scholarly tools of postcolonial theory, there is no reason to limit the lines of inquiry about colonial Jews to the modern period.77 Moreover, in discerning the uniqueness of Candia—considering why Jewish behavior, local government, and social reality interacted as they did—I argue that a colonial model best explains the evidence. Colonial justice in Candia, and the society it reflects, may not be wholly other than medieval Iberia or northern Italy, but it is dissimilar enough to help explain why Candiote Jews fared differently than their Spanish or northern Italian counterparts. In short, colonial justice is good to think with, despite any limits we may find in applying such a model.
The social and political realities that obtained on colonial Crete, a setting that necessitated real flexibility of governance to accommodate the varying parties, made the island both squarely part of Christendom, a familiar and well-trodden transfer point for galleys and their crews, and something vaguely other, on the edges of “regular” civilization. That this was a common view becomes clear from a story in Boccaccio’s Decameron in a story from the Fourth Day of his narrative, in which three sisters from Marseille elope to Crete with their lovers, only to find misery and death instead of love and freedom. For wealthy daughters of strict Marseille merchant society, Crete was a haven where they could live openly with their lovers without social repercussion but still reside safely within a familiar social world, going to banquets and meeting other well-bred young people.78 This fictionalized depiction of Crete as a hub of civilization hovering on the frontier of Christendom indeed maps onto the wider narrative of Venetian Crete. A frontier-like flexibility appears repeatedly in writings on Candia, benefiting Jews and others. Like the frontier societies of medieval Iberia, and indeed like the colonial societies of the early modern period, social complexity and distance from the center of power enabled social mores to adapt and empowered individuals to move beyond their assumed statuses.
But Crete was also a place where justice could be redefined and where rules could be bent, for better or worse.79 Boccaccio himself identified justice as a focus of Cretan governmental policy and believed that the island was a place where arrests and trials were common. He also portrayed the duke himself as an individual located at the center of the wheels of justice: empowered to define what constituted justice according to his whims, employing less than moral tactics under the guise of a sort of accommodationist justice (forcing sex on one sister to save another). Indeed, this tension also appears in many of the depictions of Venetian Crete that emerge from the sources. Justice, portrayed as unbending in the political discourse, met up with a different reality on the ground, where it appeared rather malleable. The claim of “justice” was manipulated for individual interest or as a rationale for undermining specific laws in favor of a perceived greater good.
For Boccaccio’s three sisters of Marseille and their lovers, Venice’s malleable “justice” led to their demise—in the narrative logic of the tale, a fair penalty for “the vice of anger.”80 This legal flexibility, however, as we will see, did not always punish those outside the colonial administration but offered particular advantages to other inhabitants of the island—including individual Jews and the Jewish community as a whole. Instead of imposing a uniform law on all subjects, the colonial system of rule in Crete reflected and acknowledged the social diversity of the island, particularly in the division of courts of first instance between Latin and Greek speakers (or between Venetian citizens and Venetian subjects, onto which these language groups mapped) and in its accommodation of local precedents and customary law into its judicial decision making.
Not only was the notion of Venetian justice well known to contemporaries, as the Decameron highlights, but it has also become a central discussion in modern scholarly circles, particularly focusing on notions of justice among the patrician elite in the city of Venice itself. Venice’s emphasis on the tropes of justice and equality, its approach to crime and punishment, and the place of law in its civil life have become a major focus in Venetian historiography, particularly from the fourteenth century.81 These studies tend to focus on criminal law and thus give a particular view of what constituted justice—a justice reflected through incarceration and punishment, in which violence plays a central role. But the rhetorical language of justice and equality also played a significant role in the civil courtrooms of Venice, where justice represented “a resource that could be used by the populace in pursuit of their own strategies.”82 And it played a particularly important role as a colonial tool through which to appease and placate Venetian subjects.
Though some Candiote Jews encountered Venice’s criminal justice system on the island, most Jewish involvement with colonial justice came through the civil court. Thus the particular ways in which justice was interpreted by the judiciary when Jews were involved—including by respecting and incorporating Jewish law into adjudication and providing equal access to the civil courtroom for subjects, Jewish and Orthodox alike—shed new light on the meaning of these concepts so central to Venetian state ideology.
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This study is not intended to be a synthetic account Crete’s medieval Jews. Rather, each chapter offers a new lens onto Jewish life and its relation to the island and the island’s colonial legal system. Chapter 1 introduces the Jews of Candia, their communal structure, and the evolution of the community from the thirteenth century. Chapter 2 looks to quotidian Jewish-Christian relations, considering the role of economics and space in fostering meaningful interactions between these groups. Moving beyond individually driven interactions between Jews and Christians, Chapter 3 considers the role of the state in controlling and fostering Jewish engagement with Christians; influencing and controlling Christian attitudes toward Jews and toward typical anti-Jewish tropes; and in limiting the impact of anti-Jewish claims through the reliance on the Venetian judiciary. Chapter 4 begins a series of three chapters focusing predominantly on Jewish use of colonial justice to dispute against their coreligionists. This chapter asks why the Jews of Crete chose to litigate against each other in secular courts and surveys the general variety of cases that Jews brought against each other. Chapter 5 looks at cases of marital strife in which a spouse (usually the wife) sought redress before the ducal court. Chapter 6 returns to the elite leadership and the ways in which it marshaled Venetian justice, in the process inviting Venetian intervention into the workings of everyday Jewish self-rule.
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In some respects, the Jews of Venetian Crete lived out elements of Boccaccio’s colonial fantasy. They lived in a Mediterranean society that afforded them enough distance from the power center to enjoy a freedom uncommon for medieval Jews. At the same time, Candia was also central enough to access the economic, social, and intellectual currents of the Middle Sea and beyond. This is a tale of the consequences of such a tension, between the center and the periphery, not only in space but in culture and religion. It is also a study of the implications of other familiar tensions: the community and the individual; social pragmatism and religious ideology; political expedience and judicial rigor. But most of all, it is a tale of lives—of individuals, families, and communities—intersecting with each other and with the state in a highly mobile world.
Chapter 1
The Jewish Community of Candia
Late one Friday afternoon in 1546, Elia Capsali—rabbi, historian, and leader of the Jewish community of Candia—walked home from the ducal palace. He had been visiting with his “beloved” friend Carlo Capello, the current duke of Crete.1 As he exited the ducal palace Capsali found himself on the city’s
