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

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 behavior perhaps surprises us least. Beyond attacking the party, they used an epithet known as an insult often leveled against Jews. Attempting to unsettle their targets, they shouted at Joseph and the Jews with him calling them “dogs.”¹⁷ But the behavior of those whose kindness was instinctive and, later, considered seems more unexpected. The Greek nuns, liable to be most influenced by claims of monks such as the one who preached against Jewish contagion through touch, let Jews into their hallowed ground without hesitation. Other Christians stepped up, and the Jews trusted them with their safety. More generally, the event itself was precipitated by another act of trust—that is to say, the agreement of Jews and a Greek Christian to engage in business dealings, an act that aimed to bring the mixed group from the Jewish space of the Judaica to the Greek man’s home.

      This is not a lone case of Jews and Christians trusting one another. There are a host of such instances, and they are best seen not in moments of crisis but rather in the kinds of considered economic relationships intentionally built by Jews, Latins, and Greeks in Crete. The island’s notarial records provide evidence of regular business deals between Jews and Christians from the thirteenth century on. Among the sorts of transactions that took place across the religious divide were: loans given and repaid; goods including cloth, hides, precious metals, wood, spices, furniture, and foodstuffs bought and sold; houses and apartments rented and sold; confirmation of investments of capital and their repayments; contracts for short-term hires and apprenticeships; and hiring of doctors and healers for medical treatment.

      Some Jews trusted Latins. When the late thirteenth-century Jew Elia, known as Sapiens, needed to have substantial cash, plus gold, silver, books, and other costly items delivered to his son Samaria, living in Negroponte, he entrusted the valuables to his agents: two Latin noblemen.¹⁸ Some Greeks trusted Jews with their property. The Jew Leone Thiadus acted as an estate steward (yconomos) for the elite Greek Andrea Kalergi and was named as such in a proclamation from 1325.¹⁹ This is not the only time the Kalergi family relied on Jews to deal with their real estate and other affairs. The Candiote Jewish businessman Liacho Mavristiri acted as procurator for the Kalergi family in the 1350s.²⁰ A decade earlier Mavristiri had proven his loyalty by helping the Greek archon Alexios Kalergi (illegally) purchase a feudal holding supposedly reserved for Latin nobles; Mavristiri made significant profit, Kalergi got his cavalleria, and the trust between the two was sealed.²¹ As this suggests, Jews and Christians—Greek and Latin both—relied on each other in professional capacities to deal with their possessions with fidelity and honesty, even if the deal itself smacked of the illicit.

      Not only trusted to work as each other’s employees or agents, Jews and Christians at times became partners in a range of professional capacities and business ventures. Such cooperation took place across the socioeconomic strata of Candia. A Candiote Jew and a Christian co-owned a small ship in the 1350s. A Latin and a Jew paired as legal advisors to a Jewish woman in the next decade. Two masons, one Jew and one Christian, contracted to work together to repair a Jewish physician’s cistern in 1420.²²

      Sometimes the equal nature of the partnership was specified in the very terms of the surviving act. Sambatheus, son of the late Vlimidi, a Candiote Jew, in 1303 made a partnership agreement known as a societas with the Christian Victor Paulo to buy, store, and sell wine at profit. Paulo was responsible for investing a hundred hyperpera to buy the must; Sambatheus had to convey and store it, giving an extra key to the warehouse to Paulo. All profits were meant to be divided equally.²³ In other cases, the language of partnership is less clear-cut, but the content of an act reflects a form of partnership. When Jewish Michael Carvuni gave an interest-free loan of ten hyperpera to the Christian Petrus Clarenvianus a decade after the Black Death, it actually was an investment in a joint partnership. Carvuni supplied the money, Petrus produced “Jewish wine” to sell in Candia’s Judaica, and they split any profit beyond the original investment.²⁴ This is but one example reflecting the ubiquity of Jewish-Christian deals for the production of wine. Whether the wine was considered kosher by Jewish standards is not addressed; it could be that Jews helped produce it, and Sambatheus’s role as conveyer and warehouser of the wine could potentially align with kosher rules. But in any case, at least at this level of commercial relations, this looks quite different than the world of violence described in Taqqanot Qandiya.

      The reciprocal nature of these economic relationships reveals itself in interesting ways. When Jeremiah Nomico, a Jew, bought a hundred hides from the Candiote Christian butcher Raynerius in 1271, the latter was willing to give Nomico a monopoly on this commodity, contractually