Colonial Justice and the Jews of Venetian Crete

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...