted to pass an ordinance against cheating in Jewish-Christian trade. Joseph Missini dealt with Christians at the highest level of government when he traveled on embassy to Venice, but when he returned to Crete, he encountered his Greek Christian neighbors, from whom he had bought his own home. As each man turned inward to lead his community, he simultaneously turned outward, forging enduring associations—commercial, legal, domestic—with Christians on the island they all shared.