Relations, Inside and Outside the Jewish Quarter
Although Christians appear throughout Taqqanot Qandiya, one of the very few times in which the Hebrew text collection mentions Greeks specifically can be found among the reforming ordinances of 1363, in a statute that seeks to ensure that wine production complies with the laws of kashrut. Jews did not own the vineyards or presses used in making kosher wine. Instead, they sometimes purchased grapes and rented presses to produce wine for the community and for export elsewhere. But, at least until April 1363, the Jews who supervised wine-pressing in the villages near Candia often did not fulfill the requirements for keeping the drink suitable for Jewish consumption. Rather, claims the taqqanah written that month, they allowed the grapes to run through the pressing system without the proper cleansing process. Moreover, they let non-Jews load grapes into the press, and they did not carefully observe. Some Jews dispatched to oversee wine production did not enter the premises at all, claims the taqqanah, but simply took Gentile-made wine must and claimed it as kosher.
Blame is assigned all around by the taqqanah’s authors. On the one hand, the fault lies with the Jews themselves, labeled teenage ignoramuses, such boors that they “do not know how to pray.” But the ordinance also offers a more sympathetic reading. The main reason that the Jewish men acted negligently resulted from “their fear of the Greeks, who say to the Jews ‘Go away, impure one, they called to them, go away and do not touch.’ ”1 According to the taqqanah, sometimes these verbal attacks on Jews as polluters turned violent, and Jews were banned from even entering into the building in which the wine presses sat. Those sent to guard wine production shirked their duties to the Jewish community in order to avoid being physically assaulted.2
This taqqanah certainly evinces tense and brutal relations between Jews and Christians on Crete and, in particular, between Jews and Greeks. Certainly such violence can be corroborated. Elia Capsali recorded that, probably in the 1530s, a Jew from Canea who had been sent to guard the kashrut of wine had been killed.3 Moreover, the claim that Greeks held the Jewish touch to be polluting was not just a product of Jewish imaginations, despite the use of a biblical verse to paraphrase the verbal attack. Throughout the Byzantine world, Greeks feared Jewish contagion transmitted to food and drink through touch.4 On Crete in particular, a late fourteenth-century Byzantine monk and preacher stoked this contagion anxiety. In addition to concerns over grapes and wine specifically, Crete’s Greeks also did not want Jews manhandling any fresh produce in the marketplace. In the mid-fifteenth century, Venetian authorities on Crete “bowed to Christian, mainly to Greek popular pressure,” legislating when Jews could shop for produce—that is, only when they could be appropriately surveilled.5 Meshullam of Volterra, an Italian Jewish visitor in Candia in 1481, noticed that the social custom banning Jews from touching produce was in full force during his time in the city, even if the law no longer applied.6
In fact, this anxiety was part of a larger fear of Jewish contagion that evolved among Christians in both eastern and western traditions during the Middle Ages. Unease about Jews touching grapes and wine during wine-making was expressed in the Latin west in the early thirteenth century by Pope Innocent III.7 As in the Byzantine sphere, the fear was not limited to wine, as Kenneth Stow has noted: “Laws passed by lay councils in southern France and Perugia in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries prohibited Jews from touching all food in the marketplace and required them to purchase food they did touch.”8 So the Christian fear of Jewish contagion was not solely a product of the Greek world.
Jews likewise utilized a rhetoric of contamination when referring to Christians in the Taqqanot. When Christian artisan apprentices are allowed into Jewish homes, the authors of a taqqanah from 1518 write, “We are all become as one that is unclean, woe to us.”9 By 1363, Gentiles are even conceived of as a force that, when allowed to interact with Jews, debases their very quality: “The Jews have established and accepted upon themselves, upon themselves and upon their descendants, so that they do not fall into [God’s] wrath, to separate Israel from all the nations, so that the most fine gold will not change, and how has it become dim.”10 As Benjamin Arbel has noted, the ordinances on wine—as other taqqanot as well—“reflect a marked interest of the Jewish establishment in preserving segregation between Jews and Christians, an interest shared with the Christian establishment, though for different reasons.”11
Yet these texts themselves also express a more nuanced everyday reality alongside the ideological screen. In the world described in the taqqanot, Jews and Christians relied upon each other economically. Cross-confessional apprenticeships and employment of artisans across religious lines form the backdrop to the ordinances above. In reality, these behaviors were limited, not entirely forbidden. Even when wine produced was not deemed kosher, the authors of the taqqanah authorized the Jewish owners to sell it to a Gentile, not to dump it. Furthermore, it is clear that, at least in the 1360s, when the first ordinance regarding wine production was enunciated, fear of violent Greek winepress workers was not considered significant enough to warrant finding other ways to secure Jewish wine. The authors of the taqqanah from 1363 placed the final onus on Jewish men, exhorting them to do their jobs properly.
There were real tensions between Jews and Christians in Candia. Jews did fall prey to attacks, disenfranchisement, and social prejudice. Concerned with this reality, Taqqanot Qandiya seems to promote self-segregation and locates the Jewish Quarter as the safe space for Jews to remain separate. It also assumes economic trust was hard to come by.
But the texture of Jewish-Christian interaction is necessarily more variegated. Pairing Taqqanot Qandiya with evidence from legal and notarial sources, it is clear that meaningful Jewish-Christian interaction in Candia was quite common and often without violence or tensions. The reality of everyday life for most Jews was not segregation but interaction—both positive and negative—with the city’s Christian residents. Much of this interaction took place because of economic dealings, which were often built on relationships of varying amounts of trust. Trade and production partnerships, loans in money and kind, and the composition of contracts to solemnize these deals brought Christians and Jews, male and female alike, into regular contact across the city of Candia. Moreover, physical separation was never achieved (or, it seems, wholly desired) by focusing Jewish life in the Judaica. Jewish engagement with Christians took place all over the town, including inside the Jewish Quarter and even inside Jewish homes.
Economic Encounters and the Development of Trust
Let us return to Jewish wine, this time to a story told during a Latin inquest found in the ducal court records.12 In 1424, near a Greek nunnery outside the walls of the borgo, a party of five Jews and one Greek Christian were on the road. They had set off together from the Judaica and were traveling to the Christian’s home to collect wine Jews had bought from him. We know nothing about the wine’s production or its kashrut13—only that it had been bought by Joseph Sacerdoto, who along with four other Jews was now traveling alongside the Greek seller.
Just as they left the city, highwaymen attacked. Assaulted, his clothing ripped, fearing for his life, Joseph Sacerdoto struggled off his she-ass and stumbled to the gates of the Monastery of Christ, the Greek convent. Witnessing these events, the nuns chose to save the Jew and close the gates with him safely inside.14 When it was safe to leave, another Christian, a stranger, offered to escort the Jews back to town; the Jews trusted him (ita confisi isti de ipso) and safely followed him back to the road.15 The Greek Christian wine seller, George Turcopulo, had also been attacked by the highwaymen and set off to catch them, in defense of the Jews and their possessions.16 In this harrowing moment, a business relationship had transformed into something else. Turcopulo testified alongside the Jews in the ducal court inquest as they worked to bring the highwaymen to justice and recover their belongings.
None of this behavior on the part of the Christians was given. To be sure, the highwaymen’s
