258 Jacoby
communities. These factors also account for the establishment of additional
ones in new political or administrative centres created after 1204 and in cities
enjoying swift economic growth in that period. A survey highlighting the spe-
cific features of Jewish settlements will pave the way to considerations regard-
ing the legal and social status of individuals and communities, as well as to
their interaction with society at large.
The well-known Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela, who crossed Byzantine
territory from the second half of 1161 to the spring of 1163, provides the most
detailed list of Jewish communities existing in the empire some 40 years
before the Fourth Crusade.6 However, that list is incomplete and there are
fair chances that the map of Romaniote Jewish settlements will never be fully
reconstructed.7 According to Benjamin of Tudela the Jewish community in
Thebes consisted of 2000 individuals under five leaders, and was thus the larg-
est he visited in the Byzantine Empire except for the one in Constantinople.
Highly-qualified Jewish workers were involved in the local production of
silk textiles and garments, yet their precise share in the Theban silk sector is
unknown.8
Thebes was included in the Frankish lordship of Athens from 1205. There
is good reason to believe that its Jewish community survived the Latin con-
quest, despite the absence of evidence in that respect for about an entire
century after Benjamin’s visit. Moses Galimidi left Thebes for Negroponte
during the late years of the rule of Guy i de La Roche (1225–63). His acquain-
tance with the raw silk market and the operation of silk workshops in Thebes
6 Benjamin of Tudela, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, ed. Marcus N. Adler (London, 1907),
Hebrew text, pp. 11–18. For all references below to Benjamin of Tudela, see the translation in
Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, pp. 333–37. New dating of the journey across Byzantium:
David Jacoby, “Benjamin of Tudela and his ‘Book of Travels,’ ” in Venezia incrocio di culture:
Percezioni di viaggiatori europei e non europei a confronto, ed. Klaus Herbers and Felicitas
Schmieder (Rome, 2008), pp. 144–47, 149. Seven additional localities are documented by
other 12th-century sources: see Michael Toch, The Economic History of European Jews: Late
Antiquity and Early Middle Ages (Leiden, 2013), pp. 270–72.
7 A map has been devised by Nicholas de Lange, Alexander Panayotov and Gethin Rees,
Mapping the Jewish Communities of the Byzantine Empire (2013) accessible at <www.byzan
tineJewry.net>.
8 Benjamin’s population figures have been the subject of diverging interpretations. They are
assessments in round figures, the large ones clearly referring to individuals rather than to
families or households: Jacoby, “Benjamin of Tudela,” pp. 159–61. On Jews in the Theban silk
sector, see David Jacoby, “Silk in Western Byzantium before the Fourth Crusade,” Byzantinische
Zeitschrift, 84/85 (1991/1992), 466, 485–87, repr. in David Jacoby, Trade, Commodities and
Shipping in the Medieval Mediterranean (Aldershot, 1997), vii.