Colonial Justice and the Jews of Venetian Crete. Rena N. Lauer
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“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