lands.
Though northern Italy was generally a locus of Jewish immigration, at various times Jews found the peninsula unwelcoming, particularly when mendicant preachers riled up town leaders and residents.86 The Franciscan friar Bernardino di Siena (d. 1444) stoked hostility against Jews (even if temporarily) in bustling commercial towns such as Florence, Padua, and Siena.87 Some Italian cities, such as Genoa and Milan, simply forbade Jewish settlement altogether; others expelled Jews in the late fifteenth century.88 Venice finally allowed Jewish moneylenders to settle in the city and its adjacent mainland (terraferma) in the decades after the Black Death, most explicitly from 1382. But Venice soon turned out its Jews, at the end of the century.89 In 1394, for economic reasons—there was no longer an urgent need for moneylenders lending credit in the city—the government decided that it would not renew the charter granted to the Jews when it expired in 1397.90 From that time, individual Jewish moneylenders were allowed into the city for no longer than fifteen days. Jewish merchants and doctors were allowed in sporadically according to other sets of rules. All Jews had to wear a yellow circle on their clothing. Enormous fines were levied on practicing their religion in the open during their short stays in Venice, for example by holding prayer services.91 Families left for more welcoming towns, and Venice ceased to be a tempting destination for those seeking to relocate from regions further west.
As western Europe turned more hostile to Jews, Crete came to be regarded as a haven, where Jews escaping expulsion (or worse) could start over. The Venetian government evidently had no problem with immigration to Crete. Likewise, there was no attempt by the Jewish community to control the influx, as some Ashkenazi communities in previous centuries had done.92
The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have often been seen as a period of increasing economic disabilities for Cretan Jews, part of the crisis spreading across Christendom. Undoubtedly this period witnessed residential, financial, and professional limitations for the community in Candia. Beginning in 1325, Jews in all Venetian colonies were required to live in Jewish quarters only. Residential rules tightened in 1391, when the Signoria ordered that some of the homes considered part of the Judaica, but across the street from Christian homes considered not part of that district, had to be walled off. This culminated in a final enclosure of the Judaica in 1450 at the request of the adjacent Dominican monastery of St. Peter Martyr.93 Meanwhile, in 1423, Venice prohibited Jews in all of its domains from holding real estate outside Jewish quarters.94
Jewish trade was also limited in this period. Generally, Jews were allowed to use shipping lines to Venetian colonies in the Levant, but they usually could not secure rights to ship goods to the metropole.95 Moreover, for about two decades beginning in 1429, Venice prohibited its vessels from transporting Jews or their goods to any Mamluk-held territory, thereby extending a papal ban against Christian ships conveying Jews and Jewish-owned goods to the Holy Land.96 Jewish economic outlets in Venice’s colonies were increasingly restricted, which probably led more Jewish capital to be directed toward moneylending.97
In addition, during the 1430s and 1440s, when Venice needed funds for its war efforts, Cretan Jews found themselves taxed heavily and forced to make war loans. In 1389 the community’s ambassadors successfully convinced the Senate to lower the Jewish tax to 2,000 hyperpera. But by the 1430s, the community was forced to pay 4,000 hyperpera in taxes, 12,000 ducats to help pay Venice’s war debt, and another 3,000 measures of wheat.98 Furthermore, Crete’s Jews were legally compelled to wear the yellow badge beginning around the turn of the fifteenth century. This regulation, though, apparently did not meet with great success.99
Nonetheless, despite policies aimed at limiting Jewish residency, cutting Jewish market share in overseas trade, and burdensome tax increases and other obligatory payments, these impediments seem relatively minor in comparison to the Jewish experience in other parts of Europe. In particular, the residential limitations appear not to have provoked much anguish, especially since they were sometimes honored in the breach. Segregation thus did not mean isolation or alienation, nor did it discourage new Jewish settlement in Candia. Moreover, it is likely that the Jewish tax rose not simply as a result of Christian mistreatment but also, at least in part, as a result of surging Jewish settlement.100
Perhaps more importantly, the Jews of the Stato da mar lived in Venice’s colonies without a specific legal charter or condotta, which Jews in many other parts of Europe and even in the terraferma holdings needed for legal settlement. Residence, thus, was not provisional but seemed more secure in its permanence.101 The lack of condotte also meant exceptional economic freedom, in contrast to Jews who had to abide by specific charters in Italy and elsewhere. Although the prohibition on landownership and the shipment restrictions had the effect of limiting trade (especially in luxury items and spices), Crete still offered Jews a wide variety of professional opportunities. Likewise, although Jews were never given citizenship, their status as legal residents and formal subjects of Venice provided Candia’s Jewish merchants certain advantages, such as legal protections when abroad, use of Venetian warehouses, and even, at times, access to state-sponsored shipping.102
Crete thus became a choice destination not only because its government allowed entry to refugee Jews but also because it offered significant attractions to businessmen seeking to expand their trading networks. Crete’s position at a crossroads between the Italian peninsula and the Levant made the island, and particularly the town of Candia—arguably the most important way station in the Mediterranean, at least until the rise of Famagusta on Cyprus toward 1500—an attractive and lucrative destination for Jews.103
Paths Toward Integration
Although the majority of Jews, and indeed the most powerful Jews, in Crete throughout the Venetian period identified as Romaniote—following the Byzantine-Jewish liturgical and ritual rites—the immigration described above brought a heterogeneous mix of predominantly Ashkenazim (German Jews) and Sephardim (Spanish Jews) to the island. Their integration into Candiote society can sometimes be tracked through their interaction with the kehillah’s leadership, their business contracts, and their dealings with Venice’s colonial court.
Most of the Sephardi Jews named in Latin and Hebrew sources on Crete appear after the massacres of 1391, and it seems likely that most arrived fleeing those terrible events. Some Sephardim, however, came earlier. A Catalan Jew, resident of Candia, contracted to sell honey in Candia as early as 1339, working alongside his business associates, Jews from Sicily and North Africa.104 The widow Archondisa, in her will from 1358, recorded her late husband as Elia catellanus, although her name suggests that her own origins lay in the Greek-speaking world, a marriage pattern common for Sephardi men and Romaniote women.105 Another Elia Catellan, son of Solomon, already lived in Candia in 1386 when he made his will.106
Of the Sephardim who settled in Candia before the annus horribilis of 1391, the Astruc (or Astrug) family’s tale appears in sharpest relief, nicely suggesting the possibilities available to Iberian Jewish immigrants. Members of the Astruc family, most likely from Catalonia, settled in Candia in the mid-fourteenth century and quickly amassed wealth and prestige.107 They used strategic marriages and business partnerships to secure their new positions as elite members of Candia’s Jewish community. By 1359, Solomon Astrug (as the name is spelled in the Latin sources) had married and was in the midst of divorcing a well-connected Romaniote wife, Elea, daughter of a wealthy Greek Jewish businessman, Liacho Mavristiri, and soon married into another Greek Jewish family.108
Solomon Astrug built up a successful moneylending business and bought lucrative real estate.109 He also made useful contacts in the colonial government. During the early 1390s, when the ducal court limited Jewish residence outside the Jewish Quarter, the court exempted Solomon Astrug—the only Jew identified by name—from selling his residential buildings outside the neighborhood. He had no problem paying a high fee for this favor.110
