Colonial Justice and the Jews of Venetian Crete

Colonial Justice and the Jews of Venetian Crete

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES

Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor

Edward Peters, Founding Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Colonial Justice and the Jews of Venetian Crete

Rena N. Lauer

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

This book was published with the generous assistance of a Book Subvention Award from the Medieval Academy of America.

Copyright © 2019 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-8122-5088-6

In gratitude to my parents,

Phyllis and Chaim Lauer

Contents

A Note on Usage

Introduction. Networks of Jewish Life in Venetian Crete

Chapter 1. The Jewish Community of Candia

Chapter 2. Jewish-Christian Relations, Inside and Outside the Jewish Quarter

Chapter 3. Colonial Justice and Jewish-Christian Encounter

Chapter 4. Jewish Choice and the Secular Courtroom

Chapter 5. Marriage on Trial

Chapter 6. Inviting the State into the Kahal

Conclusion. Crete’s Jewish Renaissance Men in Context

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

A Note on Usage

Names and Orthography

Orthographic flexibility (or inconsistency, one might say) rules the Latin records used in this study. Even within one document, a single person’s name may be identified using different spellings, for example: Kali, Cali, Calli, and Kalli. In addition, some of these individuals also have Hebrew names apparent in the Jewish sources. These names are usually related to, but different than, their Latinate names and must also be rendered consistently for this study. In recording names in the text, therefore, I have standardized the spelling either by using the common English spelling or by choosing a single orthography that reflects the most common usage (for example, Cali). I have rendered Isaac, Judah, and Joseph following standard English usage. The Hellenized-Latinate version of Elijah used so commonly in these sources has many spellings: Liachus, Ligiachus, Lingiachus, Lighiachus, and so forth. I have chosen the Italianate Liacho, which reflects how the name might have been pronounced. While some men named Elijah in Hebrew were called Liacho in the vernacular, many others were called Elia. This distinction remains consistent in the ducal records, and I have retained it according to that information.

When Hebrew is transliterated, the ח has been rendered h and the כ has been rendered kh.

Dating

Venice began its year on 1 March. The Jewish calendar follows a modified lunar calendar with a new year beginning in the autumn at the start of the month of Tishrei. For ease of understanding, I have changed all Venetian and Jewish dates to the familiar Julian calendar (solar, Christian, beginning the year with 1 January) unless otherwise specified. Thus, for example, a ducal record marked 4 February 1439 will be rendered 4 February 1440 in this study, since the 1439 dating is according to the Venetian calendar, which did not begin the new year until 1 March.

Coinage and Currency

In Crete during this period, the money of account was the hyperperon (a unit borrowed from the Byzantine coinage system), calculated in terms of the Venetian grosso. One hyperperon (in Venetian, a perpero) equaled twelve Venetian grossi. Twelve grossi also equaled about twenty-six soldi.¹ Notarial and ducal records almost always mention prices and fines in Cretan hyperpera, with smaller fractions of hyperpera calculated in grossi. Cretan hyperpera should not be confused with the hyperpera of Constantinople, nor should this money of account be confused with an actual coin. There was no mint in Crete during this period.² Taqqanot Qandiya mentions ducats (in this period, the gold ducat coin equaled about 2 Cretan hyperpera)³ and florins, in addition to grossi, suggesting the range of coins and moneys of account used in transactions.⁴ It also mentions dinarim, a general currency designation in Hebrew that probably refers to hyperpera.⁵

Abbreviations and Archival Citations

TQ = Elias Artom and Umberto Cassuto, Taqqanot Qandiya u’Zikhronoteha (Statuta Iudaeorum Candiae eorumque Memorabilia). Jerusalem: Mekize Nirdamim, 1943.

Material from the Archivio di Stato in Venice (ASV) is rendered according to archive (ASV), series (usually Notai di Candia or Duca di Candia), busta (envelope-box) number, register number (that is to say, folder within the busta), and folio number. I then follow with the date of the entry in parentheses. For example: ASV Duca di Candia, b. 26, r. 8, fol. 7v (1 October 1437).

Colonial Justice and the Jews of Venetian Crete

Map 1. The eastern Mediterranean in the late Middle Ages.

Introduction

Networks of Jewish Life in Venetian Crete

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources of Jewish History on Crete

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jewish Life in Christian Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Individuals and Community

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

Crete’s Jews also acted in the service of their personal identities. In the colonial courtroom, Candiote Jews made choices based on a sense of their own ability to decipher religiolegal concepts without consulting supposed experts, argued for their rights as Jews and persons, and even prized their own concerns over the needs of the community. This reality of individuals shaping their identities, making choices, and exerting agency over their own decision-making processes breaks