of the Venetian empire, their lives were also intertwined with the institutions of the colonial society. But the conventional view of colonial institutions as tools for subjugation and control cannot fully describe how they functioned in the lives of Venice’s colonial subjects. In Crete, Jewish subjects harnessed some colonial institutions and maneuvered through them for their own benefit and interests. Most importantly, regular litigation by Jews against other Jews in these Venetian courts became a primary outlet for the airing of intracommunal and interpersonal disputes. Knowledge of Crete’s colonial justice system, and the malleability of the system itself, allowed this secular court to become a key venue for Jews—male and female alike—both to articulate personal identity and to work the system for their own, individual benefit.
This book tells the story of Jewish individuals and families on Crete as they engaged with their various social and legal networks, within and beyond the Jewish community. It focuses primarily on the century between the Black Death (1348) and the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks (1453). These events, which reshaped the contours of the Jewish community on Candia as they shaped Cretan society more broadly, bookend a period of relative peace. This allows us to witness Jews making daily choices without external threats of war or famine. To be precise, peace reigned from the end of the St. Tito revolt in 1363–64, though I have decided to begin my investigation a bit earlier so as to track more closely with the dating of the sources I use.11 With the fall of Constantinople came an influx of Greek refugees into Crete, and a drastic uptick in Greek anxiety, which manifested in the form of a rebellion, the so-called Siphi Vlastos conspiracy of 1453–54, and others in its wake. At least in the short term, this event changed Venetian policies toward Greek subjects and Orthodoxy in Crete, ending the century of relative quiet.12 Comprehensive analysis, however, also requires some consideration of Jewish life in the beginning of Venetian rule in the early thirteenth century and its state of affairs in the sixteenth century.
Two overarching claims about Jewish life in Candia during this period are made in this study. The first is that the Jews of Candia encountered and engaged with Latin and Greek Christians not simply out of necessity or as a result of the vicissitudes of daily life, although these certainly played a role. Rather, Jews chose to participate in meaningful encounters through professional channels and legal engagement with Venice’s secular judiciary. This behavior was fostered, even if inadvertently, by Crete’s colonial government, which saw in the island’s Jews a relatively safe ally and buffer against the less conciliatory Greek Orthodox population. Venice’s strategy of colonial appeasement in Crete thus gave local Jews social leeway and legal opportunity that were often unavailable to Jews elsewhere at the time.
The second argument addresses the implications of such engaged interaction: that sustained encounter did not happen only at the fringes of Jewish society and that it left a decided and visible mark on the internal community. Engagement with Christians and with Venetian institutions—above all, the colonial justice system, and particularly in contexts of intra-Jewish litigation—influenced, shaped, and changed the Jewish community of Candia, allowing it to function as a traditional Jewish community without many of the anxieties and reservations of other medieval Jewish communities.
These two arguments are inextricably connected. That is to say, the internal relations of the community as negotiated in the colonial courtroom must be viewed in conjunction with the networks of which these Jews were a part. This interdependence explains why the Jews of Crete chose to behave in a fashion decidedly at odds with traditional understandings of rabbinic ideals, which dictated that all intra-Jewish disputes must be addressed within the confines of the Jewish community. In particular, the beit din, or Jewish court, was supposed to decide matters of Jewish concern. But Candiote Jews often chose to reject this directive, in part because of their relationships with people and governing entities outside the bounds of the local Jewish community. These relations were not simply pragmatic and temporary. They shaped the nature and the experience of the individual Jews who made up the community. The decisions made by these Jews then affected the nature of the Jewish community writ large.
Sources of Jewish History on Crete
The Jews who made up the kehillah kedoshah—the “holy community,” as the Jewish corporate structure called itself—of Venetian Candia (modern Iraklion) during the late Middle Ages were mostly Greek speakers hailing originally from the Byzantine sphere. The community’s story has been only infrequently and incompletely told.13 Moreover, the story of Crete’s Jewish individuals remains untold, and this book tells that tale by bringing to life Cretan Jews by looking at their interaction with Venetian colonial justice. The portrait of Jewish life drawn here looks quite different than those typically recounted about the Middle Ages. Though Jewish sources have traditionally portrayed Jews as isolated, self-segregating groups, living almost accidentally within a given sovereign society, medieval communities were often engaged in the wider societies that encompassed them. The Jews of Venetian Candia actively enmeshed themselves in the concentric social spheres of the colonial capital and beyond. They were very involved in the life of the city, both in its capacity as a site of a great deal of formal business and more casually as a hub of other sorts of quotidian interaction. Jews regularly interacted with the Latin-rite (Catholic) Venetians and Greek-rite (Orthodox) native Cretans who lived alongside them.
The fact that this book focuses on the Venetian colonial judiciary as a central institution in the lives of Crete’s Jews stems in significant part from the exceptionally large collection of ducal court records that survived the Ottoman takeover of Crete in 1669.14 These court records are housed today in Venice’s Archivio di Stato, collected as part of the Duca di Candia series. This study relies on both the records of sentences meted out (Sentenze Civili) and long-form records of cases (Memoriali).15 Jews appear in a considerable number of these records, acting as litigants, defendants, witnesses, and in other capacities, including agents, executors of wills, and medical patients. Beyond the legal context, references to Jews as neighbors, relatives, orphans, or guardians offer even more information about the Jewish community. Though the judicial records are a rich source, this study is the first to thoroughly address their Jewish-related content.
This book’s emphasis on the justice system, however, does not stem solely from the wealth of evidence but also from the real importance of courts in medieval Mediterranean life. Litigation was a far more common activity in the late Middle Ages than it is today, and many more people were likely to be swept up in late medieval court proceedings than in modern cases. Litigation thus offers us access to a broader cross section of Candiote Jewish society than is initially apparent. Moreover, emphasis on litigation also engages with the Venetian state’s own concern with “justice” as a primary ideological principle through which it ruled in both colonial and metropolitan settings. The world of litigation, legal recourse, and other modes of “justice” formed an essential building block in the development of the Venetian empire and its political philosophy. By asking how Jews fit into this picture of justice and judicial life, then, this study contributes not only to debates over Jewish life but also to considerations of the broader Venetian Mediterranean and medieval empires.
Ducal court records are not the only source available for an investigation of the Jews of Venetian Crete. There are other surviving Latin materials marshaled in this study. Notarial acts form one of these source bases. The Venetian bureaucratic engine was one of the most prolific record keepers of the premodern world. Crete’s thriving markets seem to have been constantly abuzz. Perhaps because any business deal could end up as a legal battle, residents of Candia patronized the city’s many notaries, men who had the technical skills and legal know-how to draw up binding contracts that would hold up in court. Though Greek and Hebrew notaries were active in Candia as well, Venice’s official notaries wrote in Latin, and it is almost solely these Latin registers from the capital that survive in the archival series called Notai di Candia.16
Business was brisk for these men: for the fourteenth century, the registers of forty-seven notaries survive; in the fifteenth century, forty-one notaries’ materials have endured through war, water, book-boring worms, and time.17 The systematic
