Solomon’s seven children flourished in Crete and for generations this lineage helped lead the Jewish community.111 One descendant named Solomon even served as the condestabulo in 1446.112 Other Iberian families in the next century would follow Astrug-like paths toward social integration and political leverage. Of course, money paved the way, and only a relatively small number of Sephardi Jews achieved the communal triumph of the Astrugs.113
While most Iberian Jewish immigrants appear to have come to Crete in the aftermath of the traumatic events of 1391, the contours of German Jewish migration to the island are less clear-cut. As in the case of Sephardi newcomers, there were certainly some German Jews in Crete before the Black Death. One Elia Allemanus contracted to buy wine there in 1271, only sixty years after Venice had colonized the island.114 Migration from the German lands was in full swing by 1378.115 In that year, a German Jew named Ysacharus (probably Issachar), ill and expecting death, recorded his testament. He was not an official resident of Candia but rather was currently living there with his wife, Hebela; a son remained temporarily in Ashkenaz. Ysacharus had arrived too recently to have learned a language in common with the Latin notary hired to compose his will, so he asked two Jewish landsmen to translate for him. These two men, each identified as German (theotonicus) and as official residents (habitator) of Candia, were able to navigate in local languages. Undoubtedly grateful for their assistance, Ysacharus labeled these men as being among “the better” German Jews living in Candia, indicating that more compatriots lived in the city.116
German Jews came to Crete by way of a number of different routes. Some came via Venice and north Italy. Maria, the widow of Heschia Theotonicus, lived both in Candia and in Venice in the 1390s, although her daughter and son-in-law, Samuel Theotonicus, were members of Crete’s Jewish community.117 Local Jewish leaders wanted Maria to pay Jewish taxes in Crete, though Maria held property, paid taxes, and was currently resident (so it was argued) in Venice itself in April 1391. Even during this short period in which Jews were allowed to settle legally in Venice, some Ashkenazi Jews—including Maria’s son-in-law Samuel—preferred to put down roots in Crete, although Maria’s husband seems to have remained in Venice until his death. Jews from German lands began to migrate to Venice’s mainland holdings in the thirteenth century. The example of the widow Maria and her family suggests that some turned from the mainland to the even broader possibilities available in Crete.118
While some Ashkenazim chose to leave Venice even when they were temporarily allowed to live there, more German Jews who had been living and working in Venice immigrated to Crete after August 1394, when Venice refused to renew the Jewish charter. This quasi-expulsion brought “an influx of wealthy Jews” to Crete, likely including many Ashkenazi Jews.119 The route of some of these Jews from Germany to Venice sometimes took them via Spain. In the later decades of the fifteenth century, Moses Cohen Ashkenazi migrated to Crete, where he quickly became embroiled in a famed debate over Kabbalistic notions of reincarnation with the local-born Cretan rabbi Michael Balbo.120 In fact, Moses Ashkenazi spent time in Iberia, then traveled to Venice with his father, and from there moved to Candia.121
Other Ashkenazi Jews came through Venice’s other colonies before settling in Crete, as did the Delmedigo family.122 The actual connection between Germany and this family, the most famous example of a family of Ashkenazi origin in Crete, is lost to history. Latin legal material, however, indicates that the brothers Judah and Shemarya Delmedigo came to Candia by 1359 after significant residence in Negroponte.123 They must have spent enough time in the Italian sphere to have adopted the last name Delmedigo, meaning “of the doctor.”
Both Moses Cohen Ashkenazi and the Delmedigos thought of themselves as Ashkenazi and were considered as such by their coreligionists in Candia. Abba Delmedigo the Elder, for example, supposedly founded a synagogue in Candia called the Allemaniko (“German”) around 1400.124 In his Kabbalistic-philosophical fight with Moses Cohen Ashkenazi over competing ideas of reincarnation, the Romaniote Michael Balbo emphasized the alien character of his opponent’s ideas by highlighting his foreign birthplace.125 But their affiliations and practices did not always align with our assumptions of Ashkenazi behavior; if we can rely on the Delmedigo family’s seventeenth-century prayer book, the family (at least by then) prayed according to the Romaniote rite.126 This apparently was not a novelty: in the sixteenth century, members of the Delmedigo family acted as communal representatives for both the “Synagogue of the Ashkenazim” (the Allemaniko) and the “Synagogue of the Priests” (also known as the Chochanitiko), one of the old Romaniote synagogues.127
Just as the Delmedigos came to lead Cretan Jewry, other Jews of German origin also joined the elite ranks of the Cretan kehillah, including Lazaro Theotonicus (Eliezer Ashkenazi Katz), who in 1411 acted as condestabulo and spearheaded a project to build a new sewer to protect water quality.128 In a taqqanah, Elia Capsali identified a rabbi and scholar named Yitzhak (Isaac) Ashkenazi as his revered teacher.129
Some German Jews had gained status in the community before the fifteenth century. In 1369, Malkiel Cohen Ashkenazi signed an ordinance of Taqqanot Qandiya, an act that indicated he had achieved a certain status within the community.130 Malkiel, however, was a respected member not only of the Jewish community’s elite but also of the wider town’s elite. Melchiele Theotonicus, as he is called in the Latin sources, was a doctor in independent practice who was also employed by the Venetian judiciary to treat injuries and testify about them in court. The German Jewish surgeon identified as Magister Iaco appeared before a Latin notary to translate for the dying Ysacharus as he dictated his will in 1378.131 Ashkenazi immigrants to Crete thus included respected physicians who were part of the colonial system and its institutions already in the 1360s and 1370s.
A small number of Iberian Jews also joined the leadership roster in Crete. In addition to the Astrug family, only two identified Iberian Jews appear in leadership positions. Isaac Catellan, son of Elia son of Solomon, acted as hashvan in 1444; his father had been in Candia by 1386 and thus was not of the post-1391 migration.132 Emmanuel Sephardi, a doctor, signed a taqqanah in 1439.133
Connections Beyond Candia
As Candia’s immigrants settled the city, they often remained tied into broader networks on the island, in the Venetian sphere, and in the broader Mediterranean world. In his youth, Elia Capsali had been sent to study in the Ashkenazi yeshiva in Padua and then lived in Venice. In studying abroad in an Ashkenazi setting, he emulated his father, Elqanah, who also studied in Padua, and his uncle Moses Capsali, who had apparently even attended yeshiva in Ashkenaz itself. By 1450, Rabbi Moses Capsali had moved to Constantinople, where he served as chief rabbi of the city under the Ottomans.134
The port city of Candia was, then, a place of transience and travel. Unsurprisingly, Jews from all over the island were in regular contact. Significant Jewish communities lived in Rethymno and Canea (modern Khania), although Candia boasted a larger population. Ducal court records and notarial registers from Candia also mention Jews based in other fortified towns and, to a smaller extent, villages of the hinterland, including Castronovo, Castro Belvedere,135 and Castro Bonifacio.136 The last of these fortress towns even housed a kosher slaughterhouse (becaria iudeorum) in 1439, when a predatory castellan tried to exploit it for profit.137 In 1419, some Jews clearly lived in the village of Casale de Evgenichi; a local Jewish man and woman were murdered there (an event about which we know very little).138
In the fourteenth century in Castronovo, the Jewish community fell victim to Greek rebels during the great St. Tito revolt of 1363–64. Regarded by the rebels as agents of Venice, the Jews were massacred in the summer of 1364.139 Jews did not abandon Castronovo, however; the surgeon Joseph Carfocopo was living in Castronovo in 1369, only a handful of years after the massacre, while another Jewish surgeon, Moses Gradnelli (or Gadinelli), resided there sixty years later.140
