The synagogue was a meeting house as well as a house of prayer. In the early part of the fifteenth century, the Synagogue of the Priests filled the role of a communal center, a place where community leaders “sat time and time again” to debate their responses to communal problems, such as the ongoing crisis in which Jewish-owned stores remained open for business too close to the start of Sabbath, and also sold goods during the intermediary days of holidays (hol hamo’ed).74 In the later years of the fifteenth century, the leadership met at the Great Synagogue (Beit Knesset HaGadol) to discuss religious crises such as the laxity in separation between fiancés and their betrothed before the wedding.75
Jewish Migration and Settlement in Candia
The Jewish community of Crete grew and evolved during the Venetian period because of a steady flow of Jewish immigration. Nevertheless, many of the Jewish families in Candia were not newcomers. Naming patterns suggest that many Candiote Jews in this century were of Byzantine origin or at least had been in the Greek milieu for a long time.76 Some families had lived on Crete before the Venetian conquest. A member of Casani family, Anatoli the son of David, for instance, wrote liturgical poetry on Crete in the twelfth century.77 His family remained among the Jewish elite during Venetian rule. Other migrants arrived on Crete from within the contemporary and former Byzantine Empire and from Venetian colonies such as Coron and Negroponte.
Others came from farther afield, some with little in their pockets. In 1428, a Majorcan Jew agreed to serve a Candiote physician on his travels to Venice in return for food, lodging, and a salary of three hyperpera per month.78 Others arrived with far greater resources. And just as their socioeconomic status varied, their origins did as well. Surnames suggest a wide variety of places of origin: Turco (from Ottoman lands or Asia Minor), de Damasco (Damascus), Ciciliano (Sicily), Tzarfati (northern France), and even one Jew oddly named Saracenus. Many other non-Byzantine Jews came to Crete from Iberia and German lands.79
Venetian rule on Crete coincided with periods of upheaval in many other parts of Christendom, marked by plague, riot, and massacre, especially in Iberia and Germany. This turmoil provoked a Jewish exodus from the traditional centers of settlement in western Europe. Northern France expelled its Jews in 1182 and 1306 (only to allow the Jews to return in 1189 and 1315) and again in 1395. England definitively drove its Jews out in 1290. German Jews suffered the Rindfleisch and Armleder massacres in 1298 and 1336, respectively, and the Black Death provoked a sharpened set of anti-Jewish legislation, financial disabilities, and mob hostility across Europe that began in 1348 but continued in various incarnations for another century.80 The massacres and burnings of the so-called Pestpogrom in the immediate aftermath of the plague gave way to devastating economic persecution around 1390, when the Luxembourger king Wenceslas IV canceled Jewish debt.81
Likewise, Jews began to flee Iberia in this same period. Before 1348, anti-Jewish violence certainly took place, as David Nirenberg has illustrated.82 With the advent of the plague, however, Catalonia and Navarre became “the center of violence and killings” of Jews, and the Inquisition “accompanied the crescendo of violence,” seeking out German and French converts to Christianity who had returned to their Judaism upon moving to Iberia.83 The many Jews who sought refuge in Castile, however, were not to have peace in the following decades, as vitriolic anti-Jewish preaching led to mob riots and massacres across Iberia in the summer of 1391. Beginning in Seville, the riots spread to Valencia and Catalonia, and from there across the peninsula; many Jews were killed and others were forced to convert en masse.84 In the first half of the fifteenth century, popular preachers such as Vincent Ferrer continued to rouse the masses to attack Jewish quarters and force Jews to convert under fear of death and pressed the governments of Iberia to pass ever-harsher anti-Jewish legislation.85 Long before the expulsion of 1492, many of those who were able to fled Iberia, as did Jews from the German lands.
Though northern Italy was generally a locus of Jewish immigration, at various times Jews found the peninsula unwelcoming, particularly when mendicant preachers riled up town leaders and residents.86 The Franciscan friar Bernardino di Siena (d. 1444) stoked hostility against Jews (even if temporarily) in bustling commercial towns such as Florence, Padua, and Siena.87 Some Italian cities, such as Genoa and Milan, simply forbade Jewish settlement altogether; others expelled Jews in the late fifteenth century.88 Venice finally allowed Jewish moneylenders to settle in the city and its adjacent mainland (terraferma) in the decades after the Black Death, most explicitly from 1382. But Venice soon turned out its Jews, at the end of the century.89 In 1394, for economic reasons—there was no longer an urgent need for moneylenders lending credit in the city—the government decided that it would not renew the charter granted to the Jews when it expired in 1397.90 From that time, individual Jewish moneylenders were allowed into the city for no longer than fifteen days. Jewish merchants and doctors were allowed in sporadically according to other sets of rules. All Jews had to wear a yellow circle on their clothing. Enormous fines were levied on practicing their religion in the open during their short stays in Venice, for example by holding prayer services.91 Families left for more welcoming towns, and Venice ceased to be a tempting destination for those seeking to relocate from regions further west.
As western Europe turned more hostile to Jews, Crete came to be regarded as a haven, where Jews escaping expulsion (or worse) could start over. The Venetian government evidently had no problem with immigration to Crete. Likewise, there was no attempt by the Jewish community to control the influx, as some Ashkenazi communities in previous centuries had done.92
The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have often been seen as a period of increasing economic disabilities for Cretan Jews, part of the crisis spreading across Christendom. Undoubtedly this period witnessed residential, financial, and professional limitations for the community in Candia. Beginning in 1325, Jews in all Venetian colonies were required to live in Jewish quarters only. Residential rules tightened in 1391, when the Signoria ordered that some of the homes considered part of the Judaica, but across the street from Christian homes considered not part of that district, had to be walled off. This culminated in a final enclosure of the Judaica in 1450 at the request of the adjacent Dominican monastery of St. Peter Martyr.93 Meanwhile, in 1423, Venice prohibited Jews in all of its domains from holding real estate outside Jewish quarters.94
Jewish trade was also limited in this period. Generally, Jews were allowed to use shipping lines to Venetian colonies in the Levant, but they usually could not secure rights to ship goods to the metropole.95 Moreover, for about two decades beginning in 1429, Venice prohibited its vessels from transporting Jews or their goods to any Mamluk-held territory, thereby extending a papal ban against Christian ships conveying Jews and Jewish-owned goods to the Holy Land.96 Jewish economic outlets in Venice’s colonies were increasingly restricted, which probably led more Jewish capital to be directed toward moneylending.97
In addition, during the 1430s and 1440s, when Venice needed funds for its war efforts, Cretan Jews found themselves taxed heavily and forced to make war loans. In 1389 the community’s ambassadors successfully convinced the Senate to lower the Jewish tax to 2,000 hyperpera. But by the 1430s, the community