letter from the chief rabbi of Constantinople, Candiote Moses Capsali, further attests to tensions between the town and country Jews, as well as to the problems of newcomers bringing their own traditions. A writ of divorce was given by a husband to a wife in a place identified in Hebrew as “Kastell” or “Kasteel,” likely referring to one of the fortress towns (castelli)—perhaps even Castronovo itself.169 Yet Capsali does not ultimately blame Cretans. Rather, he writes: “And all this has happened to you because of new people who have recently come, whom your ancestors could not have imagined, until they have overcome you with sins, to lead you in the customs of their lands, which your fathers and your fathers never knew. And who would say that the customs of the rest of the communities [kehillot] were better than the customs of the holy community of Candia and the rest of the holy communities on the island?”170 He also remarks on the widespread nature of the newcomer problem. In his current home of Constantinople, “a few of the wise men [hakhamim] from other lands came, and they were wise in their own eyes” for they tried to persuade the local Romaniote community to follow their alien ways. Capsali boasts that he and others proudly “stood in the breach against them.” Local customs, he repeatedly stresses, are the sole legitimate customs.171
Nevertheless, while Moses Capsali could speak generally of interlopers promoting their innovations, he too was powerfully influenced by outsiders: when the innovations came via Ashkenaz, they were desirable.172 Answering another query from the Candiote rabbis, Moses Capsali wrote about choosing a hazzan (literally, “cantor”) for each synagogue.173 On Crete as elsewhere a hazzan functioned as the chief executive officer for that synagogue during his tenure—a powerful, high-status, and lucrative job. Vexed by Venetian government intervention in the choosing of Candia’s hazzanim, Capsali expounded the proper method.174 Instead of suggesting that they go back to the old ways, though, Capsali told the Jews of Candia to follow another example: that of the Jews of Ashkenaz. Their practices are better, wrote Capsali, and in the course of his responsum he referenced the Ashkenazi liturgy and even quoted a story from Cologne, borrowed from the Ashkenazi rabbi Eliezer ben Joel HaLevi of Bonn. In idealizing Ashkenaz, Capsali reinterpreted Candiote practice, an increasingly prevalent trend as Candiote Jewish elites sent their sons to study at the Ashkenazi yeshiva in Venetian Padua. Ashkenazi ways inflected Crete’s broad, community-wide halachic practices, including kosher slaughtering of animals, and also affected a certain segment of Candia’s Jewish philosophical perspectives.175
Crete’s Jews, however, absorbed cultural influences from beyond Ashkenaz. Sixteen Hebrew manuscripts of text collections copied for patrons and reflecting their own interests have survived from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Crete.176 These manuscripts suggest an elite interested in a wide variety of topics, including biblical commentary, mysticism, homilies, and Jewish law (halacha), as well as Euclidean geometry, Hebrew grammar, Spanish poetry, Aristotelian philosophy, and medicine. These elite texts, particularly the explicitly religious works, highlight the impact of Iberian and Provençal scholars and scholarly trends on Crete’s Jews.177 In addition, responsa evidence indicates that already in 1300, some Candiote Jews sought religious rulings from Solomon ibn Adret of Barcelona; links between Crete and Barcelona’s rabbis continued throughout the century.178 No matter what anxiety individual Sephardi Jews, such as Abraham the tailor, brought to Candia, Sephardi ideas—mystical, medical, or otherwise—held sway among the island’s Jewish leaders.
This mixture of Jewish cultural traditions, as well as the ongoing connection between Jews in Candia and those farther afield, is attested in a will composed on behalf of Joseph Missini, a wealthy community leader who died in Candia around 1411.179 The Missini surname suggests that the family was not local to Crete (likely from Messinia, the region encompassing the southwest extension of the Peloponnese/Morea). But the family appears to have been on Crete for at least a generation (perhaps more) before Joseph was born and was deeply ensconced in its Jewish community and its Romaniote traditions.180 The Jewish community in Candia played a large role in Joseph’s life. He served a successful term as condestabulo.181 He had even represented Cretan Jewry before the government in Venice, when he and others successfully convinced the senate to lower Crete’s Jewish tax in 1389.182 Beyond this performance, Joseph himself appealed to Romaniote practices at times in his life.183
When Joseph dictated his will to a Latin notary in August 1411, he provided large bequests both for his extended family and for the Candiote Jewish community at large, including through the funding of the salary of a scholar of Jewish text and law to whom would be bequeathed Missini’s own library. He also left money to educate Jewish boys and to furnish dowries for impoverished Jewish girls.184 He was clearly concerned with the local benefit his considerable wealth could bestow.
Joseph’s generosity extended beyond Candia, however. He also bequeathed charity for the Jewish poor in Rethymno. Moreover, he stipulated that a third of his significant investment profits was to be given to German and French rabbis living in Jerusalem.185 For Joseph, as for many of his Candiote coreligionists, Jerusalem was not an abstract or distant land of hope but a final destination on a well-known sea voyage. Joseph’s dedication to Jews both at home and abroad, and to both Romaniote and Ashkenazi Jews, points to a Cretan Jewish community deeply tied into broader Jewish networks in the Mediterranean and beyond. Such connections to the Ashkenazi world began at home. Missini had brokered a marriage between his daughter, Crussana, and Israel Theotonicus.186 As a fixture of the Judaica’s elite, he likely sympathized with Ashkenazi intellectual and halachic ideas at the same time that he married his daughter to a German immigrant. Nevertheless, when pressed to comply with the Ashkenazi ban on bigamy, Missini refused to assent and remained married to a second wife, according to Romaniote tradition.187 For Missini this was a normal negotiation of legitimate value options, not a contradiction.
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Almost a century and a half after Joseph Missini led the Candiote community, on the Friday in 1546 when Elia Capsali walked home from the ducal palace, it was now Capsali who was in charge—and had been for a number of decades already, since his first stint as condestabulo around 1515. On that afternoon, Elia Capsali entered his sizable yard and passed into his family’s residence compound, where he prepared for the incoming Sabbath. His prosperous family probably owned their own home; most inhabitants of the Judaica rented from rich Jews or from Venetian Christian feudatories.188 But thoughts of business and property could be left for another day. As the sun began to set late on Friday, he gathered with his family for the Day of Rest, prayed the evening service, and, like his ancestors before him and his fellow community members around the neighborhood, enjoyed Sabbath dinner.
Yet the calm communality of this Sabbath-inspired domestic scene veils Elia’s own reality of integration into the wider, non-Jewish society of Crete and beyond. Capsali, like the earlier authors of Taqqanot Qandiya, did not live in isolation. Jewish internal heterogeneity in Candia met a parallel reality of an interdependent wider society across the colonial city. The reality of daily encounters between the city’s Jews and their Latin and Greek coresidents—interactions that were sometimes positive, sometimes not—had been part of Cretan life since before Venetian rule, and they only mounted during the colonial era. Capsali’s ancestor Parnas, among the first signatories of the taqqanot, recognized the reality and necessity of daily commercial exchange, as he and his cohort voted to pass an ordinance against cheating in Jewish-Christian trade. Joseph Missini dealt with Christians at the highest level of government when he traveled on embassy to Venice, but when he returned to Crete, he encountered his Greek Christian neighbors, from whom he had bought his own home. As each man turned inward to lead his community, he simultaneously turned outward, forging enduring associations—commercial, legal, domestic—with Christians on the island they all shared.
Chapter 2
Jewish-Christian
