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

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      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 backgrounds, including merchants and tanners, doctors and servants, grocers and masons, cobblers and scribes, teachers and tailors. Though poorer individuals are less visible in the sources, echoes in Taqqanot Qandiya hint that they too engaged in behavior of which the (generally wealthy) leaders did not approve, from choosing affordable food with questionable kashrut to engaging in prostitution.

      The individualism and heterogeneity of the Jewish community of Candia call for a reappraisal of the perception of the medieval Jewish community organ as a unified, semiautonomous structure that used its limited corporate powers to build a defensive bulwark between the community and the outside world.⁴⁵ When evidence suggests otherwise, scholars tend to interpret that reality in quasi-religious terms. As Elka Klein noted, “Jewish autonomy tends to be studied in the context of halakhic theory and the degree to which practice fell short of it.”⁴⁶ But this supposed boundary between permitted and forbidden behaviors was not nearly so fixed in Candia’s kehillah. Not only did regular Jews choose to bypass the kehillah in making major decisions, but the leaders of the community drew the sovereign government into communal decisions that were legally within the kehillah’s purview according to Venice’s own rules. The Venetian government considered the Jews as a singular universitas, but the Jews did not necessarily always see things the same way.⁴⁷

      By focusing on the importance of individuals and their choices, this study intervenes in a scholarly conversation that extends beyond Jews. If we are all intellectual heirs of James Harvey Robinson, E. H. Carr, and their revolutionary rejections of Great Man History, simultaneously we ought not throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, resigning ourselves to quantitative conclusions and tales in the aggregate.⁴⁸ For the individual tales of humans living ordinary lives with perhaps extraordinary or at least unexpected moments, the microhistorical approach to history reminds us that the daily habits of regular humans are the building blocks of the premodern world we historians are trying to reconstruct.

      Venice, Crete, and the World of the Late Medieval Eastern Mediterranean

      While this study homes in on the Jewish community of Candia, its implications extend beyond the study of medieval Jews and contribute to scholarly understandings of the broader world in which these Jews lived—that is, the social, political, and cultural spheres of the Venetian eastern Mediterranean in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade. A tale of Jews in the Venetian empire contributes to our understanding of the Venetian project from a fresh perspective. It is to this context that I now turn with some background to the Venetian colonial project on Crete.

      The Fourth Crusade redrew the political map of the eastern Mediterranean, marking a substantive rupture in the history of the lands of the Romania (as the formerly Byzantine eastern Mediterranean was known). In October 1202, a Latin Crusader army set out by ship from Venice. This mostly French force intended to capture Muslim Alexandria, but through Venetian intervention (the army was deeply in debt to the Venetian state for its ships) first detoured to Christian Zara (modern Zadar, Croatia), reestablishing Venetian rule in that Dalmatian city by military force and then eventually aiming its weapons at the Byzantine Empire itself. In April 1204, the Crusaders sacked Constantinople, overthrew the emperor, and installed a Latin princeling on the throne.

      In retrospect, the Latin Empire of Constantinople, as this coup’s resulting government was known, was an economic and political disaster for those who ruled it, and in 1261 a Byzantine contingent from Nicaea restored an Orthodox emperor to the throne. Nevertheless, the implications of the Fourth Crusade were vast. Most important was the infamous Partitio Romaniae, the treaty in which the Crusader leaders divided the former Byzantine territory among themselves, and the subsequent land trades made in its aftermath. After Constantinople returned to Byzantine hands, the new political realities in the Romania would in many cases remain for centuries.⁴⁹

      No state benefited more from, or was more changed by, the Fourth Crusade than Venice. By 1100, Venice had begun to extend its naval power beyond the Adriatic. The goal was commercial expansion, and in the next century, the Republic harnessed the economic potential of the Crusader States for its own goals. Venice secured trading concessions from the Latin rulers of the Levant in return for occasional military assistance, particularly gaining mastery of the Levantine coast in the 1120s.⁵⁰ In the century before the Fourth Crusade, Venetian traders expanded their foothold across the wider eastern Mediterranean, building on inroads constructed before the Crusades. Evidence, including a letter found in the Cairo Genizah, indicates that Venetian merchants were active on Byzantine Crete—buying and transporting Cretan foodstuffs to Constantinople and Alexandria—already by the mid-eleventh century, but around 1126, Venice obtained free trade privileges on Crete from the Byzantine emperor John II Komnenos and thus increased its economic power on the island and along its adjacent shipping lines.⁵¹

      The Fourth Crusade thus offered Venice a chance to directly control many of the ports it had long used as purchase points and way stations in its Levantine trade networks. Venice could cut out the middleman, that is, other sovereigns’ laws, taxes, and diplomatic mores. It is in this commercial light that we can understand the locations Venice acquired through the Partitio Romaniae and in subsequent private trades, including Negroponte (modern Evvia), connecting the Aegean Sea to the Greek mainland; the ports of Coron and Modon at the southern tip of the Morea (as the Peloponnese was known); and the Ionian island of Corfu, overlooking the southern entrance to the Adriatic (abandoned and then reconquered in 1401).

      Among all these new territories, known collectively as the Stato da mar, Crete quickly emerged as the flagship colony. Venice evidently intended only a minimal occupation of Crete, perhaps just focusing on the port cities, but securing the ports entailed capturing and controlling the island as a whole.⁵² The island’s strategic location, directly between Venetian waters and the Levant, would render it almost as important as Constantinople itself (which Venice chose to influence but not to rule directly).⁵³ In 1264, Doge Ranieri Zeno wrote to Pope Urban IV that Crete, because of its position, was the linchpin in the Republic’s maritime empire. The doge emphasized Crete’s potential role in defending Latin political interests.⁵⁴ But the island’s economic advantages were equally, if not more, fundamental. Crete’s strategic location for protection was but one of its benefits, alongside its strategic location for trade and the island’s natural fecundity.

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