Colonial Justice and the Jews of Venetian Crete. Rena N. Lauer

brought practical skills and knowledge, and (at least, ideally) contributed to the Jewish tax once they had set up in business. Naturally they arrived in Candia with their own experience of Jewish rite and tradition, as well as their own approaches to Jewish law. On one hand, the Jewish hierarchy demanded adherence to local Jewish custom from newcomers, a theme that sounds throughout Taqqanot Qandiya. At the same time, newcomers worked their way into the Jewish leadership hierarchy and into the tight cohort of Jewish elite families who had traded power among themselves for generations.

      But some Jews caused the Jewish leadership a sense of anxiety. Only three times in Taqqanot Qandiya are wrongdoers identified by name, and in each case, they are outsiders. “A Sephardi Jew, and his name is Abraham Tofer [i.e., the tailor],” provoked a 1439 ordinance demanding all marriages take place before ten witnesses.¹⁶¹ The ordinance not only stresses improper marital behavior but highlights the individual and, even more so, his Spanish origin. Likewise, when a rumor spread that Candiote women were promiscuous, the taqqanah targeted a specific man, “the Sicilian, Shalom.”¹⁶² In 1531, when another Jew libeled the reputation of Candiote Jewish women, the taqqanah identified him as “Judah Kirkus … who came to live in our land” from Egypt.¹⁶³ It was outsiders—Jews, but outsiders and newcomers nonetheless—who were presumed to threaten the reputation and sanctity of the Candiote community.

      To be sure, blaming reprehensible behavior on newcomers was not confined to these specific instances. Elia Capsali, among others, engaged in this practice. Writing in the 1530s about a practice he despised—selling certain honors on the holiday of Simhat Torah instead of awarding them to learned and pious men—he blamed the behavior on “new people who have recently come, whom your ancestors could not have imagined” (an expression he borrowed from Deuteronomy 32:17). Later he complained of “immigrants [gerim] from a far land” who thought they could purchase themselves good reputations.¹⁶⁴

      Remarkably, the most egregious Jews, from the perspective of Taqqanot Qandiya, were outsiders but still residents of Crete—in particular, the Jews of the fortress town of Castronovo. Jews from this nearby community sparked long-lasting anxiety among the pious leadership. Two statutes from 1363 offer a clear set of complaints against them. Castronovo’s Jews sold supposedly kosher meat that could not actually be trusted; their dairy products were equally suspect.¹⁶⁵ Such behavior touching on both religion and the economy was deemed “evil,” and the rabbis feared that Castronovo’s Jews would act “in secret” to trick Candiote Jews into eating impure foods.¹⁶⁶ Only if their cheeses were officially certified could Jews from Castronovo sell to their coreligionists in the city. The spatial rhetoric that divides “us vs. them” is striking: the Castronovans and their ilk are “outside of our community” (mi-hutzah le-kehilateinu), in contrast to Candiote Jews, who are “men of our place” (anshei mekomeinu).

      To be sure, rabbinic attitudes likely did not align with those of the common flock. Not all Jews saw their coreligionists in Castronovo as beyond the pale; some were eager to buy their unapproved foodstuffs—a fact that sparked the taqqanah in the first place. Likewise, some Candiote Jews were pleased to marry their children to Jews from Castronovo, as Solomon Torchidi did in 1451 when he betrothed his son to an affluent girl from Castronovo.¹⁶⁷ In general, though, for the authors of the taqqanot, these Jews were regarded as problematic and had to be carefully watched.

      The key issue was control: the Candiote rabbis wanted to take charge of ensuring the kashrut of the Judaica’s food, while Castronovo’s Jews—and likely its own leaders—judged themselves perfectly capable of producing fare without the imposition of the capital’s rabbis. This tension over control came up again in 1567, when the Candiote leadership reacted with horror that the local religious leadership in Castronovo excommunicated a member of the community. In a letter recorded among the taqqanot, the Candiote leadership reminded the Jews of Castronovo that only Candia’s rabbis had that right—bestowed on them by Venice itself, they claimed—and that their behavior, if continued, would provoke a wholesale excommunication of Castronovo’s Jews by the Candiote kehillah.¹⁶⁸

      A well-known mid-fifteenth-century 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.