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 of this older, elite lineage. Not only did he record the name of his father, Solomon, but he traced for posterity one more generation: his grandfather Joseph Capsali, whom he proudly titled “the Rabbi.”33 Over the next three centuries, Capsali men remained at the forefront of communal leadership of Candia’s kehillah kedoshah, the “holy community,” as the corporate institution styled itself. While Parnas signed the first set of taqqanot, it was Elia Capsali—ever conscious of posterity and history—who collected these ordinances, along with letters and historical reflections, into a single text, the Taqqanot Qandiya, which survives in one lone manuscript until today.34
Communal Institutions
Between Parnas’s life in the early 1200s and when Elia reached adulthood around 1500, members of the Capsali family and other elite clans developed a comprehensive corporate organization, similar to many Jewish kehillah (community) institutions in the Mediterranean and beyond.35 As in other premodern Jewish communities, elected lay officials in Candia fulfilled the mandate of the corporate institution, whose chief goal was to enable, protect, and enforce local Jewish ritual life. These leaders, headed by an elected condestabulo, ensured that Candiote Jews had access to kosher food, including ritually slaughtered meat, and properly inspected dairy and wine. They organized and fostered liturgical life, with its ritual objects, Torah scrolls, synagogue spaces, and prayer leaders. They also convened a Jewish court, a beit din, although scant information about it survives.36
The kehillah was recognized as a corporate legal body—a universitas—by the Venetian government. As such, the kehillah owned real estate from which it derived income to provide housing for the poor and fund other community needs.37 The leadership’s other primary task was to serve as liaison between the Jewish community and the Venetian colonial government on matters that affected the community as a whole. Its most daunting task was to collect the Jewish tax, which was levied not per capita but on the community as a whole.38 Although some corporate institutions in the medieval world were empowered to deal with Jewish criminal activity, Venetian courts exercised control over all criminal cases.39 The kehillah was allowed to mandate certain rules and ordinances for its members, an authority that other kinds of corporations, such as guilds and confraternities, also possessed. Thus any Jewish law and custom not contrary to Venetian law could be legislated for the community by the kehillah’s leadership. It is into this context of corporate self-rule that the Hebrew ordinances of Taqqanot Qandiya fit.
Like the Capsali family’s enduring role as leaders, in some fundamental ways the community they led would maintain continuity during the generations between Parnas and Elia. The community’s liturgical rite, the majority of its population, and its synagogues would remain “Romaniote”—that is, they identified with the ancestral ways of the Jews of Byzantine origin. Candiote Jews were generally native Greek speakers, and even as the community became more heterogeneous, it continued to follow Romaniote customs, rituals, and liturgy that—unlike Ashkenazi (Franco-German) or Sephardi (Spanish) liturgies—incorporated vernacular Greek into some parts of the service.40
In other ways, however, the Candiote Jewish community experienced significant changes between 1228 and the turn of the sixteenth century, not least because Crete’s Jewish population was in constant flux. In particular, outbreaks of plague in the mid-fourteenth century decimated the community, a result of both death and families fleeing the island. In 1389, three representatives of the Jewish community, supported by testimony of three Venetian noblemen who had served on Crete, convinced the Venetian Senate that the collective tax, which had been recently increased, was an impossible burden for a community so weakened in number.41 An influx of Jews from Iberia, Venice, and elsewhere, however, mitigated this loss soon after. Elia Capsali could have pointed to himself as an outcome of these demographic changes. Despite his well-known local patronymic, his mother came from the Delmedigo clan, an Ashkenazi family that arrived on the island in the late fourteenth century by way of Venetian Negroponte and quickly worked its way into the cadre of local elite Jews.
Given this population boost, Jewish economic fortunes on Crete changed for the better. As the nineteenth-century scholar of Venice Hippolyte Noiret noted, the expulsion of Jews (mainly of German and Italian extraction) from Venice was announced in late August 1394. A year later, the Venetian Senate voted to raise Crete’s Jewish tax, citing not only the general wealth of the Jews but also the immigration of new rich Jews to the island.42 The levied tax rose to 3,000 hyperpera, a 50 percent increase over the amount kehillah representatives had negotiated in 1389. If the tax rate correlated roughly to population, the Jewish community in the aggregate apparently remained economically successful over the course of the next century.43
To be sure, after 1492 and into the sixteenth century, faced with the challenge of poor Iberian Jews arriving en masse, and the need to ransom kidnapped Jews from Candia, Coron, and Patras, the Jewish community became so strapped for cash that it sold the silver finials from a Torah scroll; Elia Capsali even sold his personal library to an agent of Ulrich Fugger, the famed German businessman and bibliophile.44 But at least until 1492, the influx of Jews from western lands offered Candia’s kehillah some financial relief and demographic strength.
The leadership reacted to the challenges posed from the outside, such as raised taxes, through advocacy
