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

disagreements to synagogue crises) and the arguments made by Jews in the course of their suits (often marshaling Jewish, religious discourse deciphered and reframed for non-Jewish consumption), modern readers may imagine themselves present in the courtroom, hearing how individuals thought of the intersection of Jewish law and Jewish life, religious and secular interests, and how they crafted their own narratives for an outsider audience.

      Through the pen of the courtroom notary, these Jews cease to be caricatures of rabbinic discourse. Indeed, intentional anonymity often renders Jews mentioned in responsa as nebulous “Reubens” and “Simeons,” the medieval equivalents of the modern “John Doe.” Seen through Venetian legal sources, Crete’s Jews are revealed as three-dimensional individuals with competing values and complex social associations. Nevertheless, the image that develops from these sources is not one in which Jewish individualism exists wholly separately from Jewish communal membership. Rather, a major facet of Jewish choice related to the ways in which a Jew situated him- or herself in the community structure. In other words, for some Jews, the courtroom became a place in which they could express their own views on Jewish law and custom—not outside the frame of Judaism but with an eye toward their own agency within the religion. This helps explain why even the leaders of Candia’s Jewish community saw in the secular courtroom an effective venue for resolving Jewish communal disputes and did not see that strategy as a repudiation of their communal responsibilities. In fact, at times, Jewish elites came to the Venetian courtroom to force their coreligionists to uphold the tenets to which their religious community was supposed to adhere. Likewise, Jewish women trapped in unhappy marriages did not use the secular court system to undermine Jewish marriage but to find workarounds that enabled them to stay faithful to Jewish law (oftentimes pushing for their own definitions of Jewish law) while also freeing themselves from marital misery and economic subservience.

      As this discussion of unhappy wives suggests, a critical benefit of singling out personal choice, and particularly the ways that individuals used the secular judiciary, resides in what it reveals about Jewish women. Medieval rabbinic texts tend to assign Jewish women discrete, polarized identities as either “good” or “bad.” Responsa categorize women according to male, rabbinic concerns and offer moral judgments on them, based on whether the rabbinic sources approved of their behavior.³⁴ Recent scholarship on premodern Jewish women has illustrated that once they are considered outside the frame of rabbinical texts, women appear in the public sphere engaging in a variety of public and professional activities, not only with other women but also with men unrelated to them, Jewish and Christian alike.³⁵ This study takes seriously the notion of Jewish women as agents of their own lives, both figuratively—as deciders in their own lives—and literally, as self-representing figures in secular courts, as well as economic actors functioning outside the purview of their fathers and husbands.³⁶ The Jewish women of Candia certainly often married according to their parents’ wishes and lived within the communal confines of the kehillah. Within these contexts, however, women in professional and public capacities made decisions for themselves without constant requests for permission of fathers or husbands; and they publicly asserted their own understanding of their identities as females and Jews. The secular judiciary, and its common use by Jews, provided for Jewish women a venue for expressing individual agency, as it did for Jewish men.

      To be sure, the history of Jewish-Christian relations must not be seen through rose-colored glasses. Cretan Jewish life during the century from the Black Death to the conquest of Constantinople was marked by some dark moments, including a massacre of Jews in the fortress town of Castronovo by rebels during the St. Tito revolt in 1364.³⁷ Residential confinement in the Judaica, a precursor to the ghetto though never with gates or locks, emerged in stages over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Anti-Jewish rhetoric appears in many official sources. A claim of Jews crucifying a lamb around Easter time led to the arrest of nine elite Jews, and the death of two, in the early 1450s, a case addressed in Chapter 3. This study aims not to disregard crisis but to contextualize it and to underscore the space between moments of trauma.³⁸

      Taken as a whole, the history of Jewish life on Venetian Crete represents a successful experiment, in comparison with the broad, mounting anti-Judaism that characterized much of western Europe in this period. It contrasts even with Venice itself. Jews settled without barrier in Venetian Crete, but, except for fifteen years in the late fourteenth century, they were prohibited from living as a community in the Venetian metropole. In that short intervening period, Venice needed moneylenders for its war effort, and thus Jews were allowed to settle. Once the loan crisis was over, and as anti-Jewish enmity rose, Jews were forced to leave in 1395.³⁹ In the early sixteenth century, when Jews once again sought refuge from war in Venice, the government discovered it needed them as a source of revenue and as pawnbrokers. Unable to live with or without them, in 1516 Venice compromised by forcing the Jews into the neighborhood known as the Ghetto, originally a place for casting cannon (in Venetian dialect, ghettare) but soon an epithet that became a synonym for merciless segregation.⁴⁰

      Crete was different. For Jews from Germany, Iberia, France, and elsewhere, Crete was known as a haven and became a stable locus of immigration throughout this period. Jews from across western Europe and the Levant trusted that Venetian justice would serve them and their families. As a result, they not only moved to Crete but also involved themselves in the civil systems (including the judiciary) of the island. In many states across medieval Christendom, including in Crete, Christians doubtlessly mistrusted religious difference and regarded it as diabolical, the target of morally and religiously justifiable violence. As such, the ability of medieval Jews to benefit from a justice system that limited the effects of this ideology of intolerance is worthy of emphasis.

      Individuals and Community

      The reality of meaningful interaction between Jews and Christians does not mean that either side thought of itself as losing its essential identifying markers, particularly religious identity. But religion was not the exclusive marker of identity.⁴¹ Undoubtedly both social reality and colonial law stratified Jews, Greeks, and Latins on Crete according to religious identities. Yet evidence from Crete demonstrates the importance of other axes of identity.⁴² Some key markers existed outside the frame of religion: language group, professional affiliation, gender, and socioeconomic status. Some constituted subcategories within the frame of religion: identification with Ashkenazi (northern European), Sephardi (Iberian), and Romaniote (Byzantine) ideas and origins. These other markers were important identifiers both for Jews who possessed them and for the Christians and Jews with whom they interacted.

      Crete’s Jews also acted in the service of their personal identities. In the colonial courtroom, Candiote Jews made choices based on a sense of their own ability to decipher religiolegal concepts without consulting supposed “experts,” argued for their rights as Jews and persons, and even prized their own concerns over the needs of the community. This reality of individuals shaping their identities, making choices, and exerting agency over their own decision-making processes breaks down another untenable generalization about the Jews of medieval Christendom: that premodern Jews were tradition bound and community oriented above all other values.⁴³ The evidence for the Jews of Candia suggests a different picture: an evolving relationship with Christian sovereigns and Venetian colonial law provided for individual Jews a space in which they articulated choices not squarely in line with the dictates of the community, even as they stayed tied to the corporate system of the kehillah and remained dedicated to Jewish law and custom.

      The individuality of Candiote Jews becomes more meaningful when considering the broad heterogeneity of the community. On one hand, this complexity stemmed from the ethnic origins of community members. Candiote Jewry was made up of Romaniote (Byzantine) Jews of Greek origin but also newer immigrants from Iberia, Germany, and elsewhere whose arrival (especially in the decades after the advent of the Black Death and the 1391 massacres in Iberia) sparked new challenges and tensions related to Jewish law, social mores, and communal association. This study examines the difficulties inherent in a heterogeneously constructed minority community, something often considered only for communities changed by the Spanish expulsion.⁴⁴ In addition, the Candiote community was made up of individuals and families from vastly different socioeconomic