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.

Fernand Braudel (1972) in his study The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II suggested, among other things, that the Mediterranean world despite its differences should be conceived of as a unit. The present study is not an attempt to challenge Braudel's entire work on historical, empirical or pragmatological grounds, but an effort to question the unitary and totalitarian conception of the Mediterranean region. Specifically, I explore how a small Mediterranean town, Rethemnos, Crete, Southern Greece, was theorized on the back of this widespread conception that wants the Mediterranean to be a unit, and how a differential reading of the town is possible once various theories and conceptions of postmodernism and poststructuralism are put forward with respect to Rethemnos. I will be drawing on theories of the consumer society (Jean Baudrillard's and Zygmunt Bauman's analyses) in an attempt to document that Rethemnos is a society that is currently organized by recourse to the internal contradictions of the consumer society and on theories of the event and the subject (Alain Badiou's analysis) in order to explain that the Rethemniot subject is undecidable and bound to truth procedures as long as there is an event named after an intervention. Prior to that, I will be challenging, with respect to how the Greek subject was depicted on the back of the unitary fashion of conceiving of the Mediterranean region, a variety of studies of anthropological origin, based on Greece; and I will be also criticizing with respect to how the Greek social formation was dissected, on the back of the same unitary fashion, a variety of other studies of politico-economic origin this time, based on Greece as well, by focusing and drawing on certain aspects of Jacques Derrida's deconstructive strategies and Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's geo-philosophy's lines of flight.

A civilização minóica da Creta da Idade do Bronze foi uma das poucas civilizações européias a organizar a sociedade através de um sistema palacial. Os estudos sobre a formação dos estados minóicos devem analisar em profundidade o sistema administrativo palacial e as mudanças no mesmo ao longo de seus seis séculos de funcionamento - neste trabalho pretende-se analisar a evolução da complexidade das unidades sócio-políticas minóicas através da análise de suas formas administrativas. A definição de categorias de sítios administrativos - pela análise funcional dos vestígios arquiteturais e dos achados arqueológicos dos mesmos - e o estudo dos padrões hierárquicos entre os diversos sítios, serão o cerne do trabalho. O uso de metodologias apropriadas para a análise de processos de mudança e formação de instituições político-administrativas, como a Teoria de Sistemas e os conceitos de peer polity interaction de Colin Renfrew, serão as ferramentas básicas deste projeto. Esse trabalho é um desdobramento de pesquisa desenvolvida em Mestrado realizado no MAE/USP sobre as interações entre os estados primitivos de Creta e as práticas de culto minóicas. / The Minoan Civilization of the Bronze Age Crete was one of the few european civilizations that organized its society through a palatial system. The studies about the development of the Minoan States must analyse thoroughness the administrative palatial system and the changes that have occured on it during its six centuries of functioning. In this thesis we intend to analyse the complexity evolution of the Minoan polities through the analysis of its administrative configurations. The definition of administrative sites - through the function analysis of the architectural vestiges and of its archaeological discoveries - and the study of the hierarchic patterns among the sites, will be the main point of this research. The use of usefull methodologies for the analysis of early state formation and culture change, like systems theory and the concepts of peer polity interaction, will be the basis tools of this project. This research follows research developed in the mastership done in MAE/USP about the interaction between the early states of Crete and the Minoan ritual practices.

Following its acquisition in 1204, Crete became one of Venice’s prime colonial possessions in the Eastern Mediterranean. Venice’s maritime empire was known as the Stato da mar or the Oltremare. Candia, Crete’s capital, was the island’s largest urban centre, the heart of the colony’s administration, and a thriving port. Its inhabitants included patricians sent from Venice to govern the island, noble Cretans and noble Venetians, descendants of the early Venetian colonisers, cittadini, and a host of transient residents. The city’s Jewish community was confined to the Judaica, a section of the urban expanse inside the city’s Byzantine walls. By the sixteenth-century, three centuries of Creto-Venetian co-existence had given birth to an urban society which was polyglot and multi-denominational. Cretans travelled frequently to Venice, which hosted a large Greek community after the fall of Constantinople (1453). This thesis examines aspects of Cretan identity in the sixteenth century, such as class, religion and locality. The importance of appearances in the early modern colonial context is discussed and evidence is presented of Venice’s influence on Cretan attire and the language used to describe such artefacts. Stemming from this, sumptuary legislation is examined and instances when appearances deceived and threatened social order. Sources consulted and brought to bear on the discussion include extant material records, such as embroidery, and archival and published documents, such as state and private correspondence, notarial records, costume books, maps, atlases, contemporary literature, and historical accounts of Crete. The last chapter examines aspects pertaining to Crete’s insularity: the experience of sea travel, the cartographic genre of isolarii, island-books, where Crete featured prominently, the maps of Crete’s most famous cartographer and, finally, the unpublished wills of the Regno di Candia and the island of Scio.

This dissertation offers a social history of the Jews of Candia, Venetian Crete's capital, by investigating how these Jews related to their colonial sovereign, their Latin and Greek Christian neighbors, and their diverse co-religionists in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Latin ducal court records, Hebrew communal ordinances, and notarial materials reveal the unique circumstances of Venetian colonial rule on Crete, including the formalized social hierarchy dividing Latin and Greek Christians, ready access to the Venetian justice system, and Venetian accommodation of pre-colonial legal precedents. Together, these elements enabled and encouraged Jews--individuals and community alike--to invest deeply in the institutions of colonial society. Their investment fostered sustained, meaningful interactions with the Latin and Greeks populations. It even shaped the ways in which Jews engaged with one another, particularly as they brought their quotidian and intracommunal disputes before Venice's secular judiciaries. Though contemporary religious authorities frowned upon litigating against co-religionists in secular courts, people from across the spectrum of Candiote Jewry, from community leaders to unhappily married women, sought Venetian judicial intervention at times. / History

The M.A. thesis deals with the influence of Aegean textile patterns on the decoration of 18th dynasty Egyptian tombs. It attempts to provide answers to the question of a possible reconstruction of relations between the Aegean area and Egypt on the basis of this phenomenon. The first part of the thesis places textile into a broader context, dealing among others with its importance for both cultural areas and the technology of its fabrication. The second part of the thesis focuses in greater detail upon the occurrence of Aegean textile patterns in the New Kingdom, concentrating upon the tombs and the men that used these motives in their tomb decoration. The evaluation of the biographies, titles and the tombs indicates that a ceiling with Aegean textile patterns served as an element of legitimization for both the king and his officials. In the final part of the thesis I was able to establish the incorporation of the symbolic function of the Aegean textile patterns into the concept of kingship. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

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