This behavior was considered beyond the pale. Denounced as a heretic, accused of doubting the truth of Christianity and of Judaizing—defined here as participating in Jewish ceremonies—Catacalo was quickly imprisoned, tried, and found guilty. The case against Giovanni Catacalo is revealing for a number of reasons. It is the only time the Inquisition was permitted to intervene in Candia’s own judiciary.60 Indeed, the investigation was run by Dominicans sent by the Roman curia, and the language of heresy and Judaizing and the explicit claim of Jewish contagion (contagia Judaice) is decidedly atypical in Candia’s legal records until this point. Equally unusual for Candia, the tribunal interrogated (and probably tortured) Catacalo for three days, after which he confessed to having lost faith in the very foundations of Catholic dogma, including the messianic and divine nature of Christ, the intercessory power of Mary, the prophecies of Isaiah as foreshadows of Christ, and the spiritual potency of saints and icons.61 After his confession, he “begged for mercy from our God for his sin, that he recognized that he had acted wickedly.”62 It seems likely that Catacalo was indeed on the brink of doing that thing not done: converting to Judaism. But after his treatment at the hands of the state and its ecclesiastical associates, he seems to have decided such a radical jump was not worth his life.
It is clear from Catacalo’s punishment that the Inquisition believed that he came into contact with his heretical ideas by virtue of his work as a notary. Following two years of jail and other acts of public humiliation, Catacalo was allowed to return to his old profession. But he did so with one caveat: he was forbidden to notarize for Jews ever again. Moreover, his son Gabriele Catacalo, who had followed his father into the notariate, was also banned from ever working with Jews. It is apparent that the Inquisitorial court recognized that the ostensibly cut-and-dried matter of notarial work actually could and did promote a deeper relationship between client and notary.
At the same time, the relative ease of Catacalo’s punishment is striking. So too is the lack of larger legislative or social implications, for it points to the contrast between Roman Inquisitorial fears (rarely allowed sway in Crete) and the broader approach of the local Venetian bureaucracy. Following Catacalo’s ordeal, the ducal administration did not make any sweeping legislation against Jewish use of other notaries, nor did they hunt down other “Judaizing” notaries. Jewish businessmen continued to patronize favorite Latin notaries. In the early 1450s, the Latin notary Michele Calergi often served Jewish clients, including the Delmedigo family.63 The colonial government appears to have accepted this reality. For the most part, Jewish contact with notaries was supported. Pragmatically, it expedited the active trade and moneylending on which Venice and its subjects relied. A certain amount of sustained contact could be tolerated—as long as the Christian involved shunned the temptation of confessional perfidy. And, in truth, most likely there were few notaries in Candiote Christian society as inquisitive and spiritually intrepid as the unfortunate Catacalo.
The Space of Jewish-Christian Encounter
These economic transactions and the relationships they forged took place throughout the city of Candia and its environs. The countryside was the setting for the winepress fiasco, while the highway robbery of the wine merchants took place in the borgo, beyond the walls of the town. Everyday moneylending, buying and selling of goods, and writing up of contracts likely took place in many locations—workshops and warehouses, pawnshops and open-air stalls, and inside homes. Notarial contracts from Candia do not share nearly as much data as those from other Mediterranean cities; they do not identify where they were signed. But Jewish-Christian encounters were not constrained in location. When the Inquisition questioned Catacalo, they did not seem to mind that he had been in a Jewish home; rather, it was the sheer length of time he had been inside the wise Jew’s home—fifteen days—that provoked suspicion. Moreover, Jews and Christians shared much of the spatial infrastructure of daily life, even sharing communal ovens until the mid-sixteenth century, when Elia Capsali built a bakehouse on his own property. But even after that moment, we do not know if all Jews shifted their baking to the specifically kosher ovens.64
To be sure, the story of Jewish residential life in Candia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is one of increasing restrictions. The Jewish Quarter as a singular, defined space became increasingly reified and limited over that period, a trend paralleled in many other locations across Christendom.65 Until the fourteenth century, Jews lived both in the area that became known as the Judaica and in a particular area of the suburban borgo.66 Even the very boundaries, the streets that constituted the Judaica, were fluid for a century. By 1334, however, when for the first time Jews were ordered to own and rent homes only inside the Judaica, the boundary lines had become clearly defined. A further order compelling Jews to live exclusively within these streets was also passed in 1350, perhaps part of the pan-European response to the Black Death.67 In the early 1390s, the ducal administration ordered that some homes along the southern boundary of the Judaica, directly across the street from Christian homes, had to be walled off.68 The east side of the Judaica was similarly bricked up in 1450, following complaints by the nearby Dominican monastery of St. Peter Martyr.69 By the mid-1450s, then, the Judaica was no longer simply a neighborhood where Jews chose to settle together but a walled-in, discrete quarter whose inhabitants no longer lived there solely by choice.
Yet the narrative involves more than increasing segregation or a residential division of Jews and Christians caused by a Venetian change in policy. Segregation was not imposed solely by the Christian state but instead co-opted as an ideal by the leadership of the Jewish community itself. Moreover, despite this ideal found in both Jewish and Christian discourses, the reality for Jews and Christians was that that encounter took place both inside and outside of the Jewish Quarter, even as that space became increasingly identified as “Jewish.”
Co-opting the Narrative: Jewish Delineation of Jewish Space
Despite Venice’s accruing policies limiting Jewish residence, the Jewish community leadership did not chafe very much against the strictures. To the contrary, we see that the physical neighborhood of the Jewish Quarter had long been a comfortably limited area for the community’s leaders—at least since the mid-fourteenth century, when Rabbi Tzedakah revised the rhyming ordinances of 1228 into a more legalistic prose version. Rabbi Tzedakah’s text mandates that, for the sake of maintaining the sanctity of Sabbath and prayers, no Jew may leave the kahal (read: Jewish Quarter) until morning services are over.70 Here, the Jewish leadership co-opted the spatial limitations that had ostensibly been imposed on the community and reinterpreted them as helping construct a protective neighborhood. A typical example of the intermeshing of imposed segregation and self-segregation, it tells us much about the way the Jewish elite, at least, had long thought of their micro-city.71
There can be no doubt that the leadership of the ethnoreligious communities of Candia emphasized and idealized segregation. As David Jacoby has written, “Both Jewish and Venetian ordinances envisaged the corrosive effects of social contacts and promiscuity between Jews and Christians and the benefits of the Jewish segregation.”72 While Venetian legislation certainly aimed to separate Jewish and Christian residence, Jewish segregation was, at least in part, self-segregation. Per Jacoby, Jews kept to themselves “by choice. Their lifestyle, customs, culture, social cohesion and residential segregation emphasized their identity as a distinct ethnic and religious group.”73 For Capsali and his ilk, then, the closed-in walls of the kahal felt comfortably familiar and protective. Moreover, instead of considering the Judaica a limiting factor, a close reading of Taqqanot Qandiya suggests that its authors saw the increasingly defined and confined space of the Judaica as a benefit to the leadership itself. It enabled them to simultaneously define the boundaries of their power, assert control over their communities, and perhaps even boost morale by assuring their flocks that they did indeed have a place to be among themselves.
The authors of Taqqanot Qandiya certainly saw and depicted the Jewish Quarter of Candia as an insider space. As in the example above, they regularly use the term kahal (or similar, kehillah), community, not only in reference to the people but as a name for the physical Jewish Quarter. The semantic field often seems to conflate