THROUGH VENETIAN EYES*
While only a relatively small number of Jews resided permanently in Mamluk Alexandria in the late Middle Ages, many travelled through the port city in their pursuit of spiritual or secular business. Some of them have been studied in detail, while others remain to be discovered. Their historical analysis is somewhat ham-pered by the transient nature of their presence in the city of Alexandria.
Alexandria had lost much of its ancient glory but was still the chief harbour of the Mamluk Empire. The global spice route had shifted south in the wake of the imploding Mongol Empire and a great deal of the trade with Indian spices, pre-cious metal and cloth passed through Alexandria. For that reason the town was teeming with diasporic trading communities of many nations and provenances.
Prominent among them were Venetians mainly because the Venetian republic controlled a substantial part of the transcontinental spice trade in the eastern Mediterranean and thus maintained a strong permanent presence with two fon-dachi (caravanserais) under the guidance of a consul who was assisted by a notary and even a doctor.1
In 1987, David Jacoby published a seminal article on Venetian Jews in the Eastern Mediterranean. He argued that Jews, for instance Veneto-Romaniote2 Jews from Crete, were rather well integrated into the Venetian merchants’ com-munities.3 However, this integration was limited and fragile, constantly
threat-* I would like to thank my colleagues from the World History Research Cluster, The University of Manchester, for their brilliant advice and especially Natalie Zacek, Charlotte Hastings and Laurence Brown for their careful reading of this text. Thank you to Angela Marisol Roberts Christ for copy-editing.
1 Cf. Georg Christ, Trading Conflicts. Venetian Merchants and Mamluk Officials in Late Medieval Alexandria The Medieval Mediterranean 93 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), mainly 19–96.
2 Romaniote = Byzantine (the Byzantine Empire officially being the Roman Empire and Byzantine lands being referred to as Romania.
3 David Jacoby, ‘Venice and Venetian Jews in the Eastern Mediterranean’, in Gli Ebrei a Venezia : secoli XIV-XVIII: atti del Convegno internazionale organizzato dall'Istituto di storia della società e dello stato veneziano della Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venezia, Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore 5–10 giugno 1983, ed. by Gaetano Cozzi (Milano: Ed. Comunità, 1987), pp. 29–58, here 31 seq., 34 seqq., 49 seq.
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ened by looming discriminatory measures.4 Jacoby emphasized that this overview was not final and invited further studies to complete lacunae in the larger picture.5 In the meantime, many studies on Venetian Jews in the eastern Mediterranean have been produced, not least in a recent volume of the Mediterranean Historical Review, edited by Benjamin Arbel.6 Some of the Jewish communities along the main arteries of Venetian trade, such as Modon, Coron, and Corfu, have re-ceived some attention,7 while the Jewish communities in Venetian Crete and the Venetian quarter of Constantinople are particularly well studied. Segregated (by their own choosing or not) communities in Crete were in many ways similar to both Western universitates (bottom-up, self-constituted communities) and dhimma (top-down, protected) communities under Islamic rule. The latter were led by an elected head with a body of administrative officers, held together by common cult, and were forced to pay a substantial community tax to the ruler.8 In Constantinople, however, Jews were more organically part of the Venetian com-munity without segregated living quarters and with greater occupational variety and overall stronger features of integration.9 In his study on the Jews in Crete, Benjamin Arbel questioned to what extent ‘integration’ was possible:
4 Ibid., p. 47, cf. Francisco Javier Apellániz Ruiz de Galarreta, ‘Venetian trading Networks in the Medieval Mediterranean’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History XLIV, no. 2 (2013): pp. 157–179, here p. 167.
5 Jacoby, ‘Venice and the Venetian Jews’, p. 50.
6 Benjamin Arbel (ed.), ‘Special Issue: Minorities in Colonial Settings: The Jews in Venice’s Hellenic territories (15th–18th Centuries)’, The Mediterranean Historical Review 27/2 (2012); see also Ariel toaff and Simon Schwarzfuchs, ed., The Mediterranean and the Jews: Banking, Finance and International Trade (XVI-XVIII Centuries), Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 1989.
7 Gerassimos D. Pagratis, ‘Jews in Corfu’s Economy (from the late fifteenth to mid-sixteenth cen-tury)’. Mediterranean Historical Review 27, no. 2 (2012): 189–198; Andrea Nanetti, ‘The Jews in Modon and Coron During the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century’, Mediterranean Historical Review 27, no. 2 (2012): pp. 215–225.
8 Anastasia Papadia-Lala, ‘The Jews in Early Modern Venetian Crete: Community and Identities’.
Mediterranean Historical Review 27, no. 2 (2012): pp. 141–150, here 143; Sally McKee, Uncommon Dominion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
9 David Jacoby, ‘The Jews and the Silk Industry of Constantinople’, in id. (ed.) Byzantium, Latin Romania and the Mediterranean. Variorum Collected Studies Series 703 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001):
pp. 1–20 also in The Jewish presence in the Greek territory (4th-19th centuries), ed. by A. Lambropoulou and K. tsiknakis, International Symposium 12 (Athens: National Hellenic Research Foundation-Institute for Byzantine Research, 2008): pp. 2–37; id. ‘The Jews of Constantinople and Their Demographic Hinterland’, In Constantinople and its Hinterland: Papers from the Twenty-Seventh Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Oxford, April 1993, Society for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies, Publications 3 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1995); reprinted in Byzantium, Latin Romania and the Mediterranean, edited by David Jacoby, Variorum Collected Studies Series 703 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001); Benjamin Arbel,
‘Venice and the Jewish Merchants of Istanbul in the Sixteenth Century’, in The Mediterranean and the Jews: Banking, Finance and International Trade (XVI-XVIII Centuries), edited by Ariel toaff and Simon Schwarzfuchs (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 1989), pp. 92–109.
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Can we deduce from business relations between clients and craftsmen or people ex-ercising other occupations any conclusions related to social integration? It would be more useful to verify whether there were any forms of close collaboration or associa-tion between Christians and Jews on a professional or business level. No such evidence has surfaced thus far.10
He argued that, despite daily contacts, Jews in Crete were not perceived to be fully part of Cretan society.11
The Jewish presence in Alexandria, the crucial terminus of Venetian trade on the spice route, has received relatively little attention, though one might argue that it would be particularly prone to exhibit patterns of ‘association on a busi-ness level’12 between Jews and Christian, if they existed at all. Eliyahu Ashtor and David Jacoby touched on the subject briefly, both proposing that the Venetian Jews were rather well integrated into the Venetian community in Alexandria.13 The Jewish communities in this Egyptian-Mamluk port, however, might be par-ticularly worthy of our attention since an investigation of their situation might shed light on an interesting problem: Were all Jews present in Alexandria inte-grated into one community? one might perhaps expect that there was one in-tegrated and institutionalized Jewish community composed of various oriental, Romaniote and, perhaps, Western Jews akin to the Jewish universitas of Candia which amalgamated into its fold Jews from Germany and, later in a more conflict-laden way, Spain with the autochthonous Greek or Romaniote Jews.14 Yet looking at the Geniza evidence for Alexandria, one might rather expect to see a continu-ation of the almost hermetic (if contested) division between Latin, Romaniote and Arabic Jewries.15
10 Benjamin Arbel, ‘Jews and Christians in Sixteenth-Century Crete: Between Segregation and Integration’, in ‘Interstizi’: Culture ebraico-cristiane a Venezia e nei suoi domini tra basso medioevo e pri-ma epoca moderna, edited by Uwe Israel, Robert Jütte, Reinhold Mueller (Ropri-ma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2010), pp. 281–294, here p. 291.
11 Ibid., p. 294.
12 See above, note 11.
13 ‘Merchants of the Serenissima did not refrain from trading with Jews or from having recourse to col-laboration with them in emporia overseas. Their attitude towards the Jews at home and abroad was very different: overseas they carried on trade with Jewish merchants everywhere. Many texts from Venetian sources could be adduced as proof of this.’ Eliyahu Ashtor, ‘New Data for the History of Levantine Jewries in the Fifteenth Century’, Bulletin of the Institute of Jewish Studies 3 (1975): pp. 67–102, here 73; id., ‘Ebrei cittadini di Venezia?’, Studi Veneziani XVII-XVIII (1975–1976): pp. 145–156, here mainly 151 seqq., refer-ring to the case to be revisited below; Jacoby, ‘Venice and Venetian Jews’, pp. 25 seq., 46, 48 seq.
14 For the early immigration of Sephardic Jews and the tensions between those newcomers and the au-tochthonous Romaniote élite, see Rena Lauer, ‘Cretan Jews and the First Sephardic Encounter in the Fifteenth Century’. Mediterranean Historical Review 27, no. 2 (2012): pp. 129–140.
15 Michael toch, The Economic History of European Jews: Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages Études sur le judaïsme médiéval 56 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), p. 199; cf. for a more recent study: Jessica L. Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: the Geniza Merchants and their Business World,
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This paper will limit itself to exploring Jewish presence in Alexandria through the dealings of the Venetian consul and merchant Biagio Dolfin (died 1420 in Cairo) with Jewish merchants. It presents several case studies of Jews interacting with the consul in business or in official capacities; a merchant from Lecce, a wine trader from Crete, the consulate’s doctor (also from Crete), and a money-lender from the Veneto, as well as oriental Jewish intermediaries in the consulate’s ser-vice. It will pay particular attention to the status of these Jews and their degree of integration into the Venetian community.16 It shall be argued that the Romaniote and Latin Jews’ presence in Alexandria was transient and geared towards a move to Venice, and that their links to oriental Jews probably remained weak.
The perspective is thus Venetian and chiefly based on notarial instruments produced in Alexandria as well as the consul’s private archive.17 The case studies will be preceded by a general introduction to the history of the Jewish presence in Alexandria, and they will be matched with information gleaned from travelogues.
Jews in Alexandria – an Overview
Jews had lived in Egypt since the sixth century bc emigration from Palestine.
Then, with the foundation of Alexandria in 331 bc, Jews were deported to Egypt under Ptolemy I. It is not clear whether they were citizens with full rights or not, but it is uncontroversial that they formed a substantial part of the Ptolemaic metropolis. Yet another wave of Jewish immigration to Egypt might have re-sulted from the c. 135 ad expulsion of Jews from Palestine in the wake of the Bar Kokhba revolt.18
After the Arabic conquest of Egypt in 641, Jews were granted the status of dhimmî with the treaty of Alexandria. It seems that 40,000 Jews lived in Alexandria at this time. In the early Islamic period the Jewish population changed with the Karaite group rising to substantial size. The Karaites (‘the ones who read [the tanakh/Miqra = i.e. the Hebrew bible]’) were a Jewish group basing
Cambridge studies in economic history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 355; my colleague Renate Smithuis kindly guided me through the Manchester Geniza collection, which, how-ever, does not yield relevant information on the Jewish community in Alexandria in the ninth/fifteenth century.
16 ‘Integration’ might seem anachronistic in this context and is used analytically, not descriptively, cf. Benjamin Arbel, ‘Jews and Christians in Sixteenth-Century Crete: Between Segregation and Integration’, in: ‘Interstizi’: Culture ebraico-cristiane a Venezia e nei suoi domini tra basso medioevo e prima epoca moderna, ed. by Uwe Israel et al. (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2010), pp. 281–294, here 281.17 Preservered in the Archive of the Procuratori di San Marco in the Venetian State Archives, cf.
18 ‘Alexandria’, in Fred Skolnik et al., ed. Encyclopaedia Judaica, http://www.encyclopedia.com/article-1G2–2587500765/alexandria.html.
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their religious and legal practice on the sole authority of the tanakh. In medieval Egypt, the Karaites were a group of respectable size and distinct from Rabbinic Jews.19
Karaites and Rabbinic Jews (of different denominations: Babylonian and Palestinian), despite general recognition as ahl al kitâb (that is, ‘people of the book’ protected by the Islamic ruler) suffered occasional persecution. overall, however, the relationship between Jews and their neighbours of other confes-sions seemed to have been good in the Fatimid period, which one might also find corroborated in the fact that there was no distinctly and entirely Jewish quarter in Alexandria.20 In any case, the dramatic decline of Alexandrian Jewries in the following centuries can hardly be attributed to persecution or expulsion. It was voluntary emigration to Cairo (alongside the Muslim and Christian élites) that reduced Alexandrian Jewries as Cairo became the capital of a series of Islamic, Egypt-centred empires.21
Even though this golden age was long past by the late fifteenth century, Karaites still existed as a Jewish confession in Cairo and Egypt alongside the smaller group of Samaritans (of yet an older Thora-observant confession)22 and the already dominant groups of Rabbinic Jews at a ratio of about 65% Rabbinic, 25% Karaite, 10% Samaritans.23 This underlines the heterogeneity of the oriental
19 The origins of this group are debated, but some connection to Philo of Alexandria and Egypt can be established. In any case, the golden age of Karaite Judaism was during the Islamic Middle Ages (c. 700–
1100), when the group arguably formed a substantial segment (according to some estimates up to 40%) of the Jewish world population while, presently, the group is reduced to a few hundred members mainly living in Israel and Palestine, for detailed bibliographical references, see Lawrence Fine, ed., Judaism in Practice: From the Middle Ages Through the Early Modern Period (Princeton, N.J: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), p. 252; for Karaites and their relationship with Rabbinic Jews in the Fatimid period, see Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimide Caliphate (Ithaca (N.Y.): Cornell University Press, 2008). on Karaites in the Mamluk period, Donald S. Richards, ‘Arabic Documents from the Karaite Community in Cairo’. JESHO 15, no. 1 (1972): pp. 105–162, here mainly 114–125; cf. Zvi Ankori, ‘Some Aspects of Karaite-Rabbanite Relations in Byzantium on the Eve of the First Crusade’, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 24 (1955): pp. 1–38.
20 Miriam Frenkel, ‘Medieval Alexandria: Life in a Port City’, Al-Masaq: Studia Arabo-Islamica Mediterranea 26, no. 1 (2014): pp. 5–35, here 21 seq.; cf. id. Miriam Frenkel, The Compassionate and Benevolent: The Leading Elite in the Jewish Community of Alexandria in the Middle Ages (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 2006); Goldberg, Trade and institutions, mainly pp. 52, 292, 355; for an earlier period also Moshe Gil, Jews in Islamic Countries in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
21 Abraham L. Udovitch, ‘L’énigme d’Alexandrie: sa position au Moyen Age d’après les documents de la Geniza du Caire’, Revue de l’Occident musulman et de la Méditerranée 46 (1987): pp. 71–80;.
22 Cf. the many references to Samaritans in the New testament. This ethno-religious group was, as it seems, particularly strong in the Roman period (over a million), but was then subsequently reduced to a low point of about 150 members at the end of the nineteenth century and is currently recovered to some hundred members, cf. Reinhard Pummer, The Samaritans (Leiden: Brill, 1987).
23 obadiah da Bertinoro, ‘Letters’, in Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages: 19 Firsthand Accounts, ed-ited by Elkan Nathan Adler (London: Routledge, 1930, numerous reprints), pp. 209–250; ‘in Alexandria gibt es ungefähr sechzig jüdische Familienoberhäupter, darunter sind allerdings weder Karäer noch
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Jewish (or rather, Thora-observant) groups that were encountered in Mamluk Egypt.24
travelogues are a prime (and often abused) source of information on Alexandria and its population. The critical problems of the genre (narrative con-ventions, enrichment with encyclopaedic knowledge, catering to needs of read-ership, etc.) have been discussed widely and do not have to be repeated here.25 Among the Jewish travellers two stand out: Meshulam di Volterra and obadiah di Bertinoro. Both travelled through Alexandria in the second half of the fifteenth century, the latter reached the city in 1488 and only mentions the presence of Rabbinic Jews.26 Meshulam identifies Karaites and Samaritans but only in Cairo.27 obadiah later settled in Jerusalem and became an eminent leader of its Jewish community, living in the house of the Nagid (head of the Jewish community in the Mamluk Empire, appointed by the sultan) as his major-domo.28
In addition to oriental Jews (albeit, perhaps, only Rabbinic), another element was added by the fact that Alexandria was the chief Mediterranean port of Egypt.
Jews from Italy and Romaniote Jews from Venetian Crete, Hospitaller Rhodes, or other parts of the (former) Byzantine Empire (Romania) were present, probably alongside North African and perhaps some Spanish (Sephardic) Jews.29
The travelogues describe Jewish communities in some detail, with a strong focus on Rabbinic Jews, while Karaites and Samaritans are perceived as peripheral elements of Judaism.30 These descriptions reveal that even the Arabic Rabbinic Jews, though seen as spiritual brethren, are perceived as orientals: They have no
Samaritaner. Vielmehr handelt es sich um rabbanitische Juden’, Meshulam ben Menah.em mi-v.olt.erah;
Von der Toskana in den Orient: ein Renaissance-Kaufmann auf Reisen ed. & transl. by Daniel Jütte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), p. 43; the same Meshulam gives a clearer breakdown for Cairo: 400 Rabbinic, 150 Karaite and 50 Samaritan families, pp. 54 seq.
24 The variance becomes even greater when one takes into account the subgroups within these commu-nities, for instance Cabbalists: Bertinoro, ‘Letters’, 220.
25 Cf., for instance, Martin Jacobs, Reorienting the East: Jewish Travelers to the Medieval Muslim World (Philadelphia (Pa.): University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Benjamin Arbel, ‘The Port towns of the Levant in Sixteenth-Century travel Literature’, in Mediterranean Urban Culture, 1400–1700, ed. by Alexander Cowan, (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), pp. 151–164; Daniel Jütte’s introduction to Volterah, Von der Toskana, or Stefan Schröder, Zwischen Islam und Christentum. Kulturelle Grenzen in den spätmittelalterlichen Pilgerberichten des Felix Fabri, orbis Medievalis Bd. 11 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009), pp. 7–29; see also the forthcoming PhD thesis of Marci Freedman on Benjamin of tudela.
26 Bertinoro, ‘Letters’, pp. 220–223.
27 Volterah, Von der Toskana, p. 43.
28 Bertinoro, ‘Letters’, pp. 209, 229, 234, 247; on the Nagid, see also Volterah, Von der Toskana, p. 55.
29 Cf. the alleged coalition of Maghribi traders, Avner Greif, ‘Reputation and Coalitions in Medieval trade: Evidence on the Maghribi traders’, Journal of Economic History 49, no. 4 (1989): pp. 857–882;
cf. more recent and comprehensively: Goldberg, Trade and Institutions. More substantial Sephardic im-migration in response to the late fourteenth-century pogroms in Spain is attested for Crete, Rena Lauer,
‘Cretan Jews and the First Sephardic Encounter in the Fifteenth Century’ Mediterranean Historical Review 27, no. 2 (2012): pp. 129–140; for a slightly later period also for Cairo, Bertinoro, ‘Letters’, p. 228.
30 Volterah, Von der Toskana, pp. 43, 54, 55.