Medical Authority and Jewish Power in Fifteenth-Century Venetian Crete

• In Event: Authority beyond Autonomy: Re-thinking Jewish Power in the Medieval and Modern Mediterranean

Abstract

Despite both popular and learned Christian aversion to Jewish doctors, states across the medieval Mediterranean turned to Jewish medical practitioners to diagnose, treat, and testify about Christian patients. In late medieval Venetian Crete, Jewish physicians and surgeons hired by the colonial government to treat and report on wounded and ill residents greatly outnumbered Christian doctors. As a result, instead of existing at the margins of Christian society, segregated by choice and force, the Jewish doctors of Venetian Crete functioned as an ever-present, respected, and sought-after subgroup considered a legitimate part of wider non-Jewish society. They wielded official authority, visible in the legal privileges granted to them. But they also earned unofficial authority, apparent in the ways Christians related to and treated Jewish doctors inside and outside the confines of their professional context.
This paper addresses some of the social implications of Jewish access to, and state-sponsored medical authority over, all kinds of Christians in Crete—Latin rite and Greek Orthodox, rich and poor, and male and female. In particular, this talk will focus on an unusual criminal trial from 1419, in which a Jewish doctor was accused, convicted, and eventually acquitted of the murder of his pregnant Greek patient-cum-mistress. Far from portraying anti-Jewish biases leading to the accusation, as we might expect to find, the records of this case instead illustrate a society in which the Jewish doctor could enter and exit locations and engage in social activities usually deemed off-limits for Jews, enabled by virtue of his status as a state-authorized doctor.
Even with the occasional appearance of traditional anti-Jewish rhetoric in the sources, it seems that for many of Crete’s Christians, Jewish doctors’ professional identities superseded their religious identities. This reality allowed these Jews to transgress their “proper” positions on the religiously inflected social hierarchy of medieval Christendom. In addressing this upended hierarchy, this paper also contends that individual Jews in the medieval Mediterranean characterized themselves according to multiple axes of identity, and that their religious identity marker was only one, albeit important, axis.

author

• Rena Nechama Lauer, Oregon State University