Colonial Justice and the Jews of Venetian Crete. Rena N. Lauer
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had even represented Cretan Jewry before the government in Venice, when he and others successfully convinced the senate to lower Crete’s Jewish tax in 1389.182 Beyond this performance, Joseph himself appealed to Romaniote practices at times in his life.183
When Joseph dictated his will to a Latin notary in August 1411, he provided large bequests both for his extended family and for the Candiote Jewish community at large, including through the funding of the salary of a scholar of Jewish text and law to whom would be bequeathed Missini’s own library. He also left money to educate Jewish boys and to furnish dowries for impoverished Jewish girls.184 He was clearly concerned with the local benefit his considerable wealth could bestow.
Joseph’s generosity extended beyond Candia, however. He also bequeathed charity for the Jewish poor in Rethymno. Moreover, he stipulated that a third of his significant investment profits was to be given to German and French rabbis living in Jerusalem.185 For Joseph, as for many of his Candiote coreligionists, Jerusalem was not an abstract or distant land of hope but a final destination on a well-known sea voyage. Joseph’s dedication to Jews both at home and abroad, and to both Romaniote and Ashkenazi Jews, points to a Cretan Jewish community deeply tied into broader Jewish networks in the Mediterranean and beyond. Such connections to the Ashkenazi world began at home. Missini had brokered a marriage between his daughter, Crussana, and Israel Theotonicus.186 As a fixture of the Judaica’s elite, he likely sympathized with Ashkenazi intellectual and halachic ideas at the same time that he married his daughter to a German immigrant. Nevertheless, when pressed to comply with the Ashkenazi ban on bigamy, Missini refused to assent and remained married to a second wife, according to Romaniote tradition.187 For Missini this was a normal negotiation of legitimate value options, not a contradiction.
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Almost a century and a half after Joseph Missini led the Candiote community, on the Friday in 1546 when Elia Capsali walked home from the ducal palace, it was now Capsali who was in charge—and had been for a number of decades already, since his first stint as condestabulo around 1515. On that afternoon, Elia Capsali entered his sizable yard and passed into his family’s residence compound, where he prepared for the incoming Sabbath. His prosperous family probably owned their own home; most inhabitants of the Judaica rented from rich Jews or from Venetian Christian feudatories.188 But thoughts of business and property could be left for another day. As the sun began to set late on Friday, he gathered with his family for the Day of Rest, prayed the evening service, and, like his ancestors before him and his fellow community members around the neighborhood, enjoyed Sabbath dinner.
Yet the calm communality of this Sabbath-inspired domestic scene veils Elia’s own reality of integration into the wider, non-Jewish society of Crete and beyond. Capsali, like the earlier authors of Taqqanot Qandiya, did not live in isolation. Jewish internal heterogeneity in Candia met a parallel reality of an interdependent wider society across the colonial city. The reality of daily encounters between the city’s Jews and their Latin and Greek coresidents—interactions that were sometimes positive, sometimes not—had been part of Cretan life since before Venetian rule, and they only mounted during the colonial era. Capsali’s ancestor Parnas, among the first signatories of the taqqanot, recognized the reality and necessity of daily commercial exchange, as he and his cohort voted to pass an ordinance against cheating in Jewish-Christian trade. Joseph Missini dealt with Christians at the highest level of government when he traveled on embassy to Venice, but when he returned to Crete, he encountered his Greek Christian neighbors, from whom he had bought his own home. As each man turned inward to lead his community, he simultaneously turned outward, forging enduring associations—commercial, legal, domestic—with Christians on the island they all shared.
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