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