of Candia, and Capsali headed in the other direction. Walking to the northwest corner of the walled city where the Jewish Quarter was located, Capsali had to head north from the Plateia, up the Ruga Maistra, the major north-south thoroughfare that tracked through the center of the town, from the southern land gate to the northern gate at the harbor. Along the Ruga he saw Jewish stalls set up among the homes and stores that lined the street.60 He also likely saw garbage neatly piled up next to each home and stall: since the 1360s, residents and shopkeepers on the boulevard were required to sweep up on Friday mornings in preparation for a communal trash cart, which would collect it on Saturday morning while Capsali would be in synagogue.61
At some point before the road hit the port, Capsali turned west and entered into the labyrinth of neighborhoods that made up much of the walled city. Before reaching the Judaica, navigating the narrow alleys, he passed by Jews rushing to bake their savory pies, a dish known even in the Hebrew text as a torta, in bakehouses shared with their Christian neighbors. Even though this had gone on for centuries, Capsali regarded it with such pious dismay that soon after, he built kosher ovens on his own property, at his own expense.62
Capsali entered the Judaica through the southeastern gate, erected in the 1390s and decorated with the Lion of St. Mark and Venetian coats of arms.63 He strode down that neighborhood’s main street, nicknamed Stenón (Greek for “narrow”).64 The tall buildings that marked this quarter as different from other neighborhoods—buildings of three or four stories, as opposed to the usual single-story homes occupied by most non-Jewish Candiote residents—would have shaded him on this late summer afternoon.65
By Capsali’s day, the Judaica was a city within the city—enclosed by walls, some of which were also the exterior walls of Jewish homes. The south and east sides were shut up with walls in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. On its west and north sides, the Judaica abutted the water, where the seawall overlooked Dermata (Tanners’) Bay, west of the city’s main port. Lines of Jewish mansions faced the northern waterfront.
Did the noxious odors from Dermata Bay tanneries, constant threats from the sea, and narrow crowded streets make Capsali’s neighborhood undesirable, as some have claimed? Perhaps not.66 Lorenzo da Mula, a Christian visitor to Candia in 1571, wrote that the Jewish Quarter (or at least its parts closest to the water) was the “most beautiful part of the city.”67 Likewise, the keen-eyed visitor Meshullam of Volterra, in Candia in 1481, noticed other negative parts of Jewish life in the city but did not disparage the Jewish Quarter itself. Of course, perhaps these visitors saw what they wanted to see or saw what their guides showed them.
On the way home, Elia may have walked past the Jewish slaughterhouse or through the web of streets known as the “Cobbler’s Area.”68 The quarter’s synagogues, its mikvah (ritual bath), and its public well were not far from his route. Although the mikvah and the public well kept the same place over the course of the three centuries between the first taqqanot and Elia’s own tenure as condestabulo, the number and locations of the synagogues did not stay constant. The oldest synagogue that had been in use in 1228, the one named for the Prophet Elijah, seems to have closed down at some point after 1369. But another major synagogue appeared around 1400, when the Delmedigo family founded the Allemaniko (“German”) synagogue.69 An unidentified synagogue, created in the 1260s, closed down in 1421 as the result of a Jewish convert to Christianity—and descendant of one of the founders of the synagogue—successfully suing in the ducal court for control of the land.70 The taqqanot indicate that in 1369 and 1406 there were three synagogues worth mentioning; in 1424 a number of synagogues existed, but there were two major ones (hashtayim hagdolot).71 But a taqqanah likely from the 1530s lists four, with its representatives: the Great Synagogue, represented by Samuel Cohen Ashkenazi; the Synagogue of the Priests, represented by Moses Delmedigo; the Synagogue of the Ashkenazim, represented by Aba Delmedigo; and the High Synagogue, represented by Solomon Cohen Balbo.72 Already by 1369 and still in 1518, the Seviliatiko Synagogue, ostensibly the commonly used name for the Great Synagogue, was a major focus, where communal synods at least sometimes took place.73
The synagogue was a meeting house as well as a house of prayer. In the early part of the fifteenth century, the Synagogue of the Priests filled the role of a communal center, a place where community leaders “sat time and time again” to debate their responses to communal problems, such as the ongoing crisis in which Jewish-owned stores remained open for business too close to the start of Sabbath, and also sold goods during the intermediary days of holidays (hol hamo’ed).74 In the later years of the fifteenth century, the leadership met at the Great Synagogue (Beit Knesset HaGadol) to discuss religious crises such as the laxity in separation between fiancés and their betrothed before the wedding.75
Jewish Migration and Settlement in Candia
The Jewish community of Crete grew and evolved during the Venetian period because of a steady flow of Jewish immigration. Nevertheless, many of the Jewish families in Candia were not newcomers. Naming patterns suggest that many Candiote Jews in this century were of Byzantine origin or at least had been in the Greek milieu for a long time.76 Some families had lived on Crete before the Venetian conquest. A member of Casani family, Anatoli the son of David, for instance, wrote liturgical poetry on Crete in the twelfth century.77 His family remained among the Jewish elite during Venetian rule. Other migrants arrived on Crete from within the contemporary and former Byzantine Empire and from Venetian colonies such as Coron and Negroponte.
Others came from farther afield, some with little in their pockets. In 1428, a Majorcan Jew agreed to serve a Candiote physician on his travels to Venice in return for food, lodging, and a salary of three hyperpera per month.78 Others arrived with far greater resources. And just as their socioeconomic status varied, their origins did as well. Surnames suggest a wide variety of places of origin: Turco (from Ottoman lands or Asia Minor), de Damasco (Damascus), Ciciliano (Sicily), Tzarfati (northern France), and even one Jew oddly named Saracenus. Many other non-Byzantine Jews came to Crete from Iberia and German lands.79
Venetian rule on Crete coincided with periods of upheaval in many other parts of Christendom, marked by plague, riot, and massacre, especially in Iberia and Germany. This turmoil provoked a Jewish exodus from the traditional centers of settlement in western Europe. Northern France expelled its Jews in 1182 and 1306 (only to allow the Jews to return in 1189 and 1315) and again in 1395. England definitively drove its Jews out in 1290. German Jews suffered the Rindfleisch and Armleder massacres in 1298 and 1336, respectively, and the Black Death provoked a sharpened set of anti-Jewish legislation, financial disabilities, and mob hostility across Europe that began in 1348 but continued in various incarnations for another century.80 The massacres and burnings of the so-called Pestpogrom in the immediate aftermath of the plague gave way to devastating economic persecution around 1390, when the Luxembourger king Wenceslas IV canceled Jewish debt.81
Likewise, Jews began to flee Iberia in this same period. Before 1348, anti-Jewish violence certainly took place, as David Nirenberg has illustrated.82 With the advent of the plague, however, Catalonia and Navarre became “the center of violence and killings” of Jews, and the Inquisition “accompanied the crescendo of violence,” seeking out German and French converts to Christianity who had returned to their Judaism upon moving to Iberia.83 The many Jews who sought refuge in Castile, however, were not to have peace in the following decades, as vitriolic anti-Jewish preaching led to mob riots and massacres across Iberia in the summer of 1391. Beginning in Seville, the riots spread to Valencia and Catalonia, and from there across the peninsula; many Jews were killed and others were forced to convert en masse.84 In the first half of the fifteenth century, popular preachers such as Vincent Ferrer continued to rouse the masses to attack Jewish quarters and force Jews to convert under fear of death and pressed the governments of Iberia to pass ever-harsher anti-Jewish legislation.85 Long before the expulsion of 1492, many of those who were able to
