that go beyond what appears on the surface. As in the case above in which a Jew’s loan to a Christian actually hid a deal to produce Jewish wine for the Candiote market, many transactions that appear to be loans are actually investments in larger ventures. Sometimes so-called loans are a convenient if unbalanced investment in futures, such as when a Jewish lender advanced a loan in the form of an amount of wheat (or wine), with the proviso that the borrower will repay the loan in new wheat at the beginning of the next harvest season. This may illuminate the practice, surprisingly common among Candiote Jewish creditors, of giving Christians interest-free, unsecured loans in the form of both goods and cash.35 Instead of typical loan acts, these are best understood as a proxy mechanism of joint venture or futures sale. Most significantly, this type of transaction must have involved a significant amount of trust between parties.
Economic trust was not only incumbent on Jewish lenders. Rosters of negligent Candiote debtors do not list only Christians who owed money to Jews. Instead, we see a far more complex situation in which Jewish men and women acted both as creditors and as debtors to Christians. While listed debtors apparently did not deserve the trust that had been placed on them (since they had defaulted), some Jews were trusted enough to have received interest-free loans from Christians, as did the Jew Elia from the Christian Leonardo de Bonhomo in the thirteenth century.36
The existence of cross-confessional trust is readily apparent when Jews and Christians were not on opposite sides of the broker’s table. In Candia’s culture of moneylending, Jews and Christians sometimes acted as each other’s loan guarantors, such as when the Jewish Joste (Joseph) Adamero acted as guarantor (plecius) for the Greek cobbler Alexius Stavrachi, who received an interest-free loan of six and a half hyperpera from the Jewish moneylender David Angura.37 Over the course of at least eighteen years, the Jewish businesswoman Cherana, daughter of Abraham (Cherana tu Avracha), borrowed money with, guaranteed loans for, and had as guarantors two Greek sisters, Hergina Pantaleo and Petrucia Steno, both widows of elite men.38 The three women even found themselves mounting a defense together (albeit unsuccessfully) in the Curia Prosoporum, the court of first instance for Greeks and Jews, when they were sued by a creditor.39 This enduring partnership suggests that these women were in business together, ventures most likely based on deep-seated trust developed over time.
Jewish moneylending, as William Chester Jordan has explained it, became the focus of great enmity in the Middle Ages because it created an “unnatural aspect of dependency,” an upending of what Christians saw to be the proper hierarchical balance between them and Jews.40 Jewish loans to Christian debtors undoubtedly sparked anger and hatred. Yet not all moneylending produced these results. Evidence for wider use of loans as proxies for other sorts of transactions, especially when these “loans” involved significant amounts of money or goods, presses for a reconsideration of the broader category of moneylending. Likewise, as in the case of Cherana tu Avracha and her Christian partners, if one side of the creditor/debtor divide contained members from multiple religious communities, any lender/borrower discord springing from the loan cannot be seen simply as a product of religious tension.41
These kinds of partnerships in Candia’s lending marketplace offer a prime example of the ways in which allegiance to religion-based segregative dichotomies found in the official documentation conceals the complexity of interactions fostered by Venice’s credit economy. Moreover, as opposed to other Christian governments facing the challenge of intrareligious economic interaction, the Venetian government in Crete allowed for, or at least assumed, the possibility of economic trust across confessional lines, at least regarding loan-making. By the mid-thirteenth century, the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem expressly forbade the use of guarantors who were not of the same religious community as the borrower; no such limits existed in Crete.42 While Latin sources, inflected with ecclesiastical ideology about usury and filthy lucre, portray a strict bifurcation between Jewish creditors and Christian lenders, the reality—both in terms of the choices made by lenders and borrowers and in terms of the legal messages signaled more subtly by the government—was far more complicated and sometimes even far from contentious.
Mistrust and Tension in Jewish-Christian Business Relations
To be sure, examples of trusting professional relationships do not undermine the reality that numerous professional relationships were not nearly so felicitous—and that this sort of economic tension provoked anxiety among the leaders of the Jewish community. In the first centuries of Venetian rule on Crete, the authors of Taqqanot Qandiya feared that Candiote Jews were cheating Christians in business, ostensibly because they were Gentiles. In the first set of taqqanot from 1228, the third ordinance forbids swindling Christian business partners, whether through actual theft or through what is known as geneivat da’at, “theft of knowledge”—that is, tricking them, likely about the value of an object or transaction.43 The authors highlight the effect of such behavior: it ruins the reputations of Jews, causing a hilul hashem, literally “desecration of God’s name.” In the revisions of the same ordinances rewritten by Rabbi Tzedakah from sometime the next century, this ordinance remains, although it simply reads: “No one is allowed to lie to the goyim or to trick them [lignov da’atam], whether in what Jews buy from them, or in what Jews sell to them.” Once again the audience is reminded that such behavior ruins the Jewish reputation among Gentiles.44
But by the year of reforms in 1363, the problem of dishonest merchants had evidently become more worrisome. Fraudulent business dealings are the target of two ordinances. One outlaws the use of dishonest weights and measures to make more profit. The decree, however, makes no specific reference to Christians and indeed points to the victims of dishonest merchants as mostly Jews. Punishment for this behavior is a complete excommunication.45
A second taqqanah directly addresses the cross-confessional crisis and its seriousness. Although this taqqanah is labeled “Fence not to buy anything from the male slaves and female slaves of the Gentiles,” it is actually a decree forbidding Jews from buying goods from or selling goods to anyone, though especially from/to unfree or free servants of non-Jews—or “even from a Jew”—for less than they are worth.46 The taqqanah lists the sorts of goods at issue: silver, gold, bronze, iron, ore, tin, clothing, leather goods, pearls, precious gems (particularly garnet, sapphire, and diamond), silk, linen, wool, “or anything worth three grossi or more.” Strikingly, the implications of such cheating were deemed so grave that the taqqanah ordered the condestabulo to hand the guilty party over to the Venetian government. If the condestabulo refused, the council of seven “good men” was obligated to publicly rebuke him for his negligence. The staunch prohibitions against mesirah or malshinut, informing on a Jew to the secular authorities, were thus suspended.47
The anxiety of the authors of the taqqanot should not necessarily be seen as evidence of rampant cheating of Christians by Jews but rather as a sense of the truly grim ill effects they believed even minimal cheating would have on the reputation (and perhaps safety) of the Jews of Candia. Moreover, even though the Jewish leadership feared that Jews were cheating Christians and coreligionists alike, it was still not only Jews who were suspect. In 1304, Zagha, son of the late Solomon, a Jew, bought a millaria (one thousand pounds) of “good Cretan cheese” from Bartholomeus Karavelo, a Candiote Christian. Their contract suggests that Zagha did not trust his supplier: “and I [Bartholomeus],” reads the act, “have to weigh and give you this [cheese] for you with your scales.” Zagha apparently suspected Karavelo not only of skimping on his hefty millaria but of weighing the cheese with deliberately skewed instruments.48
This sort of proviso was meant to avoid litigation, but it was not always successful. A business agreement made in 1398 by the Latin nobleman Ser Amocatus Geno and the wealthy Jew Protho Spathael exploded into litigation that worked itself all the way to the ducal court over a handful of years. Although a lower court found in favor of Spathael, the highest court found for the Latin Geno and stripped the Jewish litigant of all profits from their undertaking. The
