Colonial Justice and the Jews of Venetian Crete. Rena N. Lauer
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hierarchy. Each time the community elected a condestabulo (apparently annually), he was directed to choose seven men, “important men from the good men of the community” (hashuvim mi-tuvei ha-kahal), and have them swear on the Torah Scroll to uphold the rules of the community.50 By choosing seven “good men,” the leadership enacted a familiar medieval custom with origins in the Talmud.51 In a taqqanah dated a month later, though apparently part of the same synodal texts, the legislators referred to additional leadership roles, positions more unique to the Cretan context: the condestabulo was given a panel of aides called hashvanim (councillors), the number of whom is not specified.52
The seeming precision of these new ordinances does not always bear out in the sources. In 1369, an ordinance is signed by the condestabulo and eight memunim, using the old term and an unexpected number—neither the seven “good men” mentioned above nor any councillors.53 But by 1407, the condestabulo’s privy council was indeed comprised of three men known as hashvanim, and this remained the standard arrangement for the next few centuries.54 The condestabulo’s councillors were chosen internally within the community, although by the mid-fifteenth century Venice also recognized them as officials of the Jewish community: ducal court records refer to the condestabulo and his three camerarii (chamberlains or advisors).55 The community leaders continued to tweak the structure of the institution over time; in 1489, they decided that a single scribe, officially appointed by the current condestabulo, should be the only one to write official communal documents, since documents coming out of the kehillah seem to have been intentionally or accidentally misrepresenting the aims and words of the leadership.56
Many of the ordinances published by the reforming synod of 1363 repeat injunctions from earlier times, concerning mandatory gatherings, limitations on excommunication, maintaining the ritual bath, and the need for men to come pray in the synagogue. Despite their antique content, their repetition indicates the perceived importance of this synod and underlined the synod’s goal of reunifying the community under common rules. In contrast to these repeated statutes, other ordinances were decidedly new and suggest novel social challenges faced by the community. Three ordinances seek to control the production, import, and purchase of kosher foodstuffs. Three others attempt to stem desecration of the Sabbath. Two ordinances sought to curb cheating in business deals with Christians.
These new ordinances suggest a community large enough to produce and regulate kosher food but also a community diverse enough to have members for whom Sabbath was evidently a lower priority. They also point to increased commercial relations with Christian neighbors—and, apparently, a concomitant rise in an attitude among some Jews that ethics need not apply in business transactions with individuals outside the kehillah. Although these are not unusual complaints to find in texts written by medieval Jewish communities, these new ordinances suggest an evolving focus and new challenges for the Candiote leadership.
Two new ordinances from 1363 point to a novel difficulty: Jewish prostitutes, Jewish pimps, and whorehouses in the Jewish Quarter of Candia. At least in part, this sprang from poverty, since the statute records that some of the prostitutes attempted to secure housing in the Jewish community’s poorhouse.57 The authors of the taqqanah, however, were not concerned with the sources of the problem. Rather, they sought only to root out the practice: first, by forbidding landlords to rent apartments to known prostitutes, and second, by publicly shaming those involved—including the clientele.
In the very next ordinance, the authors expressed dismay over the implications of prostitution in terms of the reputation of Candia’s Jewish women. Knowledge of Jewish prostitution in the city had apparently spread far and wide, particularly because of Jewish visitors who patronized the prostitutes and then told others of their existence.58
Faced with crisis and disorder—unruly excommunication, unethical business practices, shirking the Sabbath, Jewish whorehouses—the leadership responded by erecting legal frameworks it hoped could reunify, solidify, and reorient the community under its leadership. Although the ordinances themselves were not revolutionary, the very act of calling a synod to pass new statutes aimed at the community as a whole, and the emphasis on the structure of the Jewish leadership, speaks to the belief among the elite that Jewish life needed to be reformed and that the community needed to be reminded of its unity. The new taqqanot achieved a measure of success, in as much as they were meant to form the basis for communal self-rule. The structure set out in the ordinances of 1363 remained mostly in effect; they were frequently reissued in the following centuries. No consistent reform project would ever replace it. Instead, individual ordinances were penned at key moments of perceived social and religious need.
Jewish Life and the Jewish Quarter
After taking leave of the duke, Elia Capsali began his stroll home from southern end of the city. The Plateia sat inside the main land gate, an enormous vaulted archway known as the Porta di Piazza, which led south from the town proper to its extensive suburbs, the borgo.59 But the borgo primarily housed the Greek Orthodox population of Candia, and Capsali headed in the other direction. Walking to the northwest corner of the walled city where the Jewish Quarter was located, Capsali had to head north from the Plateia, up the Ruga Maistra, the major north-south thoroughfare that tracked through the center of the town, from the southern land gate to the northern gate at the harbor. Along the Ruga he saw Jewish stalls set up among the homes and stores that lined the street.60 He also likely saw garbage neatly piled up next to each home and stall: since the 1360s, residents and shopkeepers on the boulevard were required to sweep up on Friday mornings in preparation for a communal trash cart, which would collect it on Saturday morning while Capsali would be in synagogue.61
At some point before the road hit the port, Capsali turned west and entered into the labyrinth of neighborhoods that made up much of the walled city. Before reaching the Judaica, navigating the narrow alleys, he passed by Jews rushing to bake their savory pies, a dish known even in the Hebrew text as a torta, in bakehouses shared with their Christian neighbors. Even though this had gone on for centuries, Capsali regarded it with such pious dismay that soon after, he built kosher ovens on his own property, at his own expense.62
Capsali entered the Judaica through the southeastern gate, erected in the 1390s and decorated with the Lion of St. Mark and Venetian coats of arms.63 He strode down that neighborhood’s main street, nicknamed Stenón (Greek for “narrow”).64 The tall buildings that marked this quarter as different from other neighborhoods—buildings of three or four stories, as opposed to the usual single-story homes occupied by most non-Jewish Candiote residents—would have shaded him on this late summer afternoon.65
By Capsali’s day, the Judaica was a city within the city—enclosed by walls, some of which were also the exterior walls of Jewish homes. The south and east sides were shut up with walls in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. On its west and north sides, the Judaica abutted the water, where the seawall overlooked Dermata (Tanners’) Bay, west of the city’s main port. Lines of Jewish mansions faced the northern waterfront.
Did the noxious odors from Dermata Bay tanneries, constant threats from the sea, and narrow crowded streets make Capsali’s neighborhood undesirable, as some have claimed? Perhaps not.66 Lorenzo da Mula, a Christian visitor to Candia in 1571, wrote that the Jewish Quarter (or at least its parts closest to the water) was the “most beautiful part of the city.”67 Likewise, the keen-eyed visitor Meshullam of Volterra, in Candia in 1481, noticed other negative parts of Jewish life in the city but did not disparage the Jewish Quarter itself. Of course, perhaps these visitors saw what they wanted to see or saw what their guides showed them.
On the way home, Elia may have walked past the Jewish slaughterhouse or through the web of streets known as the “Cobbler’s Area.”68 The quarter’s synagogues, its mikvah (ritual bath), and its public well were not far from his route. Although the mikvah and the public well kept the same place over the course of the three centuries between the first taqqanot and Elia’s own tenure as condestabulo, the number and locations of the synagogues did not stay constant. The oldest synagogue that had been in use in 1228, the