Colonial Justice and the Jews of Venetian Crete by Rena N. Lauer (review)

In this monograph, Lauer offers an intensive study of the Jewish community in Candia, the capital of Venetian Crete, during a period of relative calm and prosperity lasting from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth century. Confronting Jewish and Christian textual sources, written in Hebrew, Latin, and the Venetian dialect, Lauer focuses on how mutual relations were managed and arguments settled both between Candiote Jews and Christians, and within the Jewish community itself. Lauer seeks to shed light on the social realities of Jewish—Christian co-existence in the framework of the Venetian Mediterranean empire by investigating both the authority of the Jewish communal leaders and the Jews' attitudes to the state's justice system as a powerful means of promoting their own interests. She convincingly presents the secular courts of justice in Candia as an important platform on which the city's Jews could realize their agency as Venetian subjects, thus showing that the often-accepted view of pre-modern Jewish communities as corporate bodies uniformly represented by their leadership vis-à-vis the outer world does not fully reflect the reality as it emerges from the archival sources.

In the introduction, Lauer presents what she calls the "networks of Jewish life in Venetian Crete" (1), emphasizing the deep integration of late-medieval Candia's Jewish population into the colonial society created by the Venetian rulers and indigenous Orthodox Greek population. She briefly narrates the focal points of Crete's political history under the rule of Venice and, crucially, introduces her principal sources—namely, Taqqanot Qandiyah, a collection of Hebrew-written internal statutes of the Jewish community, and, on the Christian side, the records of Venetian judiciary and notary proceedings. The first chapter paints a lavish portrait of the Jewish community, describing its topography, social structures, and the various kinds of connections between Candiote Jews, their Christian neighbors, and the Jewish communities outside the city and the island.

Afterward, Lauer moves to the core inquiry of her study, the social interactions as revealed by her sources. In Chapter 2, she maps the everyday contacts between Jews and Christians, demonstrating that they moved far beyond the familiar paradigm of creditor-debtor dynamics. From Chapter 3 onward, the focus is firmly on the courtroom. First, Lauer assesses the Jews' uses of the Venetian judicial system to their potential benefit in their dealings with the majority society, and the role of the state in regulating Jewish—Christian relations. Subsequently, Chapter 4 confronts the sensitive topic of conflicts between Jews being resolved in Christian courts, outside the ostensibly autonomous judicial system that the Jewish community was allowed to maintain.

Chapters 5 and 6 focus in more detail on two particular instances of such dealings. The former considers the settlement of marital conflicts, brought to the state's courts especially often by Jewish women; the latter shows that the Jewish elders themselves from time to time engaged Venetian justice to force individual Jews to obey their leaders, effectively compromising the autonomy of the Jewish community that they were supposed to guarantee. Lauer's analysis of these processes lead her to the conclusion that the members of the late-medieval Jewish community in Candia were not defined solely by their religion, but that individual motivations and ambitions played in their lives as great a role as their allegiance to the corporate body of the universitas Iudaeorum.

Of obvious merit for scholars of Jewish history and historians of the medieval Mediterranean, Lauer's methodology makes this book interesting for historians across disciplines. She demonstrates the value of confronting various types of textual sources, finding and describing her protagonists' multiple identities (as Jews, communal leaders, physicians, Venetian subjects, etc.) that played a vital role in her studied community. Without succumbing to overly optimistic assumptions of interfaith harmony, she shows how Jews and Christians in a specific late-medieval city achieved a largely peaceful way of coexistence for a long period of time. Her work will...