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

When the Jew David Rodhothi was hired to stretch hides by the Christian Leonardo Dragumano of the village of Selopulo for payment of six measures of wheat flour, David simultaneously gave Leonardo an interest-free loan.²⁶ Although the layers of relations and agreements that undergirded this reciprocity remain opaque, such mutual reliance betrays a different sort of relationship than either transaction might suggest alone. While David would be Leonardo’s creditor, he was also his hired help, perhaps balancing the power dynamic that either act might produce individually. Christians and Jews also depended on each other to provide other sorts of confirmations and support: a Jew named Moses was called as a witness for the defense in a case against the Christian Nicolas Serigo, who was accused of cheating a business partner out of the profits from their salted fish scheme.²⁷

      David Jacoby was certainly correct in his assertion that “joint business ventures between Jews and Christians were common at various levels of society” in Crete.²⁸ As Ricardo Court has noted, “The joint venture … was itself a bulwark of trust.”²⁹ The long-term goal of common profit encouraged both sides to work together earnestly and energetically. This notion of “trust” has recently come under the lens of a number of scholars considering the meaning of cross-confessional business relationships. While conventional wisdom has long held that premodern businessmen preferred to employ relatives, whose commonalities and kinship ties would ensure successful cooperation, a number of scholars have pointed out the problems with such assumptions. As Court has noted, kinship was “not the best basis for a business relationship” even in the premodern period because of the messy problems of disentangling oneself from the relative in case of problems; firing a relative is rarely good for family harmony.³⁰ Likewise, the Sephardi Jews of Francesca Trivellato’s The Familiarity of Strangers sometimes chose Sephardi non-relatives over relatives who lived in northern Europe; they also sometimes preferred to trade with Christians and Hindus, building relationships over time and across vast swaths of the planet, despite religious, ethnic, and cultural differences.³¹ They made this work through a “creative combination” of strategies, including “group discipline, contractual obligations, customary norms, political protection, and discursive conventions.”³²

      Candiote Jews used these same strategies to build lasting relationships with their non-Jewish business partners. Successful joint ventures, even when strictly limited to the realm of the professional, called for trust, a level of mutual confidence that fostered a sense of connection. Such trust can be both reflective of the circumstances that empowered the professional venture to be built in the first place—the sociocultural environment of colonial Candia—and generative of a furthered trusting relationship that moved beyond the professional under certain conditions.³³

       Complicating the Creditor-Debtor Relationship

      Many Jewish men and women in Candia acted as moneylenders and pawnbrokers, whether on a small or large scale. Although regular business dealings often cultivated goodwill between Jews and Christians, a common notion holds that the limit of Jewish-Christian economic trust stood fixed at the boundary between business and moneylending—that famed locus of enmity between Jews and Christians in Latin Christendom.³⁴ This tension can certainly be found in medieval Crete, when Christian debtors occasionally if vociferously sought freedom from supposedly unfair debt they owed to Jewish creditors.

      Nevertheless, loan contracts from the notarial registers reveal that even moneylending relationships could be more complex than a simple opposition between a Jewish lender and his Christian debtor. The loans often hide partnership considerations 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