Colonial Justice and the Jews of Venetian Crete. Rena N. Lauer
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dwelling in residences located “in our community [be-kehillateinu].”74 Even more explicitly, in the ordinances forbidding Jews from leaving the confines of the Judaica during Sabbath and holiday prayer services mentioned above, we read: “From today forward, no one among the people of our community [me-anshei kehillateinu] will be permitted to leave the community [kahal; read: Jewish Quarter] on Sabbaths, the New Months, or holidays, without a compelling reason, until the exit from the morning synagogue service.”75 A revision of this ordinance passed by the reforming synod of 1363 makes the conflation more specific and more concrete: “From this day forward no Jew among the people of our community [me-anshei kehillateinu] will be permitted to leave from the street of the community [rehov hakahal] during the morning services during the time that the synagogue is open for prayer.”76 For the Jewish leadership, the space of the Jewish Quarter was one and the same with the confines of the Jewish community.
But the conflated language of the kahal as a human and spatial designation not only functioned as a vocabulary of inclusion, marking everyone inside as a member of the community. It could also help draw the barriers of exclusion and difference. In a list of all the taqqanot passed in 1363, the Sabbath ordinance is identified with this extended title: “That no Jew may exit from the community [min hakahal] into the alley of the Gentiles [le-mevo’i hagoyim] on Sabbaths and holidays at the time that the congregation [tzibbur] is praying, and all Jews are obligated to come to the synagogue to be as a single association [agudah] in their prayers.”77 The Jewish space of the kahal sharply and definitively contrasts with Christian space in this schema. One must exit, making a formal transition, from one to the other. Although it is unclear whether this alley refers to a specific street or a general category of streets, the choice of contrasting words is suggestive: the language of the kahal evokes openness, while the alley calls to mind narrow confinement.
The contrast between Jewish space and the Christian space beyond the walls appears most explicit when the authors of an ordinance mention the vesper bells “which are rung by the friars [lit. the brothers], the priests who are on the border of the kahal.”78 The Dominican monastery of St. Peter Martyr—and its human embodiments of Christianity’s conversion ethic—stood to the east of the Judaica. It formed not only a physical boundary between the Jewish Quarter and the Christian world outside but also a conceptual boundary indicating where the kahal (qua persons and place) ended.
Even as the Jewish leadership saw the Judaica as a definitively Jewish space, they also recognized that they were not alone inside. The boundaries were not impermeable, nor did they need to be. Even the Dominican monastery, which starkly delineated the border of the Judaica, was not purely external to the Jewish space. The vesper bells could be easily heard within. In fact, the taqqanah that mentions these bells demanded that Jews utilize the sound of their ringing as a sign to cease working, once and for all, as Sabbath began.79 The Christian sound invading Jewish space could be repurposed for a squarely Jewish aim. The seeming encroachment of Christian things into Jewish space should thus be read as multivalent, not to be simply and single-mindedly repelled but rather to be controlled—or better, in the spirit of Jewish exegesis, to be reinterpreted. Even a monastery—probably intentionally built in this location so as to abut the Judaica, perfect for turning Jewish souls to Jesus—could be co-opted by the Jewish establishment for its own goals.
Jews and Christians Inside the Judaica
The reuse of the vesper bells hints that Candia’s Jewish leadership was well aware that the idealized self-segregation—the private, insider Jewish world they imagined existed in their Judaica—was not fully consonant with reality. First and foremost, this monastery and church had stood side by side, cheek by jowl, with the Jewish homes for over two centuries before a wall was erected.80 Its waterfront compound lay so close to the Judaica’s easternmost street that the friars could see into Jewish homes through windows and balconies that overlooked the monastery. It was this visual proximity to the Jews that threatened the friars’ souls, or so they said in the complaint that sparked the 1450 walling in of the Judaica’s street.81
It must be noted that 1450 is quite a late date to fully enclose a Jewish quarter. In contrast, the Venetian Senate ordered the Jewish Quarter of Venetian Negroponte to be separated from the rest of the city by a wall already in 1304 “for reasons of security.”82 Such a difference in policy highlights that each Venetian colony must be investigated separately, as legislation, contingencies, and enforcement of law regarding Jewish settlement and interactions with Christians did not necessarily apply uniformly to the whole Stato da mar. Here, it must suggest to us that the Cretan colonial government in this period did not obsess over the mixing of Jews and Christians in residential space as other colonial governments seem to have done.
Perhaps the government could not effectively enforce segregation; the need to repeat the orders in 1334 and 1350 may indicate this. But even the laws of the 1390s, which for the first time ordered the walling off of the southern boundary of the Judaica, incorporate a flexible understanding of the implications of the wall. The decrees explicitly permitted specific Jewish homeowners whose real estate fell outside of the technical confines of the Jewish Quarter to continue living in their homes and to rent apartments to other Jews.83 We must imagine that cash had changed hands, from the listed Jewish homeowners to some colonial officials. But this phenomenon of looking the other way in not unique to Crete. That is to say, Venice in general does not seem to have been terribly strict in enforcing the Jewish residence policy in any of its colonial holdings. Even in the case of Negroponte, a senatorial decree intimates that neither the residential requirements nor the wall truly limited Jewish mobility, leading to further orders in 1402 to block off all but three entrances to the Jewish Quarter.84 David Jacoby has noted that even after Jews were forbidden from owning real estate outside Jewish quarters across the Venetian overseas territories in 1423, Venice looked the other way as Jews continued to buy, sell, and rent outside the Judaica even in parts of Crete over the course of the next centuries.85 In 1577, alongside his more famous grievance over Jewish prostitutes in the city, provveditore generale Giacomo Foscarini complained that he still found Jews living outside Candia’s Judaica, albeit in the vicinity.86 As in other cases, it seems that the law was upheld mostly in the breach.
But the concept of “Jewish space” in Candia is complicated not only by the fact that some Jews lived outside the quarter. Rather, the Judaica itself was a locus of mixing, a space where Christians could and did enter, for a whole array of reasons. Structurally, even the closing of the walls over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries could not—and was never intended to—enforce this kind of complete separation. Venice did not prevent nonresident Christians from entering the Judaica. The arched gate built in 1390 to demarcate the southeast limit and provide a formal entrance into the Jewish Quarter was neither closed nor locked.87 Thus we find Christians who lived in other parts of the city and from the countryside present in the Judaica’s streets and squares, and even inside Jewish homes and on Jewish property.
That it was absolutely normal for Christians to enter the Jewish Quarter, rather than an exceptional experience, is perhaps best expressed in a court verdict from 1449.88 The judiciary specifically banned three Christian men (whose crimes unfortunately were not recorded) from entering the Jewish Quarter for any reason, on pain of both incarceration and monetary fine.89 Should one of them enter the Jewish Quarter, the monetary fine would be divided between the denouncer and the commune. Only if another inhabitant of the city were to denounce the men would this restraining order have any teeth. It would be very easy for one of these men to walk right in. Obviously it was quite common for Christians to enter the Judaica as they pleased.
Although we do not know precisely why these particular three men wanted to enter the Judaica (a vendetta against a former Jew and a Christian lawyer seems to be the background plot), we can certainly witness other Christians in the midst of their engagements in the Jewish Quarter. Just as Jews often used the rest of the city for economic transactions, much of the Christian activity in Jewish space that is visible to us was economic. The many Christian landlords who rented to Jews, for example, must have entered the Judaica to deal with their property