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

for Jews in the Judaica’s streets and public squares—such as a Christian seller of dairy products (probably from a surrounding village) whose goods were deemed insufficiently kosher for Rabbi Meir Ashkenazi, who ordered the man’s milk to be dumped.⁹²

      Despite the negative valence of a malicious and fraudulent Christian food seller assumed by this tale of the dumped milk, proudly recorded by leaders asserting their right to control foodstuffs within the walls of their domain, Jews actually brought Christians into their very homes inside the Judaica for economic and professional purposes—even at the behest of the very same leaders.⁹³ Indeed, such evidence comes directly from Taqqanot Qandiya itself. An ordinance from 1363 instructed that, although it was preferable for Jewish tailors to sew clothing for members of the community, should a Jew need to hire a Christian tailor, he was permitted to do so—on the Jew’s turf. The Jew “should bring him [the Christian tailor] into the Jewish home, and he should sew for him on Jewish property” in order to assure that the tailor would not transgress the biblical prohibition against mixing wool and linen in one garment, a combination known as sha’atnez.⁹⁴

      Although in this ordinance the Jewish leadership sought to limit the entrance of Christian artisans into Jewish homes, a later taqqanah indicates the flock did not limit Christian access as the rabbis had dictated. In 1518, the Jewish leadership wrote that some Jewish artisans, specifically tailors and cobblers, were regularly bringing Christian apprentices into their homes.⁹⁵ Unsurprisingly, the Jewish leadership reacted to this practice with horror. Not only does such behavior make the Jews “impure,” they wrote, but such interaction inside the home defied Venetian law. Though the reasons to forbid Christians in Jewish homes were “too many too count,” the authors nonetheless chose to recount a few: “The teenage boys of Israel will follow along after them in their deeds and in their habits, and they will mix in with the goyim and they will learn their deeds.” Moreover, they wrote, the Jewish masters should be forbidden to bring in apprentices “because of their wives and their daughters.”⁹⁶

      The authors of this ordinance, particularly the current leader Rabbi Elia Capsali, worked hard to make this seem like an atypical and perhaps new activity. Nevertheless, the threat warranted its own community-wide decree. In fact, it is likely that a significant number of young Christian men would come to the homes and workshops of Jewish artisans every day, perhaps even staying overnight and being fed and clothed by the Jewish master, like apprentices in Christian settings. This behavior was not new; a notarial contract from 1338 shows a Jewish weaver hiring two Latin assistants for an entire year to help him finish woolen cloth.⁹⁷ These apprentices were obviously not walled off from the artisans’ Jewish families but instead interacted with both the male and female family members in a way deemed seriously worrisome by the Jewish authorities, but apparently less concerning to the Jews who hired them.