Colonial Justice and the Jews of Venetian Crete. Rena N. Lauer
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ducats to help pay Venice’s war debt, and another 3,000 measures of wheat.98 Furthermore, Crete’s Jews were legally compelled to wear the yellow badge beginning around the turn of the fifteenth century. This regulation, though, apparently did not meet with great success.99
Nonetheless, despite policies aimed at limiting Jewish residency, cutting Jewish market share in overseas trade, and burdensome tax increases and other obligatory payments, these impediments seem relatively minor in comparison to the Jewish experience in other parts of Europe. In particular, the residential limitations appear not to have provoked much anguish, especially since they were sometimes honored in the breach. Segregation thus did not mean isolation or alienation, nor did it discourage new Jewish settlement in Candia. Moreover, it is likely that the Jewish tax rose not simply as a result of Christian mistreatment but also, at least in part, as a result of surging Jewish settlement.100
Perhaps more importantly, the Jews of the Stato da mar lived in Venice’s colonies without a specific legal charter or condotta, which Jews in many other parts of Europe and even in the terraferma holdings needed for legal settlement. Residence, thus, was not provisional but seemed more secure in its permanence.101 The lack of condotte also meant exceptional economic freedom, in contrast to Jews who had to abide by specific charters in Italy and elsewhere. Although the prohibition on landownership and the shipment restrictions had the effect of limiting trade (especially in luxury items and spices), Crete still offered Jews a wide variety of professional opportunities. Likewise, although Jews were never given citizenship, their status as legal residents and formal subjects of Venice provided Candia’s Jewish merchants certain advantages, such as legal protections when abroad, use of Venetian warehouses, and even, at times, access to state-sponsored shipping.102
Crete thus became a choice destination not only because its government allowed entry to refugee Jews but also because it offered significant attractions to businessmen seeking to expand their trading networks. Crete’s position at a crossroads between the Italian peninsula and the Levant made the island, and particularly the town of Candia—arguably the most important way station in the Mediterranean, at least until the rise of Famagusta on Cyprus toward 1500—an attractive and lucrative destination for Jews.103
Paths Toward Integration
Although the majority of Jews, and indeed the most powerful Jews, in Crete throughout the Venetian period identified as Romaniote—following the Byzantine-Jewish liturgical and ritual rites—the immigration described above brought a heterogeneous mix of predominantly Ashkenazim (German Jews) and Sephardim (Spanish Jews) to the island. Their integration into Candiote society can sometimes be tracked through their interaction with the kehillah’s leadership, their business contracts, and their dealings with Venice’s colonial court.
Most of the Sephardi Jews named in Latin and Hebrew sources on Crete appear after the massacres of 1391, and it seems likely that most arrived fleeing those terrible events. Some Sephardim, however, came earlier. A Catalan Jew, resident of Candia, contracted to sell honey in Candia as early as 1339, working alongside his business associates, Jews from Sicily and North Africa.104 The widow Archondisa, in her will from 1358, recorded her late husband as Elia catellanus, although her name suggests that her own origins lay in the Greek-speaking world, a marriage pattern common for Sephardi men and Romaniote women.105 Another Elia Catellan, son of Solomon, already lived in Candia in 1386 when he made his will.106
Of the Sephardim who settled in Candia before the annus horribilis of 1391, the Astruc (or Astrug) family’s tale appears in sharpest relief, nicely suggesting the possibilities available to Iberian Jewish immigrants. Members of the Astruc family, most likely from Catalonia, settled in Candia in the mid-fourteenth century and quickly amassed wealth and prestige.107 They used strategic marriages and business partnerships to secure their new positions as elite members of Candia’s Jewish community. By 1359, Solomon Astrug (as the name is spelled in the Latin sources) had married and was in the midst of divorcing a well-connected Romaniote wife, Elea, daughter of a wealthy Greek Jewish businessman, Liacho Mavristiri, and soon married into another Greek Jewish family.108
Solomon Astrug built up a successful moneylending business and bought lucrative real estate.109 He also made useful contacts in the colonial government. During the early 1390s, when the ducal court limited Jewish residence outside the Jewish Quarter, the court exempted Solomon Astrug—the only Jew identified by name—from selling his residential buildings outside the neighborhood. He had no problem paying a high fee for this favor.110 With their father’s wealth to back them, Solomon’s seven children flourished in Crete and for generations this lineage helped lead the Jewish community.111 One descendant named Solomon even served as the condestabulo in 1446.112 Other Iberian families in the next century would follow Astrug-like paths toward social integration and political leverage. Of course, money paved the way, and only a relatively small number of Sephardi Jews achieved the communal triumph of the Astrugs.113
While most Iberian Jewish immigrants appear to have come to Crete in the aftermath of the traumatic events of 1391, the contours of German Jewish migration to the island are less clear-cut. As in the case of Sephardi newcomers, there were certainly some German Jews in Crete before the Black Death. One Elia Allemanus contracted to buy wine there in 1271, only sixty years after Venice had colonized the island.114 Migration from the German lands was in full swing by 1378.115 In that year, a German Jew named Ysacharus (probably Issachar), ill and expecting death, recorded his testament. He was not an official resident of Candia but rather was currently living there with his wife, Hebela; a son remained temporarily in Ashkenaz. Ysacharus had arrived too recently to have learned a language in common with the Latin notary hired to compose his will, so he asked two Jewish landsmen to translate for him. These two men, each identified as German (theotonicus) and as official residents (habitator) of Candia, were able to navigate in local languages. Undoubtedly grateful for their assistance, Ysacharus labeled these men as being among “the better” German Jews living in Candia, indicating that more compatriots lived in the city.116
German Jews came to Crete by way of a number of different routes. Some came via Venice and north Italy. Maria, the widow of Heschia Theotonicus, lived both in Candia and in Venice in the 1390s, although her daughter and son-in-law, Samuel Theotonicus, were members of Crete’s Jewish community.117 Local Jewish leaders wanted Maria to pay Jewish taxes in Crete, though Maria held property, paid taxes, and was currently resident (so it was argued) in Venice itself in April 1391. Even during this short period in which Jews were allowed to settle legally in Venice, some Ashkenazi Jews—including Maria’s son-in-law Samuel—preferred to put down roots in Crete, although Maria’s husband seems to have remained in Venice until his death. Jews from German lands began to migrate to Venice’s mainland holdings in the thirteenth century. The example of the widow Maria and her family suggests that some turned from the mainland to the even broader possibilities available in Crete.118
While some Ashkenazim chose to leave Venice even when they were temporarily allowed to live there, more German Jews who had been living and working in Venice immigrated to Crete after August 1394, when Venice refused to renew the Jewish charter. This quasi-expulsion brought “an influx of wealthy Jews” to Crete, likely including many Ashkenazi Jews.119 The route of some of these Jews from Germany to Venice sometimes took them via Spain. In the later decades of the fifteenth century, Moses Cohen Ashkenazi migrated to Crete, where he quickly became embroiled in a famed debate over Kabbalistic notions of reincarnation with the local-born Cretan rabbi Michael Balbo.120 In fact, Moses Ashkenazi spent time in Iberia, then traveled to Venice with his father, and from there moved to Candia.121
Other Ashkenazi Jews came through Venice’s other colonies before settling in Crete, as did the Delmedigo family.122 The actual connection between Germany and this family, the most famous example of a family of Ashkenazi origin in Crete, is lost to history. Latin legal material, however, indicates that the brothers Judah and Shemarya Delmedigo came to Candia by 1359 after significant residence in Negroponte.123 They must have spent enough time in the Italian sphere to have adopted the last name Delmedigo,