concentric spheres (he also wrote Hebrew histories of both the Venetian empire and the Ottoman Empire), Taqqanot Qandiya does provide fascinating insight into not only the religiolegal life of the community but also its day-to-day workings, its institutions, its tensions, and its relationship with Candia’s non-Jewish majority.
An undated manuscript copy of Capsali’s compilation discovered among the collection of David Salomon Sassoon, the famed Anglo-Iraqi collector of Jewish and Samaritan books, remains the only manuscript of Taqqanot Qandiya in existence. It now resides in Jerusalem, part of the manuscript collection at the National Library of Israel.20 Its early pages are unfortunately in illegible condition, and an early attempt at conservation with what looks like contact paper has obscured some other pages. An edition from the mid-twentieth century, however, preserves material no longer visible in the manuscript. Umberto Cassuto and Elias Artom, scholars of Italian Jewry and classical Jewish texts, worked from this codex to create an edition with critical apparatus in Hebrew, and this published version remains the only such edition.21 The editors intended their edition, published in 1943, to be the first volume of a two-part study of the Jews of Candia based on these ordinances, but exigencies of war and finances precluded the completion of this project.22
As a self-consciously prescriptive source, Taqqanot Qandiya offers a lopsided view of the Jews of Candia, emphasizing piety, community, and religious concerns, albeit sometimes honored in the breach. Rabbinic texts have long been the major sources marshaled by scholars studying the history of Jews. When doing social history using rabbinic voices, however, it is difficult not to trip over their decidedly prescriptive nature. An alternate approach that looks only at Jewish life through non-Jewish sources also has severe limits, stemming from the outsider’s perspective they necessarily offer. This study surmounts that obstacle by bringing these kinds of sources into conversation with one another and by analyzing them in tandem. It marshals both primary sources produced by Jews and primary sources about Jews produced mainly by Christians in order to offer not only more angles of view but also a higher-resolution—and therefore clearer and more nuanced—image of the community in question, much as anthropologists do when developing their ethnographies of contemporary social groups.23
The resulting details of Jewish daily life, family concerns, economic activities, living conditions, and religious communal life are quite diverse. In some ways, what emerges looks like a typical portrait of medieval communal Jews: elites taking up local Jewish office to help liaise between the community and the sovereign; rabbis concerned with maintaining dietary standards and cleanliness in the Jewish Quarter; and wealthy and poor alike anxious to make good marriage matches for their children. But in other ways, this consilience of sources also offers a far less typically visible social landscape. Here we are privy to Jewish individuals concerned with their own interests, as well as those of the community—often contradictory though simultaneous aims. Some Jews were dedicated to religious practice and community leadership at the same time that they were comfortable going outside the community for resolutions to social and religious problems, for extended economic alliances, and even for sexual intimacy. Some happily watched the public courtroom spectacles in the town center, and some strolled around the harbor—even on Sabbath during the time of prayer services, despite the customary expectation that Jews should be in synagogue then.24 Candiote Jews were probably not the only Jews in Europe doing these things; rather, the exceptional sources, and the juxtaposing of both secular and Jewish sources, permit us uncommon entry into the daily lives and concerns of the Jews of a medieval community.25
Jewish Life in Christian Society
Focusing on Candia’s well-documented Jews, therefore, suggests new ways to think about medieval Jewry across the Mediterranean and beyond, particularly by pointing to the importance of historical contingency in Jewish-Christian relations and by identifying a complex convivencia outside the bounds of Iberia. As scholars have moved beyond the old models of reading medieval Jewish history through a lachrymose lens, one influential approach has been to reinterpret violence against Jews through a multifaceted prism of local social, political, and religious realities—and not as the inevitable product of prevalent rhetorical tropes.26
Yet explaining the contingency of anti-Jewish violence can only function as one part of this corrective. The other side of this coin remains essential as well: to recognize that violence was only one mode of interaction between medieval Jews and their Christian neighbors—one that characterized the minority of such contacts in many places across the medieval world. In Crete, as in locales throughout Christendom, quotidian interactions between Jews and Christians look rather different than the list of traumatic encounters emphasized by lachrymose narratives. Political alliances, professional reliance, sexual attraction, and even religious curiosity led Jews and Christians—Greek Orthodox and Latin-rite alike—to encounter each other on terms not defined by animosity and conflict. On a day-to-day basis, Cretan society exhibited a pragmatic acceptance of religious difference.
Scholarship on medieval Jews used to subscribe to the consensus opinion that Jewish life under Christian rule was generally harsh, malicious, and ultimately destined for destruction.27 But more recent scholarship has recognized that any universalizing conclusions about “Jewish life under Christian rule” are untenable.28 Christendom was a diverse and complicated place; local considerations—whether tense relations between the king and his Christian subjects, or policies of economic pragmatism—often played as important a role in informing attitudes and actions toward (or against) Jews as did uniform ideological prejudice. Indeed, internal Christian tension sometimes directly benefited Jews. Conflict between Venice and the pope (particularly over issues of authority and jurisdiction in its colonial sphere) helped protect Candiote Jews from papal and papally appointed Dominican Inquisition tribunals, which were not allowed to hold sway on the island except in rare cases.29
Regular, low-conflict interaction between Jews and Christians in Christendom tends to be identified as part of a phenomenon unique to the medieval Iberian Peninsula, the product of its exceptional cultural complexity in which pragmatic needs and proximity impelled Jews, Christians, and Muslims to accommodate one another. But other regions ought to be observed through a similar filter, and the Venetian territories provide an excellent natural laboratory in which to explore cross-cultural contacts that look like their own version of convivencia.30 As in Iberia, Candia’s reality of three different religiocultural groups—Greek, Latin, and Jewish—seems to have prevented the sort of binary tension (us versus them) that tends to set the stage for violent conflict aimed at Jews. Perhaps the tripartite social reality diffused the force of hatred of the Other by multiplying the targets defined as such. It seems likely that animosity aimed at the Jews in Candia was buffered by the reality of ongoing tensions between Greeks and Latins.
One of the most productive new methods for breaking through old approaches to, and artificial bifurcations about, medieval Jews is to explore the ways Jews utilized sovereign courtrooms as a venue of dispute between Jews. Scholars of Iberia and Provence have noted that Jews, male and female, chose to air their grievances against their fellow Jews not at the beit din, the Jewish court, but before secular, Christian sovereigns—despite rabbinic prohibitions.31 The significant implications of this behavior are still being worked out, in this study as in others. Elka Klein’s work on Catalonia has made an important step in recognizing that the reality of Jews in court, particularly women, ought to change our understanding of the daily functioning of Jewish society; as in other realms of medieval Jewish life, Jewish attitudes toward the court system were clearly not in line with rabbinic exhortations.32 Uriel Simonsohn’s work on Jews and Christians litigating in Islamic courtrooms in the early medieval Middle East and North Africa has demonstrated that this phenomenon extends beyond Christendom.33
Jews who litigated in sovereign judiciaries had diverse motives, and it is increasingly clear that these courts—in Crete, as in the Islamic world—offered certain benefits that made it more appealing to bring civil suits before judges of a different religion than to bring similar suits before the Jewish court: enforcement powers, a balance of professionalism and useful subjectivity, arbitrational neutrality, and even sometimes cultural familiarity. By looking at the kinds of cases Candiote Jews chose to bring against their coreligionists (from property