The dissertations offers an analysis of Takkanot Kandiyah, a corpus of communal statutes from the Jewish community in Candia, the capital of Venetian Crete. These texts were written between 1228 and 1583 and collected as a coherent work by the Cretan Jewish historian Elijah Capsali. The collection has been used by scholars as a source regarding the social and economic history of Jewish Candia, but so far, not much attention has been paid to Takkanot Kandiyah as a specific work of Jewish legal literature, providing a unique opportunity to study the development of leadership of a semi-autonomous Jewish community. The dissertation is divided into an introduction, two parts and a conclusion. In the introduction (chapter one), I outline the structure of Takkanot Kandiyah, summarise its historical background and comment on the current state of research on the Jewry in Venetian Crete. Part One (chapters two-six) then provides a detailed overview of Takkanot Kandiyah and set it into its religious, historical, literary, and legal context. In Part Two (chapters seven-ten), I examine the various areas of life touched upon by the statutes and categorise the ordinances depending on the topics covered, pointing out the collection’s concern with both halakhic and (broadly speaking) extra-halakhic matters. The main argument of the dissertation is that Takkanot Kandiyah proves the gradual development of a specific political system in which the Jewish public affairs were managed largely by the group of lay leaders. Many of them were wealthy members of long-established local families whose authority was not sanctioned by their religious education or rabbinic ordination, but by popular consent and the readiness of the Venetian government to respect them as leaders of their coreligionists. The collection also reflects the ways in which the Jewish leadership dealt with the challenges of inner diversity arising from continuing arrivals of Jewish immigrants from various parts of the Mediterranean. Showing a strong tendency towards continuity, yet also an ability to accommodate to the need of the day, Takkanot Kandiyah is a major testimony to the legal history of Cretan Jewry and to the development of leadership and communal autonomy in a pre-modern Jewish community.

La thèse a pour objet la culture juive à Candie au cours des XIVe-XVIe siècles et, en particulier, l’influence exercée par la culture et les traditions des juifs sépharades et ashkénazes, qui s’établirent sur l’île dès la moitié du quatorzième siècle. La thèse se base d’un côté sur des sources administratives et notariales et, de l’autre, sur les manuscrits hébreux produits à Candie ou apportés là-bas par les immigrés pendant la période considérée. Le premier chapitre porte sur la communauté juive de Candie dans la première moitié du XVIe siècle, et fournit de nouvelles informations à l’égard de la situation du quartier juif, de ses synagogues, de sa composition sociale, de sa démographie et de la biographie d’Élie Capsali, qui représentait la principale autorité spirituelle à cette époque. Le deuxième chapitre rassemble les informations disponibles concernant l’immigration juive à Candie des siècles XIV-XV. Le troisième chapitre examine certaines particularités de la liturgie synagogale élaborée par les Juifs de Candie sous l’impulsion de la tradition française et ashkénaze. Le quatrième chapitre analyse deux listes de livres religieux et médicaux: les deux listes, qui remontent à la deuxième moitié du quinzième siècle, sont ici interprétées comme un indice de la diffusion de la culture médicale sépharade à Candie, qui se vérifia par le moyen des immigrés catalans. Le cinquième chapitre est dédié à Mosheh ben Yehudah Galiano, un médecin, philosophe et astronome de Constantinople qui séjourna à Candie de 1526/27 jusqu’à1543. Le dernier chapitre porte sur les effets provoqués dans le quartier juif par l’épidémie de peste qui s’abattit sur Candie en 1592. / The thesis investigates the culture of the Cretan Jews in the XIV-XVI centuries and concentrates on how the Sephardi and Ashkenazi immigrants who began to settle on the island around mid-XIV century contributed in shaping a shared culture. The thesis is based both on the administrative and notarial documents preserved in the State Archive in Venice and on the Hebrew manuscripts produced by Candiote Jews or brought there by the new settlers. The first chapter offers a reconnaissance of the Jewish community of Candia in the early XVI century and brings new information on the geography of the zudeca, its administration, its social composition, the amount of its population, and the biography of its main leader at the time: Elijah Capsali (d. 1550). The third chapter illustrates some of the peculiarities that the Candiote synagogal liturgy developed under the influence of Ashkenazi settlers. The fourth chapter deals with two lists of books found in a manuscript preserved in the University Library of Bologna, and shows how they can be viewed as a testimony of the role played by Catalonian immigrants in the spread of Sephardi medical lore among Candiote Jews. The fifth chapter is dedicated to Mosheh ben Judah Galiano, a physician, philosopher and astronomer who settled in Candia in the late ’20s of the Sixteenth century and left the island on 1543. The sixth chapter offers an examination of the plague that struck Candia in 1592 and its impact on the Jewish community.