272 Jacoby
Jews are attested in the island of Chios in 1049, when Emperor Constantine ix
Monomachos granted the head-tax of 15 families to the monastery of Nea
Moni. More than a century later, in 1163, Benjamin of Tudela, estimated that
some 400 Jews under two leaders lived on the island.97 Various proposals have
been offered to explain the large discrepancy between these figures.98 Since the
emperor limited the number of families to 15, it is likely that there were more
Jews on the island in 1049. In addition, their numbers presumably increased
with the arrival of refugees fleeing from Asia Minor after the Seljuk victory of
1071 at the battle of Mantzikert.99 Since the Jews mentioned in 1049 only paid a
head-tax, they were not peasants and did not rent rural land.100
There is reason to believe that Jews continuously resided in Chios in the two
centuries following Benjamin of Tudela’s visit. The island was situated along a
major waterway linking Constantinople both to Italy and Egypt.101 It exported
its mastic, a costly resinous and aromatic substance much in demand in culi-
nary, medical, and other uses.102 In addition, from the 1260s and in any event
from the early 14th century the port of Chios served as transit station for alum
produced at Phocaea, located at a short distance on the coast of Asia Minor.
Alum, a mineral substance, was mainly used in the western textile and leather
industries, and to a small extent in medicine and cosmetics.103 More generally,
97 See above, n. 6.
98 Latest discussion by Nikolas Oikonomides, “The Jews of Chios (1049): A Group of Excusati,”
in Intercultural Contacts in the Medieval Mediterranean: Studies in Honour of David Jacoby,
ed. Benjamin Arbel (London, 1996) [= Mediterranean Historical Review, 10.1–2 (1995)],
pp. 218–25.
99 On the exodus toward Constantinople and the Aegean islands: Speros Vryonis, Jr., The
Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the
Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (Berkeley, 1971), pp. 110–71. One of the Jewish
refugees ultimately settled in Thessalonica; translation and commentary of his letter by
Shlomo D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society. The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as
Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols. (Berkeley, 1967–93), 5:438–43.
100 Andrew Sharf, Byzantine Jewry from Justinian to the Fourth Crusade (London, 1971),
pp. 114–16, followed by Elisabeth Malamut, Les îles de l’Empire byzantin, viie–xiie siècles,
2 vols. (Paris, 1988), 2:168, 170. See Jacoby, “Les Juifs de Byzance,” pp. 128–29.
101 Lilie, Handel und Politik, pp. 118–19.
102 Paul Freedman, “Mastic: A Mediterranean Luxury Product,” Mediterranean Historical
Review 26 (2011), 99–113. For export in the Byzantine period: David Jacoby, “Byzantine
Trade with Egypt from the Mid-Tenth Century to the Fourth Crusade,” Thesaurismata 30
(2000), pp. 31–32, 45 and n. 87, repr. in Jacoby, Commercial Exchange, I.
103 David Jacoby, “Production et commerce de l’alun oriental en Méditerranée, xie–xve
siècles,” in L’alun de Méditerranée, ed. Philippe Borgard, Jean-Pierre Brun and Maurice
Picon (Naples, 2005), pp. 233–34, 236–37, 245, 248–50, 253–54.