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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 promising not to sell this type of hide to anyone else.²⁵ 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 СКАЧАТЬ