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Chapter 2

Jewish-Christian Relations, Inside and Outside the Jewish Quarter

Although Christians appear throughout Taqqanot Qandiya, one of the very few times in which the Hebrew text collection mentions Greeks specifically can be found among the reforming ordinances of 1363, in a statute that seeks to ensure that wine production complies with the laws of kashrut. Jews did not own the vineyards or presses used in making kosher wine. Instead, they sometimes purchased grapes and rented presses to produce wine for the community and for export elsewhere. But, at least until April 1363, the Jews who supervised wine-pressing in the villages near Candia often did not fulfill the requirements for keeping the drink suitable for Jewish consumption. Rather, claims the taqqanah written that month, they allowed the grapes to run through the pressing system without the proper cleansing process. Moreover, they let non-Jews load grapes into the press, and they did not carefully observe. Some Jews dispatched to oversee wine production did not enter the premises at all, claims the taqqanah, but simply took Gentile-made wine must and claimed it as kosher.

Blame is assigned all around by the taqqanah’s authors. On the one hand, the fault lies with the Jews themselves, labeled teenage ignoramuses, such boors that they “do not know how to pray.” But the ordinance also offers a more sympathetic reading. The main reason that the Jewish men acted negligently resulted from “their fear of the Greeks, who say to the Jews ‘Go away, impure one, they called to them, go away and do not touch.’ ”¹ According to the taqqanah, sometimes these verbal attacks on Jews as polluters turned violent, and Jews were banned from even entering into the building in which the wine presses sat. Those sent to guard wine production shirked their duties to the Jewish community in order to avoid being physically assaulted.²

This taqqanah certainly evinces tense and brutal relations between Jews and Christians on Crete and, in particular, between Jews and Greeks. Certainly such violence can be corroborated. Elia Capsali recorded that, probably in the 1530s, a Jew from Canea who had been sent to guard the kashrut of wine had been killed.³ Moreover, the claim that Greeks held the Jewish touch to be polluting was not just a product of Jewish imaginations, despite the use of a biblical verse to paraphrase the verbal attack. Throughout the Byzantine world, Greeks feared Jewish contagion transmitted to food and drink through touch.⁴ On Crete in particular, a late fourteenth-century Byzantine monk and preacher stoked this contagion anxiety. In addition to concerns over grapes and wine specifically, Crete’s Greeks also did not want Jews manhandling any fresh produce in the marketplace. In the mid-fifteenth century, Venetian authorities on Crete “bowed to Christian, mainly to Greek popular pressure,” legislating when Jews could shop for produce—that is, only when they could be appropriately surveilled.⁵ Meshullam of Volterra, an Italian Jewish visitor in Candia in 1481, noticed that the social custom banning Jews from touching produce was in full force during his time in the city, even if the law no longer applied.⁶

In fact, this anxiety was part of a larger fear of Jewish contagion that evolved among Christians in both eastern and western traditions during the Middle Ages. Unease about Jews touching grapes and wine during wine-making was expressed in the Latin west in the early thirteenth century by Pope Innocent III.⁷ As in the Byzantine sphere, the fear was not limited to wine, as Kenneth Stow has noted: “Laws passed by lay councils in southern France and Perugia in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries prohibited Jews from touching all food in the marketplace and required them to purchase food they did touch.”⁸ So the Christian fear of Jewish contagion was not solely a product of the Greek world.

Jews likewise utilized a rhetoric of contamination when referring to Christians in the Taqqanot. When Christian artisan apprentices are allowed into Jewish homes, the authors of a taqqanah from 1518 write, “We are all become as one that is unclean, woe to us.”⁹ By 1363, Gentiles are even conceived of as a force that, when allowed to interact with Jews, debases their very quality: “The Jews have established and accepted upon themselves, upon themselves and upon their descendants, so that they do not fall into [God’s] wrath, to separate Israel from all the nations, so that the most fine gold will not change, and how has it become dim.”¹⁰ As Benjamin Arbel has noted, the ordinances on wine—as other taqqanot as well—“reflect a marked interest of the Jewish establishment in preserving segregation between Jews and Christians, an interest shared with the Christian establishment, though for different reasons.”¹¹

Yet these texts themselves also express a more nuanced everyday reality alongside the ideological screen. In the world described in the taqqanot, Jews and Christians relied upon each other economically. Cross-confessional apprenticeships and employment of artisans across religious lines form the backdrop to the ordinances above. In reality, these behaviors were limited, not entirely forbidden. Even when wine produced was not deemed kosher, the authors of the taqqanah authorized the Jewish owners to sell it to a Gentile, not to dump it. Furthermore, it is clear that, at least in the 1360s, when the first ordinance regarding wine production was enunciated, fear of violent Greek winepress workers was not considered significant enough to warrant finding other ways to secure Jewish wine. The authors of the taqqanah from 1363 placed the final onus on Jewish men, exhorting them to do their jobs properly.

There were real tensions between Jews and Christians in Candia. Jews did fall prey to attacks, disenfranchisement, and social prejudice. Concerned with this reality, Taqqanot Qandiya seems to promote self-segregation and locates the Jewish Quarter as the safe space for Jews to remain separate. It also assumes economic trust was hard to come by.

But the texture of Jewish-Christian interaction is necessarily more variegated. Pairing Taqqanot Qandiya with evidence from legal and notarial sources, it is clear that meaningful Jewish-Christian interaction in Candia was quite common and often without violence or tensions. The reality of everyday life for most Jews was not segregation but interaction—both positive and negative—with the city’s Christian residents. Much of this interaction took place because of economic dealings, which were often built on relationships of varying amounts of trust. Trade and production partnerships, loans in money and kind, and the composition of contracts to solemnize these deals brought Christians and Jews, male and female alike, into regular contact across the city of Candia. Moreover, physical separation was never achieved (or, it seems, wholly desired) by focusing Jewish life in the Judaica. Jewish engagement with Christians took place all over the town, including inside the Jewish Quarter and even inside Jewish homes.

Economic Encounters and the Development of Trust

Let us return to Jewish wine, this time to a story told during a Latin inquest found in the ducal court records.¹² In 1424, near a Greek nunnery outside the walls of the borgo, a party of five Jews and one Greek Christian were on the road. They had set off together from the Judaica and were traveling to the Christian’s home to collect wine Jews had bought from him. We know nothing about the wine’s production or its kashrut¹³—only that it had been bought by Joseph Sacerdoto, who along with four other Jews was now traveling alongside the Greek seller.

Just as they left the city, highwaymen attacked. Assaulted, his clothing ripped, fearing for his life, Joseph Sacerdoto struggled off his she-ass and stumbled to the gates of the Monastery of Christ, the Greek convent. Witnessing these events, the nuns chose to save the Jew and close the gates with him safely inside.¹⁴ When it was safe to leave, another Christian, a stranger, offered to escort the Jews back to town; the Jews trusted him (ita confisi isti de ipso) and safely followed him back to the road.¹⁵ The Greek Christian wine seller, George Turcopulo, had also been attacked by the highwaymen and set off to catch them, in defense of the Jews and their possessions.¹⁶ In this harrowing moment, a business relationship had transformed into something else. Turcopulo testified alongside the Jews in the ducal court inquest as they worked to bring the highwaymen to justice and recover their belongings.

None of this behavior on the part of the Christians was given. To be sure, the highwaymen’s behavior perhaps surprises us least. Beyond attacking the party, they used an epithet known as an insult often leveled against Jews. Attempting to unsettle their targets, they shouted at Joseph and the Jews with him calling them “dogs.”¹⁷ But the behavior of those whose kindness was instinctive and, later, considered seems more unexpected. The Greek nuns, liable to be most influenced by claims of monks such as the one who preached against Jewish contagion through touch, let Jews into their hallowed ground without hesitation. Other Christians stepped up, and the Jews trusted them with their safety. More generally, the event itself was precipitated by another act of trust—that is to say, the agreement of Jews and a Greek Christian to engage in business dealings, an act that aimed to bring the mixed group from the Jewish space of the Judaica to the Greek man’s home.

This is not a lone case of Jews and Christians trusting one another. There are a host of such instances, and they are best seen not in moments of crisis but rather in the kinds of considered economic relationships intentionally built by Jews, Latins, and Greeks in Crete. The island’s notarial records provide evidence of regular business deals between Jews and Christians from the thirteenth century on. Among the sorts of transactions that took place across the religious divide were: loans given and repaid; goods including cloth, hides, precious metals, wood, spices, furniture, and foodstuffs bought and sold; houses and apartments rented and sold; confirmation of investments of capital and their repayments; contracts for short-term hires and apprenticeships; and hiring of doctors and healers for medical treatment.

Some Jews trusted Latins. When the late thirteenth-century Jew Elia, known as Sapiens, needed to have substantial cash, plus gold, silver, books, and other costly items delivered to his son Samaria, living in Negroponte, he entrusted the valuables to his agents: two Latin noblemen.¹⁸ Some Greeks trusted Jews with their property. The Jew Leone Thiadus acted as an estate steward (yconomos) for the elite Greek Andrea Kalergi and was named as such in a proclamation from 1325.¹⁹ This is not the only time the Kalergi family relied on Jews to deal with their real estate and other affairs. The Candiote Jewish businessman Liacho Mavristiri acted as procurator for the Kalergi family in the 1350s.²⁰ A decade earlier Mavristiri had proven his loyalty by helping the Greek archon Alexios Kalergi (illegally) purchase a feudal holding supposedly reserved for Latin nobles; Mavristiri made significant profit, Kalergi got his cavalleria, and the trust between the two was sealed.²¹ As this suggests, Jews and Christians—Greek and Latin both—relied on each other in professional capacities to deal with their possessions with fidelity and honesty, even if the deal itself smacked of the illicit.

Not only trusted to work as each other’s employees or agents, Jews and Christians at times became partners in a range of professional capacities and business ventures. Such cooperation took place across the socioeconomic strata of Candia. A Candiote Jew and a Christian co-owned a small ship in the 1350s. A Latin and a Jew paired as legal advisors to a Jewish woman in the next decade. Two masons, one Jew and one Christian, contracted to work together to repair a Jewish physician’s cistern in 1420.²²

Sometimes the equal nature of the partnership was specified in the very terms of the surviving act. Sambatheus, son of the late Vlimidi, a Candiote Jew, in 1303 made a partnership agreement known as a societas with the Christian Victor Paulo to buy, store, and sell wine at profit. Paulo was responsible for investing a hundred hyperpera to buy the must; Sambatheus had to convey and store it, giving an extra key to the warehouse to Paulo. All profits were meant to be divided equally.²³ In other cases, the language of partnership is less clear-cut, but the content of an act reflects a form of partnership. When Jewish Michael Carvuni gave an interest-free loan of ten hyperpera to the Christian Petrus Clarenvianus a decade after the Black Death, it actually was an investment in a joint partnership. Carvuni supplied the money, Petrus produced “Jewish wine” to sell in Candia’s Judaica, and they split any profit beyond the original investment.²⁴ This is but one example reflecting the ubiquity of Jewish-Christian deals for the production of wine. Whether the wine was considered kosher by Jewish standards is not addressed; it could be that Jews helped produce it, and Sambatheus’s role as conveyer and warehouser of the wine could potentially align with kosher rules. But in any case, at least at this level of commercial relations, this looks quite different than the world of violence described in Taqqanot Qandiya.

The reciprocal nature of these economic relationships reveals itself in interesting ways. When Jeremiah Nomico, a Jew, bought a hundred hides from the Candiote Christian butcher Raynerius in 1271, the latter was willing to give Nomico a monopoly on this commodity, contractually promising not to sell this type of hide to anyone else.²⁵ When the Jew David Rodhothi was hired to stretch hides by the Christian Leonardo Dragumano of the village of Selopulo for payment of six measures of wheat flour, David simultaneously gave Leonardo an interest-free loan.²⁶ Although the layers of relations and agreements that undergirded this reciprocity remain opaque, such mutual reliance betrays a different sort of relationship than either transaction might suggest alone. While David would be Leonardo’s creditor, he was also his hired help, perhaps balancing the power dynamic that either act might produce individually. Christians and Jews also depended on each other to provide other sorts of confirmations and support: a Jew named Moses was called as a witness for the defense in a case against the Christian Nicolas Serigo, who was accused of cheating a business partner out of the profits from their salted fish scheme.²⁷

David Jacoby was certainly correct in his assertion that “joint business ventures between Jews and Christians were common at various levels of society” in Crete.²⁸ As Ricardo Court has noted, “The joint venture … was itself a bulwark of trust.”²⁹ The long-term goal of common profit encouraged both sides to work together earnestly and energetically. This notion of “trust” has recently come under the lens of a number of scholars considering the meaning of cross-confessional business relationships. While conventional wisdom has long held that premodern businessmen preferred to employ relatives, whose commonalities and kinship ties would ensure successful cooperation, a number of scholars have pointed out the problems with such assumptions. As Court has noted, kinship was “not the best basis for a business relationship” even in the premodern period because of the messy problems of disentangling oneself from the relative in case of problems; firing a relative is rarely good for family harmony.³⁰ Likewise, the Sephardi Jews of Francesca Trivellato’s The Familiarity of Strangers sometimes chose Sephardi non-relatives over relatives who lived in northern Europe; they also sometimes preferred to trade with Christians and Hindus, building relationships over time and across vast swaths of the planet, despite religious, ethnic, and cultural differences.³¹ They made this work through a “creative combination” of strategies, including “group discipline, contractual obligations, customary norms, political protection, and discursive conventions.”³²

Candiote Jews used these same strategies to build lasting relationships with their non-Jewish business partners. Successful joint ventures, even when strictly limited to the realm of the professional, called for trust, a level of mutual confidence that fostered a sense of connection. Such trust can be both reflective of the circumstances that empowered the professional venture to be built in the first place—the sociocultural environment of colonial Candia—and generative of a furthered trusting relationship that moved beyond the professional under certain conditions.³³

Complicating the Creditor-Debtor Relationship

Many Jewish men and women in Candia acted as moneylenders and pawnbrokers, whether on a small or large scale. Although regular business dealings often cultivated goodwill between Jews and Christians, a common notion holds that the limit of Jewish-Christian economic trust stood fixed at the boundary between business and moneylending—that famed locus of enmity between Jews and Christians in Latin Christendom.³⁴ This tension can certainly be found in medieval Crete, when Christian debtors occasionally if vociferously sought freedom from supposedly unfair debt they owed to Jewish creditors.

Nevertheless, loan contracts from the notarial registers reveal that even moneylending relationships could be more complex than a simple opposition between a Jewish lender and his Christian debtor. The loans often hide partnership considerations that go beyond what appears on the surface. As in the case above in which a Jew’s loan to a Christian actually hid a deal to produce Jewish wine for the Candiote market, many transactions that appear to be loans are actually investments in larger ventures. Sometimes so-called loans are a convenient if unbalanced investment in futures, such as when a Jewish lender advanced a loan in the form of an amount of wheat (or wine), with the proviso that the borrower will repay the loan in new wheat at the beginning of the next harvest season. This may illuminate the practice, surprisingly common among Candiote Jewish creditors, of giving Christians interest-free, unsecured loans in the form of both goods and cash.³⁵ Instead of typical loan acts, these are best understood as a proxy mechanism of joint venture or futures sale. Most significantly, this type of transaction must have involved a significant amount of trust between parties.

Economic trust was not only incumbent on Jewish lenders. Rosters of negligent Candiote debtors do not list only Christians who owed money to Jews. Instead, we see a far more complex situation in which Jewish men and women acted both as creditors and as debtors to Christians. While listed debtors apparently did not deserve the trust that had been placed on them (since they had defaulted), some Jews were trusted enough to have received interest-free loans from Christians, as did the Jew Elia from the Christian Leonardo de Bonhomo in the thirteenth century.³⁶

The existence of cross-confessional trust is readily apparent when Jews and Christians were not on opposite sides of the broker’s table. In Candia’s culture of moneylending, Jews and Christians sometimes acted as each other’s loan guarantors, such as when the Jewish Joste (Joseph) Adamero acted as guarantor (plecius) for the Greek cobbler Alexius Stavrachi, who received an interest-free loan of six and a half hyperpera from the Jewish moneylender David Angura.³⁷ Over the course of at least eighteen years, the Jewish businesswoman Cherana, daughter of Abraham (Cherana tu Avracha), borrowed money with, guaranteed loans for, and had as guarantors two Greek sisters, Hergina Pantaleo and Petrucia Steno, both widows of elite men.³⁸ The three women even found themselves mounting a defense together (albeit unsuccessfully) in the Curia Prosoporum, the court of first instance for Greeks and Jews, when they were sued by a creditor.³⁹ This enduring partnership suggests that these women were in business together, ventures most likely based on deep-seated trust developed over time.

Jewish moneylending, as William Chester Jordan has explained it, became the focus of great enmity in the Middle Ages because it created an “unnatural aspect of dependency,” an upending of what Christians saw to be the proper hierarchical balance between them and Jews.⁴⁰ Jewish loans to Christian debtors undoubtedly sparked anger and hatred. Yet not all moneylending produced these results. Evidence for wider use of loans as proxies for other sorts of transactions, especially when these “loans” involved significant amounts of money or goods, presses for a reconsideration of the broader category of moneylending. Likewise, as in the case of Cherana tu Avracha and her Christian partners, if one side of the creditor/debtor divide contained members from multiple religious communities, any lender/borrower discord springing from the loan cannot be seen simply as a product of religious tension.⁴¹

These kinds of partnerships in Candia’s lending marketplace offer a prime example of the ways in which allegiance to religion-based segregative dichotomies found in the official documentation conceals the complexity of interactions fostered by Venice’s credit economy. Moreover, as opposed to other Christian governments facing the challenge of intrareligious economic interaction, the Venetian government in Crete allowed for, or at least assumed, the possibility of economic trust across confessional lines, at least regarding loan-making. By the mid-thirteenth century, the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem expressly forbade the use of guarantors who were not of the same religious community as the borrower; no such limits existed in Crete.⁴² While Latin sources, inflected with ecclesiastical ideology about usury and filthy lucre, portray a strict bifurcation between Jewish creditors and Christian lenders, the reality—both in terms of the choices made by lenders and borrowers and in terms of the legal messages signaled more subtly by the government—was far more complicated and sometimes even far from contentious.

Mistrust and Tension in Jewish-Christian Business Relations

To be sure, examples of trusting professional relationships do not undermine the reality that numerous professional relationships were not nearly so felicitous—and that this sort of economic tension provoked anxiety among the leaders of the Jewish community. In the first centuries of Venetian rule on Crete, the authors of Taqqanot Qandiya feared that Candiote Jews were cheating Christians in business, ostensibly because they were Gentiles. In the first set of taqqanot from 1228, the third ordinance forbids swindling Christian business partners, whether through actual theft or through what is known as geneivat da’at, “theft of knowledge”—that is, tricking them, likely about the value of an object or transaction.⁴³ The authors highlight the effect of such behavior: it ruins the reputations of Jews, causing a hilul hashem, literally “desecration of God’s name.” In the revisions of the same ordinances rewritten by Rabbi Tzedakah from sometime the next century, this ordinance remains, although it simply reads: “No one is allowed to lie to the goyim or to trick them [lignov da’atam], whether in what Jews buy from them, or in what Jews sell to them.” Once again the audience is reminded that such behavior ruins the Jewish reputation among Gentiles.⁴⁴

But by the year of reforms in 1363, the problem of dishonest merchants had evidently become more worrisome. Fraudulent business dealings are the target of two ordinances. One outlaws the use of dishonest weights and measures to make more profit. The decree, however, makes no specific reference to Christians and indeed points to the victims of dishonest merchants as mostly Jews. Punishment for this behavior is a complete excommunication.⁴⁵

A second taqqanah directly addresses the cross-confessional crisis and its seriousness. Although this taqqanah is labeled “Fence not to buy anything from the male slaves and female slaves of the Gentiles,” it is actually a decree forbidding Jews from buying goods from or selling goods to anyone, though especially from/to unfree or free servants of non-Jews—or “even from a Jew”—for less than they are worth.⁴⁶ The taqqanah lists the sorts of goods at issue: silver, gold, bronze, iron, ore, tin, clothing, leather goods, pearls, precious gems (particularly garnet, sapphire, and diamond), silk, linen, wool, “or anything worth three grossi or more.” Strikingly, the implications of such cheating were deemed so grave that the taqqanah ordered the condestabulo to hand the guilty party over to the Venetian government. If the condestabulo refused, the council of seven “good men” was obligated to publicly rebuke him for his negligence. The staunch prohibitions against mesirah or malshinut, informing on a Jew to the secular authorities, were thus suspended.⁴⁷

The anxiety of the authors of the taqqanot should not necessarily be seen as evidence of rampant cheating of Christians by Jews but rather as a sense of the truly grim ill effects they believed even minimal cheating would have on the reputation (and perhaps safety) of the Jews of Candia. Moreover, even though the Jewish leadership feared that Jews were cheating Christians and coreligionists alike, it was still not only Jews who were suspect. In 1304, Zagha, son of the late Solomon, a Jew, bought a millaria (one thousand pounds) of “good Cretan cheese” from Bartholomeus Karavelo, a Candiote Christian. Their contract suggests that Zagha did not trust his supplier: “and I [Bartholomeus],” reads the act, “have to weigh and give you this [cheese] for you with your scales.” Zagha apparently suspected Karavelo not only of skimping on his hefty millaria but of weighing the cheese with deliberately skewed instruments.⁴⁸

This sort of proviso was meant to avoid litigation, but it was not always successful. A business agreement made in 1398 by the Latin nobleman Ser Amocatus Geno and the wealthy Jew Protho Spathael exploded into litigation that worked itself all the way to the ducal court over a handful of years. Although a lower court found in favor of Spathael, the highest court found for the Latin Geno and stripped the Jewish litigant of all profits from their undertaking. The ducal court decided that Spathael’s role in the business arrangement was “against all justice, equity, and good practices” (contra omnem justiciam, equitatem, et bonas mores), language that had probably been put forth by Geno’s camp.⁴⁹ Importantly, the essential disagreement appears to have had little to do with the different religions of the two men. No matter the religious affiliation of the men on each side of the deal, if both could live up to “justice, equity, and good practices”—the basic building blocks of trust—cross-confessional business could be effective and continue for years to come.

Much of the mistrust that occurred in business between Jews and Christians did not necessarily arise out of religious tensions but rather resulted from the common suspicion and standard difficulty that occur—now as then—between those who seek profit together or those who are competing for the same piece of the market pie.⁵⁰ Disappointment over broken trust only arose from situations based upon a certain degree of trust in the first place, a fact that illustrates that Jewish-Christian business partnerships were viewed as normal more than as suspect. In England, the crown established a Jewish Exchequer to deal with Jewish business. The Venetian state, in contrast, did not accentuate the difference between Jewish and Christian business. Christians engaging in business with Jews likewise did not overemphasize the religious affiliations of their business partners but rather their ability to deliver on the contract.⁵¹ Business disputes between Jews and Christians in Crete do not reflect a social pathology set in motion by religious divides. Instead, as legal anthropologists have stressed, “disputes, far from being pathological,” can often be read as “normal and inevitable” interactions between any individuals working to “secure their objectives.”⁵² However unfortunate or uncomfortable, dispute is a normal part of business relationships for all parties regardless of religious affiliation. Jewish leaders, nonetheless, saw animosity and misdeed as a potential threat to the stability of the community, and they thus forbade such behavior by summoning up its strongest weapons: excommunication (for fraud between Jews) and handing over the culprit to the Venetian colonial government (for egregious fraud against Christians in particular).

The Notary and the Wise Jew

Every sale, loan, or hire needed a contract written up based on the recording of a well-known litany of reliable formulae meant to ensure a deal would be upheld in a court of law. The most pragmatic relationship between two people, one might argue, is between a businessman and the man who writes up his contracts: a cursory, if regular, transaction. Candia’s Latin notaries were agents of the Venetian state, a status that ensured that all transactions recorded in their registers had legal validity. The Latin notary, then, provided the seal of government; he was an ostensibly impartial instrument guaranteeing contractual legitimacy.

Nevertheless, regular contact between Jewish businessmen and the notaries they frequented could also initiate relationships beyond the technical confines of contract writing. Notarial registers illustrate just how often individual businessmen sought out notaries and that many Jewish businessmen patronized particular notaries. In just three months during 1388, for example, the Jewish moneylender Abraham Angura employed the notary Nicolo Tonisto thirteen times.⁵³ This same notary was a favorite of businessman Solomon Astrug, who hired Tonisto for twenty-three transactions during this same period.⁵⁴ Apparently Tonisto was known as a notary trusted by the Jewish community; other Jewish businessmen also appear over and over again in his records for these months.

Tonisto was but one Christian notary with a dedicated Jewish following: two decades earlier, Solomon Astrug had faithfully patronized the Latin notary Egidio Valoso. Valoso was also a favorite of Judah Balbo, a prolific moneylender who employed Valoso for forty separate contracts between April and August 1370.⁵⁵ Judah Balbo’s son, Lazaro, however, patronized another Latin notary, Giovanni Catacalo: Lazaro appears in Catacalo’s register engaging in fourteen separate transactions over just three days in May 1389.⁵⁶

A court case from 1420 illustrates the tricky implications of Jewish loyalty for this last notary, Giovanni Catacalo, whose surviving registers show him to have been a favored notary for Jews—patronized not only by Balbo but also by many Jewish businessmen and businesswomen of Candia.⁵⁷ Likely in the context of his notarial work, Catacalo developed a relationship with a Jewish client that went beyond the pragmatic. Catacalo would soon turn to this Jew for more personal reasons. The official story, as told by Catacalo, was that the notary had bought himself a Bible (ostensibly the Hebrew Bible or “Old Testament”) in Greek but had trouble with some of the difficult language.⁵⁸ Through his work, he knew a Jewish man who was both a businessman and a scholar—one we already met when he was engaged in business litigation with a Latin nobleman—by the name of Protho Spathael. The latter, active in business in the first decades of the fifteenth century, had also served as condestabulo, according to Taqqanot Qandiya.⁵⁹ Spathael was known to Catacalo as an intelligent and wise man (hominem intelligentem et sapientem) and thus turned to him for guidance regarding the meaning of the text and its vocabulary, which Spathael provided at his own house over a couple of weeks.

This behavior was considered beyond the pale. Denounced as a heretic, accused of doubting the truth of Christianity and of Judaizing—defined here as participating in Jewish ceremonies—Catacalo was quickly imprisoned, tried, and found guilty. The case against Giovanni Catacalo is revealing for a number of reasons. It is the only time the Inquisition was permitted to intervene in Candia’s own judiciary.⁶⁰ Indeed, the investigation was run by Dominicans sent by the Roman curia, and the language of heresy and Judaizing and the explicit claim of Jewish contagion (contagia Judaice) is decidedly atypical in Candia’s legal records until this point. Equally unusual for Candia, the tribunal interrogated (and probably tortured) Catacalo for three days, after which he confessed to having lost faith in the very foundations of Catholic dogma, including the messianic and divine nature of Christ, the intercessory power of Mary, the prophecies of Isaiah as foreshadows of Christ, and the spiritual potency of saints and icons.⁶¹ After his confession, he “begged for mercy from our God for his sin, that he recognized that he had acted wickedly.”⁶² It seems likely that Catacalo was indeed on the brink of doing that thing not done: converting to Judaism. But after his treatment at the hands of the state and its ecclesiastical associates, he seems to have decided such a radical jump was not worth his life.

It is clear from Catacalo’s punishment that the Inquisition believed that he came into contact with his heretical ideas by virtue of his work as a notary. Following two years of jail and other acts of public humiliation, Catacalo was allowed to return to his old profession. But he did so with one caveat: he was forbidden to notarize for Jews ever again. Moreover, his son Gabriele Catacalo, who had followed his father into the notariate, was also banned from ever working with Jews. It is apparent that the Inquisitorial court recognized that the ostensibly cut-and-dried matter of notarial work actually could and did promote a deeper relationship between client and notary.

At the same time, the relative ease of Catacalo’s punishment is striking. So too is the lack of larger legislative or social implications, for it points to the contrast between Roman Inquisitorial fears (rarely allowed sway in Crete) and the broader approach of the local Venetian bureaucracy. Following Catacalo’s ordeal, the ducal administration did not make any sweeping legislation against Jewish use of other notaries, nor did they hunt down other “Judaizing” notaries. Jewish businessmen continued to patronize favorite Latin notaries. In the early 1450s, the Latin notary Michele Calergi often served Jewish clients, including the Delmedigo family.⁶³ The colonial government appears to have accepted this reality. For the most part, Jewish contact with notaries was supported. Pragmatically, it expedited the active trade and moneylending on which Venice and its subjects relied. A certain amount of sustained contact could be tolerated—as long as the Christian involved shunned the temptation of confessional perfidy. And, in truth, most likely there were few notaries in Candiote Christian society as inquisitive and spiritually intrepid as the unfortunate Catacalo.

The Space of Jewish-Christian Encounter

These economic transactions and the relationships they forged took place throughout the city of Candia and its environs. The countryside was the setting for the winepress fiasco, while the highway robbery of the wine merchants took place in the borgo, beyond the walls of the town. Everyday moneylending, buying and selling of goods, and writing up of contracts likely took place in many locations—workshops and warehouses, pawnshops and open-air stalls, and inside homes. Notarial contracts from Candia do not share nearly as much data as those from other Mediterranean cities; they do not identify where they were signed. But Jewish-Christian encounters were not constrained in location. When the Inquisition questioned Catacalo, they did not seem to mind that he had been in a Jewish home; rather, it was the sheer length of time he had been inside the wise Jew’s home—fifteen days—that provoked suspicion. Moreover, Jews and Christians shared much of the spatial infrastructure of daily life, even sharing communal ovens until the mid-sixteenth century, when Elia Capsali built a bakehouse on his own property. But even after that moment, we do not know if all Jews shifted their baking to the specifically kosher ovens.⁶⁴

To be sure, the story of Jewish residential life in Candia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is one of increasing restrictions. The Jewish Quarter as a singular, defined space became increasingly reified and limited over that period, a trend paralleled in many other locations across Christendom.⁶⁵ Until the fourteenth century, Jews lived both in the area that became known as the Judaica and in a particular area of the suburban borgo.⁶⁶ Even the very boundaries, the streets that constituted the Judaica, were fluid for a century. By 1334, however, when for the first time Jews were ordered to own and rent homes only inside the Judaica, the boundary lines had become clearly defined. A further order compelling Jews to live exclusively within these streets was also passed in 1350, perhaps part of the pan-European response to the Black Death.⁶⁷ In the early 1390s, the ducal administration ordered that some homes along the southern boundary of the Judaica, directly across the street from Christian homes, had to be walled off.⁶⁸ The east side of the Judaica was similarly bricked up in 1450, following complaints by the nearby Dominican monastery of St. Peter Martyr.⁶⁹ By the mid-1450s, then, the Judaica was no longer simply a neighborhood where Jews chose to settle together but a walled-in, discrete quarter whose inhabitants no longer lived there solely by choice.

Yet the narrative involves more than increasing segregation or a residential division of Jews and Christians caused by a Venetian change in policy. Segregation was not imposed solely by the Christian state but instead co-opted as an ideal by the leadership of the Jewish community itself. Moreover, despite this ideal found in both Jewish and Christian discourses, the reality for Jews and Christians was that that encounter took place both inside and outside of the Jewish Quarter, even as that space became increasingly identified as “Jewish.”

Co-opting the Narrative: Jewish Delineation of Jewish Space

Despite Venice’s accruing policies limiting Jewish residence, the Jewish community leadership did not chafe very much against the strictures. To the contrary, we see that the physical neighborhood of the Jewish Quarter had long been a comfortably limited area for the community’s leaders—at least since the mid-fourteenth century, when Rabbi Tzedakah revised the rhyming ordinances of 1228 into a more legalistic prose version. Rabbi Tzedakah’s text mandates that, for the sake of maintaining the sanctity of Sabbath and prayers, no Jew may leave the kahal (read: Jewish Quarter) until morning services are over.⁷⁰ Here, the Jewish leadership co-opted the spatial limitations that had ostensibly been imposed on the community and reinterpreted them as helping construct a protective neighborhood. A typical example of the intermeshing of imposed segregation and self-segregation, it tells us much about the way the Jewish elite, at least, had long thought of their micro-city.⁷¹

There can be no doubt that the leadership of the ethnoreligious communities of Candia emphasized and idealized segregation. As David Jacoby has written, “Both Jewish and Venetian ordinances envisaged the corrosive effects of social contacts and promiscuity between Jews and Christians and the benefits of the Jewish segregation.”⁷² While Venetian legislation certainly aimed to separate Jewish and Christian residence, Jewish segregation was, at least in part, self-segregation. Per Jacoby, Jews kept to themselves “by choice. Their lifestyle, customs, culture, social cohesion and residential segregation emphasized their identity as a distinct ethnic and religious group.”⁷³ For Capsali and his ilk, then, the closed-in walls of the kahal felt comfortably familiar and protective. Moreover, instead of considering the Judaica a limiting factor, a close reading of Taqqanot Qandiya suggests that its authors saw the increasingly defined and confined space of the Judaica as a benefit to the leadership itself. It enabled them to simultaneously define the boundaries of their power, assert control over their communities, and perhaps even boost morale by assuring their flocks that they did indeed have a place to be among themselves.

The authors of Taqqanot Qandiya certainly saw and depicted the Jewish Quarter of Candia as an insider space. As in the example above, they regularly use the term kahal (or similar, kehillah), community, not only in reference to the people but as a name for the physical Jewish Quarter. The semantic field often seems to conflate the two, people and place. The leadership decries Jewish prostitutes dwelling in residences located “in our community [be-kehillateinu].”⁷⁴ Even more explicitly, in the ordinances forbidding Jews from leaving the confines of the Judaica during Sabbath and holiday prayer services mentioned above, we read: “From today forward, no one among the people of our community [me-anshei kehillateinu] will be permitted to leave the community [kahal; read: Jewish Quarter] on Sabbaths, the New Months, or holidays, without a compelling reason, until the exit from the morning synagogue service.”⁷⁵ A revision of this ordinance passed by the reforming synod of 1363 makes the conflation more specific and more concrete: “From this day forward no Jew among the people of our community [me-anshei kehillateinu] will be permitted to leave from the street of the community [rehov hakahal] during the morning services during the time that the synagogue is open for prayer.”⁷⁶ For the Jewish leadership, the space of the Jewish Quarter was one and the same with the confines of the Jewish community.

But the conflated language of the kahal as a human and spatial designation not only functioned as a vocabulary of inclusion, marking everyone inside as a member of the community. It could also help draw the barriers of exclusion and difference. In a list of all the taqqanot passed in 1363, the Sabbath ordinance is identified with this extended title: “That no Jew may exit from the community [min hakahal] into the alley of the Gentiles [le-mevo’i hagoyim] on Sabbaths and holidays at the time that the congregation [tzibbur] is praying, and all Jews are obligated to come to the synagogue to be as a single association [agudah] in their prayers.”⁷⁷ The Jewish space of the kahal sharply and definitively contrasts with Christian space in this schema. One must exit, making a formal transition, from one to the other. Although it is unclear whether this alley refers to a specific street or a general category of streets, the choice of contrasting words is suggestive: the language of the kahal evokes openness, while the alley calls to mind narrow confinement.

The contrast between Jewish space and the Christian space beyond the walls appears most explicit when the authors of an ordinance mention the vesper bells “which are rung by the friars [lit. the brothers], the priests who are on the border of the kahal.”⁷⁸ The Dominican monastery of St. Peter Martyr—and its human embodiments of Christianity’s conversion ethic—stood to the east of the Judaica. It formed not only a physical boundary between the Jewish Quarter and the Christian world outside but also a conceptual boundary indicating where the kahal (qua persons and place) ended.

Even as the Jewish leadership saw the Judaica as a definitively Jewish space, they also recognized that they were not alone inside. The boundaries were not impermeable, nor did they need to be. Even the Dominican monastery, which starkly delineated the border of the Judaica, was not purely external to the Jewish space. The vesper bells could be easily heard within. In fact, the taqqanah that mentions these bells demanded that Jews utilize the sound of their ringing as a sign to cease working, once and for all, as Sabbath began.⁷⁹ The Christian sound invading Jewish space could be repurposed for a squarely Jewish aim. The seeming encroachment of Christian things into Jewish space should thus be read as multivalent, not to be simply and single-mindedly repelled but rather to be controlled—or better, in the spirit of Jewish exegesis, to be reinterpreted. Even a monastery—probably intentionally built in this location so as to abut the Judaica, perfect for turning Jewish souls to Jesus—could be co-opted by the Jewish establishment for its own goals.

Jews and Christians Inside the Judaica

The reuse of the vesper bells hints that Candia’s Jewish leadership was well aware that the idealized self-segregation—the private, insider Jewish world they imagined existed in their Judaica—was not fully consonant with reality. First and foremost, this monastery and church had stood side by side, cheek by jowl, with the Jewish homes for over two centuries before a wall was erected.⁸⁰ Its waterfront compound lay so close to the Judaica’s easternmost street that the friars could see into Jewish homes through windows and balconies that overlooked the monastery. It was this visual proximity to the Jews that threatened the friars’ souls, or so they said in the complaint that sparked the 1450 walling in of the Judaica’s street.⁸¹

It must be noted that 1450 is quite a late date to fully enclose a Jewish quarter. In contrast, the Venetian Senate ordered the Jewish Quarter of Venetian Negroponte to be separated from the rest of the city by a wall already in 1304 “for reasons of security.”⁸² Such a difference in policy highlights that each Venetian colony must be investigated separately, as legislation, contingencies, and enforcement of law regarding Jewish settlement and interactions with Christians did not necessarily apply uniformly to the whole Stato da mar. Here, it must suggest to us that the Cretan colonial government in this period did not obsess over the mixing of Jews and Christians in residential space as other colonial governments seem to have done.

Perhaps the government could not effectively enforce segregation; the need to repeat the orders in 1334 and 1350 may indicate this. But even the laws of the 1390s, which for the first time ordered the walling off of the southern boundary of the Judaica, incorporate a flexible understanding of the implications of the wall. The decrees explicitly permitted specific Jewish homeowners whose real estate fell outside of the technical confines of the Jewish Quarter to continue living in their homes and to rent apartments to other Jews.⁸³ We must imagine that cash had changed hands, from the listed Jewish homeowners to some colonial officials. But this phenomenon of looking the other way in not unique to Crete. That is to say, Venice in general does not seem to have been terribly strict in enforcing the Jewish residence policy in any of its colonial holdings. Even in the case of Negroponte, a senatorial decree intimates that neither the residential requirements nor the wall truly limited Jewish mobility, leading to further orders in 1402 to block off all but three entrances to the Jewish Quarter.⁸⁴ David Jacoby has noted that even after Jews were forbidden from owning real estate outside Jewish quarters across the Venetian overseas territories in 1423, Venice looked the other way as Jews continued to buy, sell, and rent outside the Judaica even in parts of Crete over the course of the next centuries.⁸⁵ In 1577, alongside his more famous grievance over Jewish prostitutes in the city, provveditore generale Giacomo Foscarini complained that he still found Jews living outside Candia’s Judaica, albeit in the vicinity.⁸⁶ As in other cases, it seems that the law was upheld mostly in the breach.

But the concept of “Jewish space” in Candia is complicated not only by the fact that some Jews lived outside the quarter. Rather, the Judaica itself was a locus of mixing, a space where Christians could and did enter, for a whole array of reasons. Structurally, even the closing of the walls over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries could not—and was never intended to—enforce this kind of complete separation. Venice did not prevent nonresident Christians from entering the Judaica. The arched gate built in 1390 to demarcate the southeast limit and provide a formal entrance into the Jewish Quarter was neither closed nor locked.⁸⁷ Thus we find Christians who lived in other parts of the city and from the countryside present in the Judaica’s streets and squares, and even inside Jewish homes and on Jewish property.

That it was absolutely normal for Christians to enter the Jewish Quarter, rather than an exceptional experience, is perhaps best expressed in a court verdict from 1449.⁸⁸ The judiciary specifically banned three Christian men (whose crimes unfortunately were not recorded) from entering the Jewish Quarter for any reason, on pain of both incarceration and monetary fine.⁸⁹ Should one of them enter the Jewish Quarter, the monetary fine would be divided between the denouncer and the commune. Only if another inhabitant of the city were to denounce the men would this restraining order have any teeth. It would be very easy for one of these men to walk right in. Obviously it was quite common for Christians to enter the Judaica as they pleased.

Although we do not know precisely why these particular three men wanted to enter the Judaica (a vendetta against a former Jew and a Christian lawyer seems to be the background plot), we can certainly witness other Christians in the midst of their engagements in the Jewish Quarter. Just as Jews often used the rest of the city for economic transactions, much of the Christian activity in Jewish space that is visible to us was economic. The many Christian landlords who rented to Jews, for example, must have entered the Judaica to deal with their property and tenants. In another kind of exchange, the Jewish prostitutes seem to have serviced their clients (including Christians) inside the Judaica’s whorehouses and poorhouses.⁹⁰ Christian masons contracted to build walls for Jewish homes inside the Judaica.⁹¹ Christians provided other goods and services for Jews in the Judaica’s streets and public squares—such as a Christian seller of dairy products (probably from a surrounding village) whose goods were deemed insufficiently kosher for Rabbi Meir Ashkenazi, who ordered the man’s milk to be dumped.⁹²

Despite the negative valence of a malicious and fraudulent Christian food seller assumed by this tale of the dumped milk, proudly recorded by leaders asserting their right to control foodstuffs within the walls of their domain, Jews actually brought Christians into their very homes inside the Judaica for economic and professional purposes—even at the behest of the very same leaders.⁹³ Indeed, such evidence comes directly from Taqqanot Qandiya itself. An ordinance from 1363 instructed that, although it was preferable for Jewish tailors to sew clothing for members of the community, should a Jew need to hire a Christian tailor, he was permitted to do so—on the Jew’s turf. The Jew “should bring him [the Christian tailor] into the Jewish home, and he should sew for him on Jewish property” in order to assure that the tailor would not transgress the biblical prohibition against mixing wool and linen in one garment, a combination known as sha’atnez.⁹⁴

Although in this ordinance the Jewish leadership sought to limit the entrance of Christian artisans into Jewish homes, a later taqqanah indicates the flock did not limit Christian access as the rabbis had dictated. In 1518, the Jewish leadership wrote that some Jewish artisans, specifically tailors and cobblers, were regularly bringing Christian apprentices into their homes.⁹⁵ Unsurprisingly, the Jewish leadership reacted to this practice with horror. Not only does such behavior make the Jews “impure,” they wrote, but such interaction inside the home defied Venetian law. Though the reasons to forbid Christians in Jewish homes were “too many too count,” the authors nonetheless chose to recount a few: “The teenage boys of Israel will follow along after them in their deeds and in their habits, and they will mix in with the goyim and they will learn their deeds.” Moreover, they wrote, the Jewish masters should be forbidden to bring in apprentices “because of their wives and their daughters.”⁹⁶

The authors of this ordinance, particularly the current leader Rabbi Elia Capsali, worked hard to make this seem like an atypical and perhaps new activity. Nevertheless, the threat warranted its own community-wide decree. In fact, it is likely that a significant number of young Christian men would come to the homes and workshops of Jewish artisans every day, perhaps even staying overnight and being fed and clothed by the Jewish master, like apprentices in Christian settings. This behavior was not new; a notarial contract from 1338 shows a Jewish weaver hiring two Latin assistants for an entire year to help him finish woolen cloth.⁹⁷ These apprentices were obviously not walled off from the artisans’ Jewish families but instead interacted with both the male and female family members in a way deemed seriously worrisome by the Jewish authorities, but apparently less concerning to the Jews who hired them.