Colonial Justice and the Jews of Venetian Crete. Rena N. Lauer
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Candia became the key stopover point on the Venice-Levantine commercial route.6 The first half of the fifteenth century witnessed the peak in Candia’s role as a major emporium.7 It was not simply that Candia was a hub for trade in other places’ goods; the city and its hinterland produced highly desired items for export, including wine, cheese, wool, and tanned hides, among other lucrative merchandise.8
However bustling, Candia was nevertheless a small city, comprising 192 acres—only three-tenths of a square mile.9 Today, a stroll from the Venetian piazza (now popularly known as Lion’s Square), up the old main street known then as the Ruga Maistra (or Magistra), and right up to the harbor—a journey through the entire length of the walled city south to north—takes little more than five minutes. At least in the late sixteenth century, it was densely populated, with a 1583 census estimating the population inside the walls (not including the borgo) at 15,976. Only a relatively small percentage of these residents—fewer than a thousand people—belonged to Venice’s noble class. Most of the city’s inhabitants—over 80 percent—were middle-class Greeks, non-noble Italians, and Armenians. The city’s suburb, the borgo, housed more of this community, especially Greeks but also Venetian elites who preferred some distance from the center of power and others who were priced out of central city living.10 Jews made up another small but substantial population within the city’s walls: about 950 souls, according to that census.11 To be sure, we must add to this mix those who were not counted: people such as slaves and temporary visitors, including merchants and pilgrims.12 Nevertheless, Candia remained a small town, physically and demographically. In comparison, even during the plague-ridden centuries after 1348, Venice managed to rebuild its population to above 100,000 souls; a census from 1500 puts the number at about 120,000.13
Unfortunately, no similar contemporary demographic assessment has survived for the century following the Black Death. Sally McKee has estimated Candia’s demographics according to status and profession. She argues that “feudatories,” the Venetian elites given land directly from the state, “and their families very likely never reached, much less surpassed, the figure of two thousand individuals” in the late Middle Ages. She also suggests that the “Candiote working population” (capaciously understood) hovered between at least five and eight thousand people.14
Yet any overarching total remains highly speculative. This fact—and a suspicion of numbers proposed by contemporary visitors—has led scholars to debate Candia’s Jewish population numbers in the late Middle Ages.15 But the census data for the late sixteenth century seem to me quite consistent with the earlier period. Counting the Jews mentioned in court documents, notarial records, and Hebrew sources from 1350 to 1454 suggests a similar population of at least 1,000 Jewish souls in the city—and probably more—in this century.16
These thousand or so Jews took part in the vibrant commercial life of the city, producing goods and offering services for Candia, for export, and for the internal Jewish community as well.17 Some Cretan Jews busily made their livings in professions habitually associated with medieval Jews—moneylenders, merchants, and physicians. They were also notaries, religious scribes, and teachers, positions of high social standing.18 Often these individuals involved themselves in more than one of these arenas, such as those who were both physicians and creditors. Despite the ubiquity of these high-status, “white-collar” jobs in the sources, many members—perhaps a majority—of the Jewish community in Candia worked in manual labor. Jewish laborers and skilled craftsmen hired themselves out and maintained their own workshops; these include tailors, artisans (faber), goldsmiths (aurifex), cobblers (cerdo), tanners, cork makers, butchers, healers, and dyers (tintor). Kosher food manufacture, including the production of kosher wine, dairy products, and meat, as well as overseeing their production for religious purposes, also employed a number of residents. Some Jews were domestic servants (famulus/famula), most likely serving in Jewish households.19 Undoubtedly many unskilled laborers also existed among the community.
Though men predominantly filled these professional roles, Jewish women certainly also contributed to their own and their families’ economic coffers across the spectrum: as creditors and merchants, health practitioners, domestics, and textile workers, actively and publicly taking part in the life of the city, as they also filled the at-home roles more commonly prescribed to them: wives and mothers.20
The Development of Candia’s Kehillah
As he left the Plateia on that Friday afternoon in 1546, perhaps Elia Capsali glanced up at the clock on the bell tower to check how long he had before Sabbath began.21 Though the clock was relatively new, the square—its organization and central role in the life of the city—remained much as Elia’s ancestors saw it during more than three centuries that the Capsalis, once Byzantine Jews, had lived under Venetian rule. As a man keenly attentive to his family’s and community’s history—Capsali considered himself a historian and keeper of the community’s memory—it could not have been lost on him that his situation was exceptional for a Jew of his time: his access to the halls of Venetian power, freedom in this colonial society, and, indeed, the place of the community he led.22 In his book on Ottoman history, he himself would write of the trauma of other Jews that he had personally witnessed when some of Iberia’s expelled Jews—poor, ragged, and hopeless—washed up on Crete’s shores after the traumatic expulsion of 1492.23
In contrast to the insecurity of contemporary Sephardim, his community was confidently situated to help these homeless Jews. Despite burdensome taxation, the Jews of Candia were generally financially and politically secure; both the exigencies of Venetian imperial settlement and active negotiation by the island’s Jews had created a safe space in which Jewish life could flourish.
And so it had, for centuries, both before and during Venetian rule. Jews did not come to Crete only as a result of the Venetian conquest. The Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo notes a significant Jewish community on Crete in the first century CE; Josephus Flavius married a woman from this Cretan Jewish community a few decades after Philo wrote.24 Both reference to Jews in a tale recounted by the church historian Socrates Scholasticus and independent epigraphic evidence indicate that a Jewish community was settled on Crete in the fifth century.25 To be sure, we do not know if Jews remained on Crete continuously, and Jewish settlement in this period seems to have been focused in Gortyna, the Roman administrative center on the southern coast of the island.26
Yet evidence certainly places Jews in Chandax (later called Candia) in the ninth and tenth centuries.27 By the time Venice sent its first round of military colonists to hold the island in 1211, a Jewish community had struck deep roots in Candia, inhabiting its own neighborhood in the northwest corner of the city. This was the same district to which Capsali walked home after meeting the duke on that Friday in 1546.28 This Jewish Quarter became known alternatively in Latin, Venetian, and Greek—the most commonly used languages of this multilingual colonial society—as the Judaica, Zudecca, and Obraki. In Hebrew, the quarter and its people were synonymous: both were known as the kahal or kehillah, simply “the community.”
In fact, Elia’s own ancestors were among those who lived in that thirteenth-century kahal. In 1228, Parnas Capsali signed his name to the first set of Jewish communal ordinances, taqqanot, which were meant to organize and unify Jewish life across the Jewish communities on the island.29 Scholars assert that, since the community had long predated the Venetian colonial project, the Jewish communal structure was probably a holdover from Byzantine days.30 Yet the authors of the rules of 1228, according to an introduction by its signatories, believed themselves to be innovators: this was the first unified attempt at bringing together representatives “from all four Hebrew [ivrim] communities” to agree to a set of rules aimed at all the Jews across the island.31 Only seventeen years after Venice had established its rule there, a group of elites had amassed enough strength and trust within the community to gather the Jews, “young and old,” in the Great Synagogue of Elijah the Prophet and to impose on them a set of ordinances prepared in advance.32
In his very signature, Parnas Capsali identified himself as part