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This dissertation traces the course of Jewish history in the kingdom of Castile from the late-thirteenth century to the Toledo riots of 1449. It shows that the security afforded to Jews through their protection by the Crown, and the high-office gained by Jewish royal administrators and tax-farmers, permitted a crossing of cultural boundaries by Jews, rarely seen elsewhere in Europe. Economic reliance underpinned royal protection; a fresh examination of taxation registers shows the extent of the Crown's dependence upon the substantial revenues provided by the communities. These revenues, however, were considerably diminished in the course of the fourteenth century as a consequence of the war of Trastámaran succession. The Castilian and Hebrew records indicate that the integration of the Jewish court elite conferred privilege but was also dangerous for the individuals involved. Rabbinical correspondence reflects fears of secular learning and apostasy, fears confirmed by the conversion of influential Jewish scholars. These converts soon became supporters of the friars' mission to the Jews in the fourteenth century. Though their efforts had little initial success, some voluntary conversions did occur even before the mass riots of 1391. A few such individuals showed how thoroughly they integrated into Christian society, acquiring wealth and property through marital alliances following their conversion. The many forced baptisms that occurred in the riots of 1391, were followed by a further wave of conversion in the early fifteenth century owing much to the preaching of Vincent Ferrer, and his insistence on the segregation of Jews. This study portrays the social pressures, even within a permissive cultural environment in late medieval Castile, pressures which led to the emergence of New Christians. Their contested identity was central to the Toledo rebellion of 1449 which marked a new and ominous chapter in faith relations in the Peninsula.

This project examines the rhetorical functionality of metaphors created and used by victims of Nazi terror during the Holocaust. Exploring the link between knowledge, thought and language, along with an examination of metaphors used by Nazi victims, leads to the definition that metaphor is a vital tool creator of meaning, not merely "ornamental." The project first aims to stress the importance of grounding theories that highlight the strong relationship between metaphors and the culture they develop in. By defining metaphor as a trope possible of not only describing, but also shaping the reality of its users, I argue that studying metaphors used by victims in the camps can reveal how they either retained or gained a certain degree agency through the performative use of language. I claim that victims created and used language to their advantage in a way that enabled their survival. Through this lens, victim power and agency can be evaluated in terms of language from a specifically rhetorical theory that stresses the always-active language user. The research is a rhetorical-textual analysis of the discourse of the Holocaust through an examination of metaphors used by the victims and collected from survivor testimonies found in the Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. The theoretical perspective from which I approach this archive draws on an interdisciplinary theoretical background that includes the fields of communication, rhetoric, philosophy, linguistics, and social-psychological cognitive research, as well as Holocaust studies. The rhetorical analysis of testimonies in the first phase includes extracting metaphors from Holocaust testimonies, identifying their vehicle terms, and finally, determining their functions in camp discourse. The metaphors are then grouped into five major metaphors that illustrate the functionality of victim-created metaphors and then analyzed in an aim to illustrate both the troping of new metaphors and the counter-troping of Nazi-created metaphors as a perfromative form of gaining agency. The use of these metaphors also functions as agency-gaining devices after the Holocaust among survivors making sense of their past experiences. The subsequent conclusion is that for those seeking to understand the Holocaust, metaphors are an important key necessary for comprehending the horrific realities that survivors are trying to express. The project aims to introduce a new rhetorical lens to uncovering historical events such as the Holocaust. The twentieth century saw other regimes of terror intended to eliminate groups of people creating situations in which lexical voids are created, such as the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides. Since those historical events involve violence in such extreme measures that speakers turn to metaphor in order to both describe their horrific reality and gain agency against their oppressors, it is vital that we identify and define a methodology to uncover truths through metaphor.

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In the summer of 1391 anti-Jewish violence spread across the kingdom of Castile and the Crown of Aragon. Unprecedented numbers of Jews were murdered and even more were forcibly converted. These converts, known as conversos, formed a new, self-perpetuating social group, which, together with the rest of Spanish society, remained deeply conscious of its distinct ethnicity and culture. A century later, testimonies to the Spanish Inquisition depict a converso community with a continued, if varied, affiliation to Judaism. This dissertation investigates the economic, social and political factors that promoted Jewish identification among the first two generations of conversos in Majorca following their baptism in 1391. It employs previously unexamined and unpublished archival sources to argue that corporate fiscal obligations had a major impact in shaping the converso community in Majorca, just as they shaped Jewish social and communal life prior to 1391. Conversos organized collectively in order to meet royal fiscal demands, settle their corporate debt and fund social welfare following the disruptions of 1391, adopting administrative models of the former aljama. The monarchy continued to relate to the conversos as a distinct corporate entity in the same ways it had dealt with them as Jews. Royal efforts to prevent converso emigration to the Maghreb, where many fled to renege on Catholicism, carried overtones of the same proto-mercantilist policies that motivated its failed attempts to revivify the island’s Jewish aljama. Publicized restrictions against conversos, many of whom continued to cultivate prior commercial and family relationships with Maghrebi Jews, contributed to popular assumptions that Majorcan conversos at sea were Judaizers, spurring targeted anti-converso and anti-Jewish piracy. Conversos thus remained entrenched in the same socioeconomic structures, and employed the same licit and illicit strategies to cope with royal exploitation, as when they were Jews. This perpetuated a group identity that was unmistakeably anchored in their Jewish past, and which could promote other aspects of Jewish affiliation. In 1404 the conversos established a formal confraternity which replicated the social welfare programs and administrative techniques of the former aljama within the framework of a Catholic pious society, representing one of the first necessary adaptations to Christian life.

In the summer of 1391 anti-Jewish violence spread across the kingdom of Castile and the Crown of Aragon. Unprecedented numbers of Jews were murdered and even more were forcibly converted. These converts, known as conversos, formed a new, self-perpetuating social group, which, together with the rest of Spanish society, remained deeply conscious of its distinct ethnicity and culture. A century later, testimonies to the Spanish Inquisition depict a converso community with a continued, if varied, affiliation to Judaism. This dissertation investigates the economic, social and political factors that promoted Jewish identification among the first two generations of conversos in Majorca following their baptism in 1391. It employs previously unexamined and unpublished archival sources to argue that corporate fiscal obligations had a major impact in shaping the converso community in Majorca, just as they shaped Jewish social and communal life prior to 1391. Conversos organized collectively in order to meet royal fiscal demands, settle their corporate debt and fund social welfare following the disruptions of 1391, adopting administrative models of the former aljama. The monarchy continued to relate to the conversos as a distinct corporate entity in the same ways it had dealt with them as Jews. Royal efforts to prevent converso emigration to the Maghreb, where many fled to renege on Catholicism, carried overtones of the same proto-mercantilist policies that motivated its failed attempts to revivify the island’s Jewish aljama. Publicized restrictions against conversos, many of whom continued to cultivate prior commercial and family relationships with Maghrebi Jews, contributed to popular assumptions that Majorcan conversos at sea were Judaizers, spurring targeted anti-converso and anti-Jewish piracy. Conversos thus remained entrenched in the same socioeconomic structures, and employed the same licit and illicit strategies to cope with royal exploitation, as when they were Jews. This perpetuated a group identity that was unmistakeably anchored in their Jewish past, and which could promote other aspects of Jewish affiliation. In 1404 the conversos established a formal confraternity which replicated the social welfare programs and administrative techniques of the former aljama within the framework of a Catholic pious society, representing one of the first necessary adaptations to Christian life.

Lelov, an otherwise quiet village about fifty miles south of Cracow (Poland), is where Rebbe Dovid (David) Biederman founder of the Lelov ultra-orthodox (Chasidic) Jewish group, - is buried. His grave is now a focal point of the Chasidic pilgrimages. The pilgrims themselves are a Chasidic hodgepodge, dressed in fur-brimmed hats, dreadlocked, and they all come to Lelov for the same reasons: to pray, love, and eat with their brethren. The number of pilgrims has grown exponentially since the collapse of Communism in Poland in 1989; today about three hundred ultra-orthodox Jews make a trek. Mass pilgrimage to kevorim (Chasidic graves), is quite a new phenomenon in Eastern Europe but it has already became part of Chasidic identity. This thesis focuses on the Chasidic pilgrimage which has always been a major part of the Jewish tradition. However, for the past fifty years, only a devoted few have been able to undertake trips back to Poland. With the collapse of Communism, when the sites in Eastern and Central Europe became more open and much more accessible, the ultra-orthodox Jews were among the first to create a ‘return movement’. Those who had been the last to leave Poland in search of asylum are now becoming the initiators of the re-discovery of Jewish symbols in this part of the world.