Jews from the town appear in the ducal records in May 1373, after one seriously wounded the other.142 A decade later, enough Jews lived in Castronovo for a judicial sentence regarding payment for water use to simply refer to them collectively, “the Jews residing in Castronovo.”143 Although the Jewish population was expelled from Castronovo and Bonifacio at some point in the fifteenth century, once again this was not permanent, and evidence of Jewish settlement in both those locales reappears in the following century.144
Many Jews had interests in more than one town on the island, including some who owned property in more than one location.145 Branches of the same family often lived in different cities, especially in both Candia and Rethymno. Members of the Capsali family lived in Rethymno;146 and in the 1420s, Magister Monache, a doctor and resident of Candia, had his son settle in Rethymno, at least in part so that they could take up two ends of the cloth trade that linked the two towns.147 Sometimes marriage connected families across the island. Herini, the widow of Sambatheus Chasuri, lived in Candia when she dictated her will in March 1348, but her two brothers, named as executors of her will, resided in Canea.148 Likewise, Liacho, a Jewish cobbler, called Candia home, though earlier his father, Lazarus, had lived in the district of Milopotamo, west of Candia.149
Most of the evidence of Jewish settlement from areas outside Candia exists because these Jews journeyed there from their hometowns, often to petition the ducal court. While in Candia, these Jews relied on the institutions of the Judaica for food, shelter, and other needs, such as prayer services. Taqqanot Qandiya attests to connections between the elites of Candia and other cities. Jewish leaders from Rethymno appear as signatories on various ordinances, and one from Rethymno was adopted whole cloth in Candia.150 As such, it is not surprising that the Jews of these cities worked together to promote common communal interests. When fighting a steep tax increase levied on the island’s Jews during the 1440s, the universitas of Candiote Jews joined with representatives of the universitas iudeorum of Rethymno to appeal before the ducal court.151
Shared Venetian sovereignty also facilitated regular and easy connections between Jews living in Crete and those in other parts of the Stato da mar, particularly Negroponte.152 Jews moved back and forth between Crete and Negroponte; marriages between Jews from the two islands were not uncommon.153 Even the prominent Delmedigo family evidently moved to Candia after a stint in Negroponte.154 Beyond the Venetian sphere, marriage, trade, and resettlement took place between Cretan Jews and those nearby on Rhodes, controlled by the Hospitallers from 1309 until the mid-fifteenth century.155 Jewish traders from Rome, Barcelona, and Majorca came to Crete, sometimes to partner with their Cretan Jewish counterparts. Jewish traders set off from Candia to sell their wares in Sardinia, Tunis, Alexandria, and Constantinople.156 The great Venetian wine trade to Alexandria enabled Jews like Elia Capsali of Rethymno (a relative of the Candiote leader) to reap profit exporting both kosher and conventional Malvasia di Candia (Malmsey), a rich varietal derived from Greek grapes.157 In Constantinople before 1453—and indeed after as well—Candiote Jewish traders exchanging Cretan wine and cheese for leather hides often stayed in the Venetian quarter, where they met Catalan and Genoese Jewish merchants.158 Finally, Cretan Jews had a profound connection to Jerusalem, a place where Candiote men and women went on pilgrimage but also sometimes to stay, to die, and to be buried.159 The holy city loomed large in their imaginations. Some sent money “to the great Jewish men who are in Jerusalem,” as one 1348 testator put it. Some named their children after it—such as Çigio, the daughter of Chaluda Balbo, whose name is most likely the feminized form Tziona—Zion.160
Anxiety, Acceptance, and Other Jews
Jewish community leaders welcomed newcomers, whether refugees or businessmen, from east and west, absorbing them into the kehillah kedoshah. These newcomers brought practical skills and knowledge, and (at least, ideally) contributed to the Jewish tax once they had set up in business. Naturally they arrived in Candia with their own experience of Jewish rite and tradition, as well as their own approaches to Jewish law. On one hand, the Jewish hierarchy demanded adherence to local Jewish custom from newcomers, a theme that sounds throughout Taqqanot Qandiya. At the same time, newcomers worked their way into the Jewish leadership hierarchy and into the tight cohort of Jewish elite families who had traded power among themselves for generations.
But some Jews caused the Jewish leadership a sense of anxiety. Only three times in Taqqanot Qandiya are wrongdoers identified by name, and in each case, they are outsiders. “A Sephardi Jew, and his name is Abraham Tofer [i.e., the tailor],” provoked a 1439 ordinance demanding all marriages take place before ten witnesses.161 The ordinance not only stresses improper marital behavior but highlights the individual and, even more so, his Spanish origin. Likewise, when a rumor spread that Candiote women were promiscuous, the taqqanah targeted a specific man, “the Sicilian, Shalom.”162 In 1531, when another Jew libeled the reputation of Candiote Jewish women, the taqqanah identified him as “Judah Kirkus … who came to live in our land” from Egypt.163 It was outsiders—Jews, but outsiders and newcomers nonetheless—who were presumed to threaten the reputation and sanctity of the Candiote community.
To be sure, blaming reprehensible behavior on newcomers was not confined to these specific instances. Elia Capsali, among others, engaged in this practice. Writing in the 1530s about a practice he despised—selling certain honors on the holiday of Simhat Torah instead of awarding them to learned and pious men—he blamed the behavior on “new people who have recently come, whom your ancestors could not have imagined” (an expression he borrowed from Deuteronomy 32:17). Later he complained of “immigrants [gerim] from a far land” who thought they could purchase themselves good reputations.164
Remarkably, the most egregious Jews, from the perspective of Taqqanot Qandiya, were outsiders but still residents of Crete—in particular, the Jews of the fortress town of Castronovo. Jews from this nearby community sparked long-lasting anxiety among the pious leadership. Two statutes from 1363 offer a clear set of complaints against them. Castronovo’s Jews sold supposedly kosher meat that could not actually be trusted; their dairy products were equally suspect.165 Such behavior touching on both religion and the economy was deemed “evil,” and the rabbis feared that Castronovo’s Jews would act “in secret” to trick Candiote Jews into eating impure foods.166 Only if their cheeses were officially certified could Jews from Castronovo sell to their coreligionists in the city. The spatial rhetoric that divides “us vs. them” is striking: the Castronovans and their ilk are “outside of our community” (mi-hutzah le-kehilateinu), in contrast to Candiote Jews, who are “men of our place” (anshei mekomeinu).
To be sure, rabbinic attitudes likely did not align with those of the common flock. Not all Jews saw their coreligionists in Castronovo as beyond the pale; some were eager to buy their unapproved foodstuffs—a fact that sparked the taqqanah in the first place. Likewise, some Candiote Jews were pleased to marry their children to Jews from Castronovo, as Solomon Torchidi did in 1451 when he betrothed his son to an affluent girl from Castronovo.167 In general, though, for the authors of the taqqanot, these Jews were regarded as problematic and had to be carefully watched.
The key issue was control: the Candiote rabbis wanted to take charge of ensuring the kashrut of the Judaica’s food, while Castronovo’s Jews—and likely its own leaders—judged themselves perfectly capable of producing fare without the imposition of the capital’s rabbis. This tension over control came up again in 1567, when the Candiote leadership reacted with horror that the local religious leadership in Castronovo excommunicated a member of the community. In a letter recorded among the taqqanot, the Candiote leadership reminded the Jews of Castronovo that only Candia’s rabbis had that right—bestowed on them by Venice itself, they claimed—and that their behavior, if continued, would provoke a wholesale excommunication of Castronovo’s Jews by the Candiote kehillah.168
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