Communal Institutions
Between Parnas’s life in the early 1200s and when Elia reached adulthood around 1500, members of the Capsali family and other elite clans developed a comprehensive corporate organization, similar to many Jewish kehillah (community) institutions in the Mediterranean and beyond.35 As in other premodern Jewish communities, elected lay officials in Candia fulfilled the mandate of the corporate institution, whose chief goal was to enable, protect, and enforce local Jewish ritual life. These leaders, headed by an elected condestabulo, ensured that Candiote Jews had access to kosher food, including ritually slaughtered meat, and properly inspected dairy and wine. They organized and fostered liturgical life, with its ritual objects, Torah scrolls, synagogue spaces, and prayer leaders. They also convened a Jewish court, a beit din, although scant information about it survives.36
The kehillah was recognized as a corporate legal body—a universitas—by the Venetian government. As such, the kehillah owned real estate from which it derived income to provide housing for the poor and fund other community needs.37 The leadership’s other primary task was to serve as liaison between the Jewish community and the Venetian colonial government on matters that affected the community as a whole. Its most daunting task was to collect the Jewish tax, which was levied not per capita but on the community as a whole.38 Although some corporate institutions in the medieval world were empowered to deal with Jewish criminal activity, Venetian courts exercised control over all criminal cases.39 The kehillah was allowed to mandate certain rules and ordinances for its members, an authority that other kinds of corporations, such as guilds and confraternities, also possessed. Thus any Jewish law and custom not contrary to Venetian law could be legislated for the community by the kehillah’s leadership. It is into this context of corporate self-rule that the Hebrew ordinances of Taqqanot Qandiya fit.
Like the Capsali family’s enduring role as leaders, in some fundamental ways the community they led would maintain continuity during the generations between Parnas and Elia. The community’s liturgical rite, the majority of its population, and its synagogues would remain “Romaniote”—that is, they identified with the ancestral ways of the Jews of Byzantine origin. Candiote Jews were generally native Greek speakers, and even as the community became more heterogeneous, it continued to follow Romaniote customs, rituals, and liturgy that—unlike Ashkenazi (Franco-German) or Sephardi (Spanish) liturgies—incorporated vernacular Greek into some parts of the service.40
In other ways, however, the Candiote Jewish community experienced significant changes between 1228 and the turn of the sixteenth century, not least because Crete’s Jewish population was in constant flux. In particular, outbreaks of plague in the mid-fourteenth century decimated the community, a result of both death and families fleeing the island. In 1389, three representatives of the Jewish community, supported by testimony of three Venetian noblemen who had served on Crete, convinced the Venetian Senate that the collective tax, which had been recently increased, was an impossible burden for a community so weakened in number.41 An influx of Jews from Iberia, Venice, and elsewhere, however, mitigated this loss soon after. Elia Capsali could have pointed to himself as an outcome of these demographic changes. Despite his well-known local patronymic, his mother came from the Delmedigo clan, an Ashkenazi family that arrived on the island in the late fourteenth century by way of Venetian Negroponte and quickly worked its way into the cadre of local elite Jews.
Given this population boost, Jewish economic fortunes on Crete changed for the better. As the nineteenth-century scholar of Venice Hippolyte Noiret noted, the expulsion of Jews (mainly of German and Italian extraction) from Venice was announced in late August 1394. A year later, the Venetian Senate voted to raise Crete’s Jewish tax, citing not only the general wealth of the Jews but also the immigration of new rich Jews to the island.42 The levied tax rose to 3,000 hyperpera, a 50 percent increase over the amount kehillah representatives had negotiated in 1389. If the tax rate correlated roughly to population, the Jewish community in the aggregate apparently remained economically successful over the course of the next century.43
To be sure, after 1492 and into the sixteenth century, faced with the challenge of poor Iberian Jews arriving en masse, and the need to ransom kidnapped Jews from Candia, Coron, and Patras, the Jewish community became so strapped for cash that it sold the silver finials from a Torah scroll; Elia Capsali even sold his personal library to an agent of Ulrich Fugger, the famed German businessman and bibliophile.44 But at least until 1492, the influx of Jews from western lands offered Candia’s kehillah some financial relief and demographic strength.
The leadership reacted to the challenges posed from the outside, such as raised taxes, through advocacy and negotiation with the colonial government—by working within the bounds of colonial justice and politics. The successful 1389 embassy to Venice is but one example of the direct approach Jewish leaders took in aiding their community; the support of the Venetian noblemen at that time suggests the value of maintaining close ties with the local administration. Capsali’s visit to his “beloved friend” the duke should be read as part of this strategy, too.
Communal Reforms: 1363
When the challenges faced by the community arose from the internal realities of the kehillah, a different sort of strategy had to be employed. After the demographic crisis of the Black Death, the leadership convened a synod, perhaps recognizing in the moment an opportunity for unity and conformity that, they believed, would best serve the community. This synod of 1363 and its resulting taqqanot illustrate a community in need of a new leadership structure and new rules for relating both to each other and to the Christian communities with which they lived, worked, and even at times socialized.45
Their reforming ordinances of 1363 addressed problems with the structure of the system in place. From the century and a half beforehand, we have only the first set of taqqanot from 1228, the ones signed by Parnas Capsali and others, and a revision of the same. The 1228 set are written in rhyme; the revised set are written in prose and reordered, though the same ten ordinances remain. The prose revisions are undated and are ascribed to an otherwise unknown Rabbi Tzedakah. The initial ten ordinances address aspects of Jewish life, such as interactions with Gentiles, ritual purity, and synagogue attendance.
Regarding communal structure, the early ordinances identify communal leaders only as “appointed officials” (ha-memunim ha-reshumim) and assert that they have sole authority to impose excommunication.46 An organizational structure that included these memunim (sg. mamun) seems to have lasted until 1363.47 Deterioration in the surviving manuscript of Taqqanot Qandiya makes much of these first ordinances unreadable, and so it is unclear whether the community’s “president,” the condestabulo, existed yet in the early thirteenth century. One of the signatories is referred to as the manhig, “leader,” but the designation is imprecise. A century later, however, the office of condestabulo was well established. In the revision of the first ten ordinances by Rabbi Tzedakah, likely from the first half of the fourteenth century, the right to call a ban is no longer the purview of unspecified officials but only allowed with prior approval from “the condestabulo who will be [in that position] at that time.”48 The Hebrew text transliterated the Venetian term without a translation, suggesting it had become standard by this point. From 1363 on, this official’s name would often be listed in the introduction or signatory sections of ordinances; the first man identified in March of that year is “our leader, our president [nesiyeinu]” David the son of Judah, “the condestabulo.”49
In