Jewish Law and Litigation in the Secular Courts of the Late Medieval Mediterranean

Abstract

Although medieval rabbinic law generally forbade Jews from suing their co-religionists in state courts, this practice was widely accepted among some Mediterranean Jewish communities. This study focuses on one such community, the Jews of Venetian Crete’s capital city of Candia, during the century following the Black Death (ca. 1350-1450). Court records indicate that Candiote Jews quite often sued each other in Venice’s colonial courts. Unlike many other medieval Jewish communities, the rabbinical leadership of Candia took this intra-Jewish litigation as a given. Moreover, these leaders themselves accessed Venetian justice to sue fellow Jews. Among the factors that motivated Jewish use of the Venetian court was a special accommodation given to Cretan Jews: when litigation in the colonial court dealt with Jews’ marriages or divorces, judges were obligated to adjudicate according to Jewish law. Many Candiote Jews utilized this personal law privilege, and the Venetian court actively implemented it. The Catholic judges of the colonial court in Crete learned about Jewish law mostly from the litigants themselves, and not from a panel of rabbinic experts, giving these Jewish litigants significant agency in shaping not only the outcome of their marriage and divorce cases but also the government’s understanding of Jewish law.