The Jewish Communities in the Social Fabric of Latin Greece 259
was undoubtedly one of the reasons inducing David Kalomiti, a rich Jewish
merchant of Negroponte involved in silk transactions, to recruit him in his
service. The wandering Spanish mystic, Abraham Abulafia, appears to have
been in Thebes in the late 1270s.9 A son of Moses Galimidi fled in or shortly
after 1300 from Negroponte to Thebes.10 There was a well-organised Jewish
community in this city around that time, as attested by an epitaph of 1337/38
recording the name of the grandfather of the deceased, a parnas or communal
leader presumably in office some 30 years earlier.11 The inscription also points
to the continuity of the local Jewish community after Thebes’ occupation in
1311 by a military contingent known as the Catalan Company, although some
Jews may have fled at that time to Negroponte, like many Latins.12 Another epi-
taph dated 1336 and the colophon of a manuscript dated 1367 confirm the pres-
ence of the community under Catalan rule.13 The occupation of Thebes in 1379
by another military contingent, the Navarrese Company, may have generated
yet another exodus of Jews to Negroponte.14 A Jewish professional scribe from
Spanish Toledo worked in Thebes in 1415.15 The city pursued the production
of silk textiles throughout the 13th and 14th century.16 However, the continu-
ous existence of the local Jewish community in that period does not neces-
sarily imply Jewish participation in their manufacture, for which there is no
evidence. The Ottomans occupied the city in 1458.
9 Moshe Idel, “The Kabbalah in Byzantium: Preliminary Remarks,” in Jews in Byzantium,
p. 663.
10 Information on the Kalomiti and Galimidi families in a Hebrew letter published by Carlo
Bernheimer, “Document relatif aux Juifs de Négrepont,” Revue des Études Juives 65 (1913),
224–28; translated with commentary by Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, pp. 234–40,
no. 30. i shall deal elsewhere with the dating of the letter and the events it records.
11 Text of the epitaph in Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, p. 270, no. 60b. On the title parnas,
see ibid., pp. 99–100.
12 On the Latins: David Jacoby, “The Demographic Evolution of Euboea under Latin Rule,
1205–1470,” in The Greek Islands and the Sea, ed. Julian Chrysostomides, Charalambos
Dendrinos and Jonathan Harris (Camberley, 2004), pp. 153–54, repr. in David Jacoby,
Travellers, Merchants and Settlers across the Mediterranean, Eleventh-Fourteenth Centuries
(Farnham, 2014), ix.
13 Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, pp. 269–70, no. 60a, and p. 287, no. 92.
14 Jacoby, “The Demographic Evolution,” p. 154.
15 Bowman, The Jews of Byzantium, pp. 302–03, no. 117.
16 David Jacoby, “The Production of Silk Textiles in Latin Greece,” in Τεχνογνωσία στη
λατινοκρατούμενη Ελλάδα [Technology in Latin-Occupied Greece] (Athens, 2000), pp. 24–27,
repr. in David Jacoby, Commercial Exchange across the Mediterranean: Byzantium, the
Crusader Levant, Egypt and Italy (Aldershot, 2005), xii.