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CHAPTER 1

Language and Identity

“I am a Hebrew”

Near the end of the first millennium, it is told, a Jewish apostate from Blois named Seḥoq ben Esther Israeli made his way to a city on the edge of Tsarefat, where he hid his apostasy, married, and pursued all manner of wickedness.¹ Not satisfied with being “ruler and judge” in his wife’s home,² Seḥoq plotted to take over the property of a pious Jew who lived nearby, hiring twelve Gentile men to kill him. The chain of events that ensued nearly destroyed the Jewish community.

If this “terrible tale” (ma‘aseh nora’), as Abraham Berliner calls it, reports historical truth, it is a truth obscured by literary symbols and conventions. Kenneth Stow analyzes the evil protagonist’s name as a reminder of the ambiguities and dangers of converts: “He is seḥoq [sic], joke, or even a gamble; ben esther, the fictionalized heroine, but one who had to deny her Jewishness to play the role—and whose identity, therefore, remained and still remains always in doubt; yisraeli, perhaps a play on the much debated question of Verus Israel. Did that title belong to the Jew or the Christian? Seḥoq obviously tried to be both.”³ (We might also translate Seḥoq as “Laughter” or “Laughingstock”; Verus Israel refers here to the Christian church’s claim of being the new and only true Israel.)⁴

The name of the protagonist is unvocalized in the manuscript, and intriguingly enough, its spelling () also admits a second interpretation: Shaḥuq (“Rubbed out,” “Pulverized”). The two interpretations (Seḥoq: “Laughter,” “Laughingstock”; Shaḥuq: “Rubbed out”) encapsulate two of the most important aspects of the Purim holiday: laughter and obliteration. Seḥoq is a new Amalek, a Haman, and the proposed second reading recalls the blotting out of Haman’s name with noise during the public reading of the Book of Esther on the feast of Purim, in accordance with Deut. 25:19, which enjoins the Jews to blot out the memory of Amalek.⁵ In 2 Sam. 22:43, the root sh-ḥ-q is used to refer to the obliteration of enemies. As for Seḥoq’s matronym (ben Esther), it evokes Haman’s nemesis, suggesting well before the plot unfolds that this enemy of the Jewish people will be thwarted.

Biblical allusions in the story serve as reminders of other brushes with mass destruction. The pious Jew is of the house of Levi, like Moses (Exod. 2:1), and God stiffens Seḥoq’s heart as he did those of Pharaoh and the men Joshua fought, against terrible odds, in conquering land for Israel.⁶ Seḥoq identifies himself to the Jewish communities he visits with words from Jonah, which in this context evoke God’s eleventh-hour pardon of Nineveh: “He went from there to the towns with Jewish communities that he found. He stirred them with deceitful words, saying to them, ‘I am a Hebrew’ [Jon. 1:9]. The house of Jacob felt compassion for him, and they provided for him according to their custom in every town that he visited.”⁷ Seḥoq convinces the Jews he visits that he is one of them by his words “I am a Hebrew,” identifying himself with a linguistic or ethnic, rather than religious, term. Christians and Jews alike studied Hebrew during the Middle Ages,⁸ but only the Jews formed a Hebrew textual community. Hebrew and Jewishness were such close associates that in Latin, Old French, and many other languages (including modern English), words meaning “Hebrew” come also to mean “Jew,” and saying “I am a Hebrew” is—or should be—tantamount to saying, “I am a Jew.” But Seḥoq is a deceiver.

Sociolinguistics is concerned with language variation, of which we perceive two major sorts in the story of Seḥoq ben Esther and in the picture of medieval French Jewry sketched in the introduction. The first is variation between individuals or groups. The Jews of medieval northern France inhabited a multicolored linguistic environment in which the mother tongue was most often a variety of French and the father tongue Latin or Hebrew, depending on one’s religious community. French speakers were conscious of regional, situational, and social variation within their own language (see below). Some came into contact with native speakers of other languages.

The second type of variation at least implicit in the story of Seḥoq is highly individual. Modern sociolinguistic research has shown that individuals change the way they speak depending on topic, audience, and setting. They may use language, consciously or unconsciously, to resemble their audience more closely and to build or reinforce alliances; they may even use language to do the opposite.⁹ Sarah Bunin Benor, for example, has shown that American Jews who have chosen to become Orthodox dynamically construct and maintain their orthodox identity through many behaviors, including linguistic ones. They may acquire Hebrew and Yiddish loanwords and distinctly Jewish syntactic constructions, phonological processes, and intonational contours.¹⁰ Keeping in mind that Seḥoq may be a fictional character, we can assume that in convincing Jews he met that he was one of them, it was not only what he said that was important but also how he said it.

As Gabrielle Spiegel has observed, certain pre- and post-structuralisms have viewed language “not as a window on the world it transparently reflects, but as constructing that world, that is, as creating rather than imitating reality.”¹¹ If we wish to explore whether and how medieval French Jews’ spoken language helped construct their world and their identities, it is crucial first to determine how they spoke and whether their speech ever identified them as Jews, setting them apart from Christians. Only then may we ask whether and how the Jews’ vernacular contributed to the shaping of their identities and affected the way they presented themselves and were perceived by each other and by others, and, to return to Seḥoq ben Esther, what speech characteristics such an apostate might have adopted so as to construct and reinforce the illusion that he was an observant Jew.

“Une langue fantôme”?

Robert Le Page and Andrée Tabouret-Keller have stated the uncontroversial but sometimes overlooked truth that “everybody’s (layman’s and scholar’s) theories and suppositions about language and society are powerfully conditioned by the culture and tradition within which he/she works—conditioned, that is, either positively or negatively.”¹² Sara Japhet has located the strongest conditioning factors in “the unconscious, psychic empathy of the scholar with the object of his research.”¹³ Current research on the vernacular of the Jews of medieval northern France inevitably builds on the work of two European-born Jewish men whose contributions to our understanding of the issue have been among the most extensive, lasting, and influential: Max Weinreich (b. 1894 in Latvia, d. 1969 in New York) and Max Berenblut, better known by the name he took after making aliyah to Israel, Menahem Banitt (b. 1914 in Antwerp, d. 2007 in Tel Aviv).¹⁴

In discussions of Jewish languages, scholars often take a comparative approach, and it is worth noting that the hypothesis that there was a distinctively Jewish variety of French in the Middle Ages, often referred to as “Judeo-French,” has been especially well received among scholars who work on Jewish languages more generally.¹⁵ It is reasonable to suppose that experience with, or an interest in, a Jewish proclivity to Judaizing local dialects in other parts of the Diaspora, such as North Africa, the Iberian peninsula, and Central and Eastern Europe, may predispose scholars to look favorably upon the hypothesis that the same happened in France, particularly given the Jews’ long presence there (it is believed that Jews first settled in Gaul in Roman times).¹⁶ Skepticism about Jewish linguistic varieties or a particular linguistic variety, on the other hand, could have the opposite effect.

There is a correlation between Weinreich’s and Banitt’s attitudes toward Yiddish and their opinions regarding the existence or nonexistence of a distinctive medieval Jewish dialect of French that should make us take pause. Weinreich, who grew up in a German-speaking family, learned Yiddish as a teenager and went on to devote his scholarly career to the language.¹⁷ The four-volume Geshikhte fun der Yidisher Shprakh (History of the Yiddish language) is considered his magnum opus.¹⁸ Weinreich viewed Jewish linguistic difference positively and, as we shall see, sought out evidence of it in medieval France. Banitt, whose published remarks suggest that he looked on Yiddish with scorn, argued that the Jews’ medieval French was pure and downplayed ways in which it differed from that of non-Jews.

Banitt was strongly influenced by another west European scholar of roughly the same generation, Louis Rabinowitz (b. 1906 Edinburgh, d. 1984).¹⁹ In The Social Life of the Jews of Northern France (1938), Rabinowitz famously declared, “apart from the purely religious life, there was an almost complete social assimilation of the life of the Jewish community [in medieval northern France] to that of the general community. In their language, their names, their dress, they were indistinguishable from non-Jews.”²⁰ The reality was more nuanced, as even a reading of Rabinowitz’s own work makes clear.²¹ We may wonder whether these words reflect wishful thinking for a happier and more peaceful Jewish past; they seem also to express the heartfelt concern with the integration of oppressed minorities and convictions about human equality and worth that were to become increasingly visible in Rabinowitz’s later life, especially in his forceful criticisms of apartheid policies in South Africa.

The scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement from the first half of the nineteenth century to World War I also displayed an interest in the fluency of medieval Jews in the languages spoken around them, artifacts of which include the numerous vernacular glosses in commentaries. Many of the studies Rabinowitz and Banitt relied upon were written by men associated with that school—Abraham Geiger, Samuel Poźnanski, and Leopold Zunz, for example. Wissenschaft des Judentums was driven by a specific political agenda: portraying the Jewish intellectual heritage as equal to the non-Jewish one and the Jews therefore deserving of rights equal to those of non-Jews. Not surprisingly, Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars “consciously avoided” the issue of Jewish national identity, as Japhet reports,²² and they preferred to emphasize the linguistic integration of the Jews of medieval northern France rather than explore evidence of their difference.

Weinreich described Jewish linguistic distinctiveness in heroic terms and portrayed language and community as inseparable. He described Yiddish as a living work of Jewish genius deliberately constructed out of pieces from Hebrew, German, and other vernaculars—among them medieval Jewish French. (Weinreich preferred the term Western Loez, which he defined as “Judeo-French,”²³ so that it might be studied in its own right and not suffer from comparison with French.)

Arriving in areas where variants of German were spoken, the Jews created their own language. This language preserved fragments of Hebrew— frequently in greatly modified form—and also elements of the vernaculars that had been brought along. It incorporated parts of the language of the coterritorial population, but the stock material was so transformed that it became indigenously Jewish. And when the major part of the Yiddish-speaking community moved many hundreds of miles away it took along the language, developed it, and later even transported it overseas. This scattered and dispersed handful was not swallowed by the majority, and thus for over a millennium a language was in the making, which must be considered—the reference here is to language itself, not its literature—among the highest achievements of the Jewish national genius.²⁴

Weinreich was not alone in associating Jewish linguistic distinctiveness with national genius. In The Heroic Age of Franco-German Jewry (1969), Polish-born Irving Agus argued that the majority of twentieth-century Ashkenazic Jews descended from five to ten thousand extraordinarily resilient ancestors. “What were the special characteristics of these five to ten thousand persons,” he asks, “that enabled them to achieve such outstanding success in the struggle for existence? What natural qualities did they possess, what advantages of background and forms of inner organization, what special educational and cultural traditions that enabled them successfully to control their very difficult and very hostile environment and eventually to emerge as numerically the largest, culturally the most creative, and politically the most significant, branch of the Jewish people of the twentieth century?”²⁵ For Agus, the “style of living, system of education, great brotherly devotion, and unusually progressive form of organization” of medieval Ashkenazi Jewry resulted from rigorous Darwinian-style selection in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages (second century B.C.E. to third century C.E. and fourth to eighth century C.E.).²⁶ It is little wonder that when it came to language, he preferred to believe that the medieval French spoken by Jews in northern France was highly distinctive.²⁷

Yiddish, considered by Weinreich one of “the highest achievements of the Jewish national genius,” was often stigmatized as a corrupt dialect of German and dismissed as a “jargon” by Jews and non-Jews alike.²⁸ In 1699 Johann Christoph Wagenseil wrote, “The Jews have dealt with no language as ‘sinfully,’ as one says, as with our German language. They have given it a totally foreign intonation and pronunciation. They have mutilated good German words, they have tortured them, they have inverted their meaning as well as invented new words unknown to us. They have mixed innumerable Hebrew words and turns of phrase into German.”²⁹ “What a German!” Friedrich Engels declared in the nineteenth century, referring in the same context to the “peddler Jews, their lice and their dirt.”³⁰ For non-Jews opposed to Jewish emancipation in the nineteenth century, Yiddish epitomized the vulgarization that Jews would bring with them into society. For modernizing Jews, Yiddish was a barrier to greater social and cultural assimilation. Early on, Moses Mendelssohn’s (1729–1786) translations of books of the Bible into German and his writing of a modern commentary were central to the modernization effort.

Steven Aschheim describes in his book Brothers and Strangers how many Jews of western Europe viewed east European Jews as “culturally backward creatures of ugly and anachronistic ghettoes” and how this served as “a symbolic construct by which they could distinguish themselves from their less fortunate, unemancipated East European brethren.”³¹ Yiddish, stigmatized as a corrupted form of German, came to be associated by many west European Jews—many of them speakers of Yiddish themselves—with the purported degeneracy and backwardness of east European Jewish culture. In tsarist Russia, the Maskilim and Jewish intelligentsia embraced Hebrew and Russian, respectively, and although most knew Yiddish, they dismissed it as a jargon. “Only at the turn of the century,” David Fishman writes, “primarily under the influence of the Jewish labor movement and its political arm, the Bund, did a segment of the Jewish intelligentsia change its attitude towards Yiddish, and begin to view it as a valued cultural medium or as a national cultural treasure.”³² Regarding Jews hostile to Yiddish, Sander Gilman hypothesizes: “in order to deal with their real fear of being treated as a Jew, they accept the qualities ascribed by the reference group to their own language.”³³

Without acknowledging the ideological underpinnings of his own position, Agus saw clearly that many of his predecessors had been driven by a desire to believe that “Rashi and his contemporaries were much more ‘modern’ than Polish-Russian Jews of the turn of the twentieth century.”³⁴ Those Polish-Russian Jews were overwhelmingly speakers of Yiddish: in the 1897 census of the Russian Empire, which included the Polish provinces in the Pale of settlement, over 97 percent of Jewish respondents identified their daily language as Yiddish.³⁵

It is against this backdrop that we must read Banitt’s arguments against the notion of a Judeo-French dialect. Banitt associates Yiddish with a long and dismal history of Jewish oppression, describing it as the language of Jews who lived “on the margins of Christian society,” “eternal refugees in their wretched ghettos and their ill-fated Judengassen.”³⁶ He understands “Judeo-French” to mean substandard or deformed French.³⁷ He calls D. S. Blondheim’s notion of Judeo-French (characterized especially by loanwords from Hebrew) “a sort of amorphous and heterogeneous language that does not even deserve the name ‘language,’ a koine, whose evolution across time and space seems indiscernible, one ‘Jewish dialect’ among so many others.”³⁸ He continues:

Tout porte à croire … que les Juifs de France, avant leur expulsion à la fin du XIV^e siècle, parlaient la langue, le dialecte et le patois de ceux au milieu desquels ils vivaient, et ne parlaient que cela: le caennnais à Caen, l’orléanais à Orléans, le troyen à Troyes, son patois bourguignon particulier à Brinon. Les formes picardes et les expressions provençales du champenois (ou lorrain) Colin Muset, les latinismes du Psautier de Metz, les formes provençales et les archaïsmes dans Aucassin et Nicolette, ont-ils jamais fait penser à quelqu’un que leurs auteurs parlaient une “langue vulgaire”, un charabia panaché?³⁹

(Everything points to this: that the Jews of France, before their expulsion at the end of the fourteenth century, spoke the language, the dialect, and the patois of the people among whom they lived, and they spoke only that: the dialect of Caen in Caen, the dialect of Orleans in Orleans, the dialect of Troyes in Troyes, and in Brinon, its own special variety of Burgundian. The Picard features and the Provençal expressions of the Champenois (or Lorraine) [poet] Colin Muset, the Latinisms of the Metz Psalter, the Provencal elements and archaisms in Aucassin and Nicolette—did they ever make anyone think that their authors spoke a “vulgar tongue,” a motley gobbledygook?)

Banitt was not blind to the Hebrew borrowings in medieval Jewish texts in French, as his mention of regionalisms in other medieval French works indicates, but he objected to calling attention to them through the use of a special name, Judeo-French. This opinion is justifiable (though we must point out that speaking geographical dialects does not exclude the possibility of speaking them in distinctive ways). What shocks is the phrase “un charabia panaché” (motley gobbledygook) to describe a variety of French marked by Hebrew loanwords, archaisms, and other nonstandard elements. The implication is that Banitt saw Yiddish, too, as a “motley gobbledygook,” and that his stance on Jewish linguistic distinctiveness in medieval France (i.e., that there was none) was colored by his attitudes toward Yiddish.

“German Jews,” Aschheim writes, “were never able to forget that they shared a common border with the unemancipated Eastern ghetto masses,”⁴⁰ a reality reinforced by Germany’s status as a destination and conduit for east European Jews migrating westward. Banitt was born in Antwerp, Belgium, but it is perhaps worth noting that two circumstances led to a highly visible east European Jewish presence there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which may or may not have influenced Banitt’s views: its status as a major gateway for east Europeans heading toward America and its thriving diamond industry. Simon Schwarzfuchs reports that in 1920–21, 23,656 emigrating Jews passed through Antwerp’s port and that from 1900 to 1939, its Jewish population increased almost sevenfold, from 8,000 to 55,000.⁴¹

Scholarly writing should be dispassionate, and the emotional engagement revealed by Banitt’s remarks about the Jews’ French is reason enough to reconsider his evidence against medieval Jewish linguistic distinctiveness in northern France. Preferring an idyllic vision of medieval Franco-Jewish integration and stability, Banitt argued that French-speaking Jews in the Middle Ages (1) were not segregated, (2) were fully assimilated into Christian society, and (3) tended to remain in one locale, deliberately focusing on three factors commonly cited as contributing to the rise of Jewish languages— segregation, lack of assimilation, and migration.⁴² In arguing that the Jews were fully assimilated into Christian society, Banitt rightly emphasizes the small size of most Jewish communities but goes too far when he declares, “Paris never had more than one hundred Jews.”⁴³ Even Rabinowitz, whom Banitt cites in this discussion and whose own study must be consulted with care,⁴⁴ puts the Jewish population of Paris in the hundreds, noting that the number of adult taxpayers numbered 121 and 85 in 1292 and 1298, respectively, according to rolls published by Isidore Loeb.⁴⁵ Other scholars have given even higher estimates, as discussed later in this chapter. In order to emphasize the dialectal purity of Jewish speech, Banitt dwelled on the tendency of many medieval French Jews to stay within seigniorial domains. But while there were certainly real barriers to Jewish movement into and out of lordships, it did exist, even before the first expulsion of the Jews from the royal domain in 1182.⁴⁶ Banitt wrote that the Jews prayed in French and that certain unnamed offices were performed only in French.⁴⁷ Jews prayed in French at times, but existing medieval French- and Ashkenazi-rite prayer books are written almost exclusively in Hebrew, as he certainly knew. Much of Banitt’s article is devoted to a seemingly meticulous presentation and refutation of “Judeo-French vocabulary” directed primarily against the work of Raphael Levy, who included many common Old French words in his studies (for example, kant [“when”]) because he was interested in the totality of the Jews’ French lexicon, not just distinctive vocabulary items.⁴⁸ Banitt says little about the most distinctive lexical items in medieval Jewish texts in Old French, some of which are discussed below, dismissing them as few in number and unimportant.⁴⁹ In arguing against Levy, Banitt occasionally explains words from Levy’s studies in cavalier fashion, including asseser, which he relates to assesser through the noun asseseance and defines as “ ‘raffermir’ sa voix, quand on est brûlé vif” (“strengthen” one’s voice, when burned alive). Banitt does not note that this is a definition that he himself invented based on the word’s context in the Troyes elegy and that assesser’s attested, unrelated meaning is “assess, value; assess for tax purposes.” (I have since argued that the word in the elegy is properly read as assenser [“instruct”].)⁵⁰

Banitt titled his diatribe against the notion of a Jewish French “Une langue fantôme: Le judéo-français.” The adjective phantom can mean imaginary or nonexistent; the noun refers to something with no physical reality as well as something dreaded or despised. Judeo-French was indeed one of Banitt’s phantoms. Whether it was a phantom language depends entirely on what we take “Judeo-French” to mean. Medieval Jewish texts in French were written for and by Jews in Hebrew letters, and they contain distinctive lexical items, most of them from Hebrew. According to definitions of “Jewish language” put forward by various scholars, the Jews’ medieval French is one.⁵¹ Although some scholars may prefer more stringent definitions that disqualify the Jews’ medieval French from being called a Jewish language, it will be shown below that, based on the written evidence we have, calling the Jews’ medieval French “identical” to or “indistinguishable” from the medieval French spoken and written by Christians is untenable.

When east and west European Jewish scholars born near the turn of the twentieth century confronted the question of Jewish linguistic distinctiveness in medieval France, they often did so having already taken some sort of a stand on Yiddish, even if only a private one. For those who associated Yiddish with crowded and dirty ghettos, a lack of cultivation, and marginalization and persecution, the proposal that Jews living in France in a time before ghettos also spoke a distinctly Jewish vernacular may have been an uncomfortable, even intolerable one. Specifically, I have raised the possibility that Banitt’s rejection of the idea of a distinctively Jewish way of speaking medieval French was influenced by associations like these, and perhaps also by the emphasis of the earlier Wissenschaft des Judentums movement on Jewish integration. Scholars relatively unfettered by these biases were sometimes held by ideological agendas of their own. Claiming that great scholars like Rashi did speak a distinctly Jewish variety of Old French might be said to play a redemptive role, raising the stature of all Jewish languages; focusing on differences between Jewish languages and co-territorial non-Jewish languages reinforces Jewish unity. We have seen that Weinreich associated Yiddish with genius, and that Agus, another defender of Judeo-French, exalted Jewish difference in other, non-linguistic realms.

When one assimilates the views of other scholars without considering the forces that helped shape them or subjecting them to critical analysis, one risks becoming handicapped by their biases and prejudices even without sharing them. Recent scholarship on medieval French-speaking Jews and their literature has frequently cited Banitt’s article “Une langue fantôme” as the last word on the question of whether the Jews’ French was distinctive. As we have seen, however, the many flaws in Banitt’s argument require us to step back and consider this question anew. Yes, the Jews of France generally spoke French. But they used it in a distinctively Jewish way—writing it in the Hebrew script and incorporating Hebrew and other Jewish lexical items.

In the rest of this chapter I put aside the question of whether the Jews spoke “Judeo-French” or a “Jewish language,” because any answers we might propose would depend on our definitions of these terms. Instead, referring to the Jews’ French simply as “French,” but recognizing that languages are dynamic systems and that linguistic variation is the norm rather than the exception, I focus on ways in which the components of medieval Jewish identities asserted themselves through language, especially the vernacular. I also consider whether the Jews’ French might have differed structurally from that of non-Jews and, if so, to suggest avenues for future research.

Religious Difference, Linguistic Difference

The Jews of medieval France lived and worked among Christians: Rigord (d. c. 1209), self-identified chronicler of the kings of France and author of the Gesta Philippi Augusti, mentions Christian servants in Jewish households and relationships between Christians and the Jews who loaned them money or who bought grain and animals from them.⁵² But their religion ensured a certain level of social distinctiveness. Dietary laws meant that observant Jews bought meat from Jewish butchers and took wine and meals with other Jews, not Christians. They had their own educational system and their own means of administering justice. They often clustered together in residential streets or neighborhoods that were nevertheless not exclusive, and they tended to marry within the group.⁵³ Can a distinctive dialect or way of speaking arise or be maintained under such conditions? Studies of language variation in modern populations have shown that it can,⁵⁴ and they harmonize with broader findings about the influence of close-knit social networks on language variation and change.⁵⁵ To take only two examples, Charles Boberg finds significant differences between the vowels produced by English speakers of Ashkenazic Jewish, Italian, and Irish descent who have grown up in Montreal,⁵⁶ and he relates them to residential patterns as well as to the minority status of English there. Concentrations of Jews in particular neighborhoods encourage the creation and maintenance of close social networks that both reinforce shared elements of linguistic difference within the group and resist assimilation to patterns of linguistic variation outside the group.⁵⁷ Perfect homogeneity is not a prerequisite: the Jewish neighborhoods of Montreal are no more exclusive than the medieval rues des Juifs and juiveries. Clive Holes, citing “religious cleavage,” shows that Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims in Bahrain have spoken dramatically different dialects for one hundred fifty to two hundred years despite living in close proximity to one another. Sunnis and Shi’is are segregated: they often live with others of their faith, they socialize among themselves, and they tend to marry within the group. Sunnis and Shi’is also differ from each other in education level, the kinds of employment they engage in, and social custom. All of these also held true for many, though not all, medieval French-speaking Jews.

That Jews generally married within the group, that they worshiped and studied in a Jewish environment, and that they had specifically Jewish customs, even if these were sometimes influenced by their Christian surroundings, are well accepted. More delicate is the claim that Jews often lived among others of their faith. Scholars have rightly emphasized that there were no Jewish ghettos during the Middle Ages⁵⁸ and that many medieval settlements probably had only one or a few Jewish families.⁵⁹ Nonetheless, archaeological and documentary evidence suggests that particularly in urban settings, Jewish households often clustered together in what Louis Rabinowitz calls “selfappointed Ghettoes”—Jewish neighborhoods and streets.⁶⁰

Consider Paris’s Ile de la Cité. At the beginning of Philip Augustus’s reign, approximately one-fifth of the population of the Cite (perhaps one thousand residents) may have been Jewish, with many of these Jews concentrated in at least one Jewry.⁶¹ Jewish neighborhoods were not exclusive (Paris tax lists of 1292, 1296, and 1297, a little over a century later, show scattered non-Jewish families living on Jewish streets),⁶² but as William Jordan has observed, “Even if … not all the people living in the Ile de la Cité jewries were Jews, there is enough evidence to suggest that most of them were and that a large number of Jewish residences were scattered about the tiny island.” Rigord, he adds, “paints a picture that is completely receptive to [this] demographic sketch … [he] waxes hot about the Jews controlling half of Paris before Philip Augustus expelled them.”⁶³ The Jewish neighborhoods of Paris, of which the Juiverie de la Cité was only one,⁶⁴ and Jewish neighborhoods in other major centers including Rouen, Troyes, and London would have fostered the creation and maintenance of social ties between their Jewish residents just as modern ethnic neighborhoods do. These, in turn, are known to contribute to linguistic distinctiveness.

The role of differences in types of employment in fostering segregation is similarly delicate. During the first part of the Middle Ages, Jews exercised many of the same professions as Christians, but by the twelfth century circumstances had pushed them into engaging primarily in commerce and trade, especially lending at interest.⁶⁵ This hardly eliminated Christian-Jewish interactions, though it possibly diminished their variety. Concerning the Jews’ social segregation, the rise of guilds, from which Jews were usually excluded,⁶⁶ is potentially more significant.

Migration is a major contributor to linguistic distinctiveness.⁶⁷ A major feature of some dialects of Judeo-Arabic is the presence of “migrated or displaced” dialectal features—linguistic features that are found in Arabic dialects from other regions, but not in the Arabic dialect spoken in the immediately surrounding territory.⁶⁸ Children of Jews expelled from France who grew up speaking French at home, never having lived in French-speaking lands, could hardly be expected to have spoken precisely the same French dialect as the Christian neighbors their families once had.⁶⁹ There is little doubt that such children existed. French-speaking Jews living in the Rhineland after the 1306 expulsion seem to have mourned their dead in French, as suggested by prayers discussed later in this chapter. According to Bernhard Blumenkranz, French was still being used by displaced Jews in Budapest in 1433.⁷⁰ And Jews continued to copy bilingual Hebrew-French texts into the late fifteenth century: a recipe for ḥaroset with ingredients in French was copied around 1470 in northern Italy by a scribe whose family originated in Tours (see Chapter 3). Scholars working on Hebraico-French texts have expended a great deal of effort identifying dialectal features of texts so as append a neat geographical provenance to them. But inventories of dialectal features in their studies are rarely exhaustive, and the possibility of migrated or displaced dialectal features has been neglected.

Many earlier studies have treated Jewish linguistic distinctiveness as an all-or-nothing phenomenon, but the linguistic situation of medieval Jewish communities was as complex as their social one, even if it is relatively undocumented in comparison. Medieval Jewish commentaries, responsa, chronicles, and other texts teach us much about Jewish social structures. They tell us little or nothing about the Jews’ spoken French, as Blondheim was careful to point out almost a century ago.⁷¹ Copyists’ errors and attempts at correction sometimes obscure the original forms of French words or render them irrecoverable; French glosses were frequently deleted altogether.⁷² The French spellings of Jewish scribes are generally uninfluenced by Latin etymologies,⁷³ but they cannot be equated with modern-day phonetic transcription. Small-scale phonological differences such as those involving vowel height, backness, and rounding are not necessarily reflected in spellings, and so absence of evidence cannot be taken as proof that pronunciation differences did not exist. Moreover, the individuals who recorded texts do not represent the medieval Jewish speech community as a whole. Most notably, data about the language of women, children, and uneducated or less educated adult males are missing. William Labov has observed that adolescents of approximately nine to eighteen in the United States today speak “the most consistent vernacular,” attributing this to their relatively homogeneous and close-knit peer groupings. As they move into adulthood they “inevitably [acquire] a greater ability to shift towards the standard language and more occasions to do so.”⁷⁴ By extension, the medieval Jewish boys who attended yeshivot (others were educated at home by a melammed), along with their teachers, may well have spoken French in a more distinctively Jewish way than other members of the community. Based on our knowledge of modern speech communities, we can also hypothesize that Jews displayed fewer Jewish speech characteristics in conversations with outsiders.⁷⁵ In both cases, however, our ability to draw firm conclusions from the existing data is limited. In the remainder of this chapter I sort through some of this data, addressing Jewish linguistic distinctiveness first from the Gentile perspective and then from the Jewish one. We may not be able to gauge the extent to which Jewish French speech in medieval Tsarefat was distinctive, but perhaps we can assess ways in which it was distinctive.

The Gentile Perspective

In order to put into perspective the question of whether the Jews spoke a Jewish variety of French during the medieval period, let us consider a variety of French known to have been distinctive: Picard. Picard’s distinctiveness is apparent from the linguistic features attested in Picard texts and the testimony of medieval writers. Conon de Béthune, born to an illustrious family of Artois, in Picardy, complained toward the end of the twelfth century about the negative attention his “mos d’Artois” (Artesian words) were attracting at court.

Encoir ne soit ma parole franchoise,

Si la puet on bien entendre en franchois;

Ne chil ne sont bien apris ne cortois,

S’il m’ont repris se j’ai dit mos d’Artois,

Car je ne fui pas norris a Pontoise.⁷⁶

(Although my speech is not French

The French speakers can certainly understand it;

And they are neither well-brought-up nor gracious

If they have reproached me for using words from Artois,⁷⁷

For I was not raised in Pontoise.)

This text and a host of others make clear both that Picard was highly distinctive and that by the late twelfth century, the dialect of the Ile-de-France had begun to emerge as the standard for good French. Writers of the period concern themselves more and more with linguistic difference, and their descriptions of individuals real and fictional sometimes include observations about how closely their French resembles that of Paris or Pontoise.⁷⁸ As with the comments of Agus and Banitt on Judeo-French, these linguistic descriptions often promote a particular ideology, in this case the intellectual and cultural superiority or centrality of Paris.

Had a distinctly Jewish way of speaking Old French existed during this period, non-Jewish writers might have been expected to note or even mock it, as Roger Bacon, Bartholomaeus Anglicus, and others call attention to Picard, or the author of the Roman de Renart makes fun of the way English and Italian speakers spoke French.⁷⁹ They do not, despite a significant concern with Jewish otherness. In the present context, however, there is particular reason to avoid making conclusions based on negative evidence. For medieval Christian writers, Jewish difference was located especially in their religious beliefs and customs, their approach to religious texts, and history, and their portrayals of Jews are often based on tradition and hearsay rather than personal experience.⁸⁰

One such writer was Gautier de Coinci (1177/78–1236), a northern French monk and writer of miracle stories and lyric poetry known for his hatred of the Jews and love of the Virgin Mary. In D’un Archevesque qui fu a Tholete, Gautier declares, “Jez bruïroie toz ensanble” (I would burn them all together),⁸¹ and in a song to Mary, “Tant les het mes corages, je ne le puis nïer, / S’iere rois, jes feroie tous en un puis nïer” (My heart hates them so much, I cannot deny it, that if I were king, I would have them all drowned in a well).⁸² As genuine as this hatred seems, Gautier’s anti-Jewish storylines and themes can be traced to Latin sources, and he seems to have written about the Jews not so much because they belonged to his society but because they were the example, par excellence, of the blind unbeliever, Augustinian witnesses to the truth of Christianity, and because their intellectualism and familiarity with Scripture threatened Christian souls.⁸³ His miracle stories tell us little about how the Jews of his time lived and interacted with Christians.

Miri Rubin traces the evolution of one story—that of the Jewish boy in the oven—from its Greek origins in the sixth century or before (Evagrius Scholasticus of Antioch, c. 536–600, recorded it in his Historia ecclesiastica) through the fifteenth century in France, England, Germany, and elsewhere, in literature and art.⁸⁴ Details change in these adaptations (one is by Gautier),⁸⁵ and some of them may indeed reflect realities of particular times and places. Nevertheless, the Jews in this and other stories are types, constructed and elaborated for specific didactic and polemical purposes, not reliable representations of living Jews.

Two examples from later centuries are instructive. By the fifteenth century in Germany, Yiddish was well established, yet non-Jewish writers of the period rarely give examples of distinctively Jewish expressions in literary texts such as religious folk plays. Instead, “Jews are ridiculed through chanting or shouting meaningless syllables, presumably Jewish prayer [in Hebrew].”⁸⁶ In pre- and post-Revolutionary France, few writers apart from the abbé Henri Grégoire dwelled on the many regional varieties of French and Occitan. “Language differences are real,” David Bell writes, “but their extent, and the extent to which they matter, lie at least partly in the ear of the listener.”⁸⁷ Whereas in modern scholarship, asserting or denying medieval French Jewish linguistic difference (likewise, asserting the linguistic diversity of early modern France, as David Bell has shown) has served at least two particular ideological agendas, it is not clear that discussing distinctive features of the Jews’ French—for example, Hebrew loanwords, if Christians were aware of them, and a Jewish “accent,” if one existed—would have served medieval Christian writers. If the distinctive features were subtle, involving phonological features like vowel height and rounding, those same writers might not even have been capable of commenting on them. Medieval Tsarefat was a land of great linguistic diversity. Portraying a Jew as speaking French with a slightly idiosyncratic pronunciation would not have been an effective way of calling attention to his or her otherness in a land where there was no standard language.⁸⁸

Gentile writers do call attention to the Jews’ use of Hebrew. In Routbeuf’s Miracle de Théophile (thirteenth century), Salatin conjures the devil with nonsense words.

Bagahi laca bachahé

Lamac cahi achabahé

Karrelyos

Lamac lamec bachalyos

Cabahagi sabalyos

Baryolas

Lagozatha cabyolas

Samahac et famyolas

Harrahya. (ll. 160–68)⁸⁹

Salatin is not obviously Jewish, but his predecessors in earlier versions of the story by Gautier de Coinci and Adgar are. Vincent de Beauvais also portrays Theophilus’s helper as Jewish.⁹⁰ The nonsense words from Rutebeuf’s version are not really Hebrew, but popular audiences probably understood them to be. After Salatin pronounces these words, the devil asks him not to torture him anymore, “Ne en ebrieu ne en latin” (in Hebrew or Latin; l. 203).⁹¹ In a medieval mystery play, Jews address Pilate with real and imitation Hebrew mixed with Latin: “chodus, chados, adonai sebaos, sesim, sossim, chochun yochun or nor yochun or nor gun yinbrahei et ysmahel ly ly lancze lare uczerando ate lahu dilando, sicut vir melior yesse ceuia ceuca ceu capiasse amel.”⁹²

Jordan gives a number of vivid examples of the fear and loathing inspired by Hebrew writing, particularly in England, though the situation seems to have been similar in France. His analysis of “ecclesiastical legislation against loud chanting by Jews in synagogue or actions in procession to burials” is striking: “the cultic signs were wrong, the sounds were wrong.”⁹³ Judaism was an inverted form of Christianity and Hebrew a devilish foil to Latin. The mid-fourteenth-century Book of Sir John Mandeville, which circulated in the British isles and on the continent, portrayed Hebrew as dangerous.⁹⁴ Odo, author of Ysagoge in Theologiam, believed that Hebrew could be used to draw Jews to the Church,⁹⁵ but others believed the opposite: when the Dominican cleric Robert of Reading became a Jew in the late thirteenth century, some blamed the seductive powers of Hebrew.⁹⁶

We cannot discount the possibility that what Gentiles heard as Hebrew was sometimes a mixture of Hebrew and French, its imagined ancestor the mixed Hebrew and Latin of the Jews addressing Pilate seen above. Again, examples taken from other contexts are instructive. In 1596 Thomas Platter of Switzerland visited Avignon and noted that the women’s synagogue was “underground, a veritable cellar, getting its light from a room above through an opening. A blind rabbi preaches there to women, in bad Hebrew, for the dialect of the Jews of Avignon is mixed with Languedocean words. In the room above, however, they preach to men in good Hebrew.”⁹⁷ The “dialect of the Jews of Avignon” was not Hebrew at all but rather Shuadit (Judeo-Occitan), a Romance language with many Hebrew loanwords. But Platter reverses the matter, considering it a Hebrew corrupted by lexical borrowing from the local Occitan dialect. Yiddish is sometimes called “Hebrew” by people who do not know any better, and sometimes even by those who do. The Jewish-born Christian Gerson, baptized a Christian in 1605, claimed to know real Hebrew, as opposed to Yiddish.⁹⁸ Wagenseil wrote that a Christian “who hears [the Jews] speak German [!] must conclude that they speak nothing but pure Hebrew, for practically no single word comes out intelligible.”⁹⁹

This said, the writings of medieval Christian observers concentrate Jewish linguistic difference in the use of Hebrew for scholarship and worship, and not in day-to-day conversation. An exception is a mid- to late thirteenth-century account of the ritual crucifixion of Adam of Bristol, discussed by Robert Stacey: “God the Son … startles the Jewish perpetrators of Adam’s murder by addressing them in Hebrew, a language unknown to any Bristol Christians (according to the tale), and therefore utilized by the Jewish characters for secret communications between themselves that they did not want their Christian neighbors to understand—in this case, of course, for their plans to murder Adam of Bristol.”¹⁰⁰ Even here, we must ask to what the “Hebrew” of the Jews’ secret conversations really corresponded: was it more or less pure, or did it have a substantial French component?

To return to the story of Seḥoq ben Esther, Seḥoq’s self-identification as a “Hebrew” makes him appear Jewish. His actions reveal that he is a Christian: “He abandoned His Torah and His laws and statutes that He had commanded Moses His servant. And he served the god of the Gentiles and the idols of the sons of Esau that neither see nor hear nor eat nor smell [Deut. 4:28]; he clung to these, serving them and bowing down to them, and of God, our fortress, he had no understanding.” There is a kernel of truth in Seḥoq’s words, “I am a Hebrew”: brought up in the Jewish faith, we assume that he received some sort of Jewish education. He is a “Hebrew,” a member of the Jewish textual and cultural community, even if he is not a “Jew.” In the way Seḥoq joined forces with Gentiles to hurt the Jews, he resembles historical figures like Nicholas Donin, who in the first half of the thirteenth century denounced particular talmudic passages to Christian authorities and opposed Jewish scholars in the Talmud trial of 1240.¹⁰¹ Seḥoq and Donin, two “serpents,” as medieval Jewish writers call them using conventional language, both visited communities in Tsarefat—Seḥoq out of curiosity or a desire for profit, Donin because he had been asked by the Church to investigate his allegations further. They also used their knowledge of Hebrew to get ahead. For Seḥoq, Hebrew was part of his self-identification; for Donin, it was a weapon to be used against the Jews. They were both slanderers, and even when their words were directed against individuals, they harmed the entire Jewish community. (The danger posed by the Jewish malshin [“slanderer, informer”] looms again in the Blois incident, discussed in the next chapter.) Hebrew is the foundation on which the authority of the Jewish convert to Christianity rests.¹⁰² Its potential as a weapon comes from the importance of Hebrew texts and all they hold to the Jews and to Jewish identity.

In the next section we turn to Jewish linguistic distinctiveness from the perspective of the Jewish community itself, drawing on evidence from glosses and Old French texts written in Hebrew letters. Appropriately, it was Hebrew that left the most lasting mark of difference of the written records of the Jews’ French.

Acts of Identity

The relationship between speech and self is at the heart of much sociolinguistic research. For Le Page and Tabouret-Keller, linguistic behavior is made up of deliberate “acts of identity,” choices that individuals make about language so as to resemble or be unlike certain people or groups, depending on whether they wish to be identified with or distinguished from them.¹⁰³ Paul Wexler considers distinctive features of Jewish languages “voluntary acts of linguistic creativity” and their fusion of Jewish and non-Jewish elements “part of the group’s desire for independent linguistic expression.”¹⁰⁴ We could interpret the distinctive Jewish features of Hebraico-French texts as evidence of a distinctively Jewish dialect of Old French, but as we have already seen, such an approach is highly dependent on definitions of technical terms, with assessments of the same sets of objective linguistic data differing radically depending on scholars’ theoretical constructs. Instead I would like to build on the work of Le Page, Tabouret-Keller, Wexler, and others and propose that instantiations of medieval Franco-Jewish linguistic distinctiveness represent “voluntary acts of linguistic creativity” that alternately reveal, reinforce, or actively construct a consciousness of Jewish difference.¹⁰⁵ In contrast, though the French language also contributed to the identity of medieval French Jews, speaking French was not itself an active choice; it was imposed on them by the environment. A child does not choose his or her mother tongue. (Writing in French, rather than the more usual Hebrew, was an active choice, an idea I return to in Chapters 3 and 4.)

Medieval Jewish communities in Tsarefat were embedded in a larger, French-speaking community made up of Jews and non-Jews. For the Jews of England and Jewish communities near linguistic frontiers (for example, French-German, French-Occitan), the situation was even more complex. This was reflected in the way Jews used language and particularly in the alternation between Hebrew and French in medieval Jewish manuscripts that we can call “code-switching.”¹⁰⁶ The choice to switch from one language to another carries social meaning, and the languages themselves reflect aspects of the identities of both participants or sets of participants in the discourse, regardless of whether that discourse is oral or written.¹⁰⁷ The subject matter of medieval Hebrew-French manuscripts assures the writers, themselves Jews, of a primarily Jewish readership or, in the case of texts intended for oral performance, audience. In such contexts, where the two languages reflect salient aspects of both participants’ (writer’s and reader’s/audience’s) identities, it is the overall pattern of using two languages that carries social meaning rather than particular instances of code-switching.¹⁰⁸ The existence of code-switching between Hebrew and French is one of the clearest illustrations that medieval Jewish writers belonged simultaneously to two linguistic communities.

The most common type of code-switching in Jewish texts in Old French involves isolated Hebrew words. Many of the same words occur in other Jewish languages and can be considered symbols of unity between far-flung Jewish communities. Many have no apt vernacular translation, but many do (for example, rasha‘ [“wicked”], mizraḥ [“east”], sha‘ah [“hour, time”]), suggesting that the Hebrew words served both practical and stylistic purposes. Most of the Hebrew words in Jewish French texts come from the religious sphere, denoting, for example, people and other beings (e.g., ḥatan [“bridegroom”], kallah [“bride”], kohen [“priest”], qadosh [“martyr”], mal’akhim [“angels”]),¹⁰⁹ texts (e.g., torah),¹¹⁰ ritual objects (e.g., shofar [“instrument made from the horn of a ram or other animal”]),¹¹¹ concepts (e.g., galut [“(Jewish) exile”], qedushah [“sanctification, martyrdom”], teshuvah [“return, repentance”], zekhut [“right, merit”]),¹¹² or the Temple, its parts, and the items found there (lo mishkan [“the Temple”] [lo is French], dukhan [“platform”]).¹¹³ In the written documents that have come down to us, it is Hebrew-French code-switching, including the use of Hebrew vocabulary items (regardless of their frequency or limitations on contexts in which they were used), that renders medieval Jews’ French most distinctive.

In Hebraico-French poetry, the mixing of occasional Hebrew words creates a “poétique des contrastes,” a linguistic texturing considered by Paul Zumthor a fundamental tendency of medieval literary aesthetics.¹¹⁴ In this stanza from a hymn for Rosh Hashanah in Old French, avot (“fathers”) is used instead of Old French peres; shofar, which has no true equivalent in Old French, designates the ritual ram’s horn sounded during the service for the new year.

Les anfanz des AVOT sages i apris, bian anseneiz,

A tocher do SHOFAR ce setein mais cheke an sont peneiz;

Roi de rainçon, remanbr[e] l’amor d’anci[a]nz: ver soi eteiant adoneiz; Lus anfanz si acreis[s]e come éteiles de ciel, plus ne seiant mal meneiz.¹¹⁵

(The well-taught children of the wise and learnèd FOREFATHERS

take pains to sound the SHOFAR in this, the seventh month, each year;

King of Redemption, remember the love of the Ancients: they dedicated themselves to you;

multiply their children like stars in the heavens, may they not be harassed anymore.)

Jews writing in Old French regularly called the bride kallah and the bridegroom ḥatan, as in the final stanza of the wedding song beginning El giv‘at ha-levonah (To the hill of frankincense) (see Chapter 4), and it can be argued that these have no real vernacular equivalents, because they denote a specifically Jewish bride and bridegroom.

ET SHEN SELA‘ HA-EITAN

tu ve[n]ras ja eiproveir

EL TOKH GINNAT HA-BITAN

Ou li ḤATAN fu livreiz

HE-ḤATAN QOLO NATAN

Il a dit a seis priveiz

Bia chanteir einuie ce saveiz

Le ḤATAN e la KALLAH an la cheire sus leveiz!¹¹⁶

(THE TOOTH OF THE HARD ROCK

You will come to experience it

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PALACE GARDEN

Where the bridegroom was turned over,

THE BRIDEGROOM GAVE FORTH HIS VOICE

He said to his attendants

“I’m bored by this fine singing, you know.”

Raise the BRIDEGROOM and the BRIDE upon the throne!)

This stanza is remarkable for another reason: the Hebrew preposition el (“to”) in the third line seems out of place, but it may have passed unnoticed by speakers of Old French, who would have heard Old French el (“in the”), making el tokh ginnat ha-bitan linguistically hybrid.

Not all of the special terms in Hebraico-French texts come from Hebrew. Melder (“study, meditate on [a text]”), originally from Greek (μελ-ετάω) through Latin (meletāre), was fully integrated into the Jews’ French, as demonstrated by its participation in phonological and morphological processes. Its phonological shape changes in accordance with regional phonological processes such as /l/-deletion in Lotharingian, and its inflections in accordance with its grammatical context.¹¹⁷ While Christian-authored texts contain prefixed forms of Latin meletāre, it seems that from the Middle Ages onward, unprefixed cognates occur almost exclusively in Jewish texts, whether Greek or Romance (French, Italian, Provençal, Portuguese, Spanish).¹¹⁸

Ḥaldrube (“camel’s hump,” “hunchback’s hump”), cognate with Classical Arabic ḥádaba and modern Spanish joroba and apparently borrowed into French from Hispano-Arabic, is given as a French term in numerous contexts, including the glosses of Rashi, Joseph Kara, and pseudo-Gershom, and the Hebrew-French glossaries of Basel, Leipzig, and Paris.¹¹⁹ Another word that appears in multiple contexts is the bird name herupe, which is given as the Old French translation of Hebrew dukhifat (an unclean bird sometimes translated into English as “hoopoe”) by Rashi, as well as in brief glossaries in ms. Valmadonna 1 and Cod. Parm. 2342 (on the latter, see Chapter 3) and in the much more extensive Basel, Leipzig, Paris, and Parma (Cod. Parm. 2924) glossaries.¹²⁰ Herupe, which may be onomatopoeic, is not, to my knowledge, attested in non-Jewish texts in Old French, which call the hoopoe hupe or huhud.¹²¹ Note that the existing evidence shows only that ḥaldrube and herupe existed in a French Jewish scholarly register, although either might have potentially been used in non-scholarly contexts as well (in the case of ḥaldrube, presumably only with the sense “hunchback’s hump”).

In many Jewish texts in Old French of diverse geographic provenance, the word for “God” is Gé.¹²² The more typical Old French oblique forms Dié and Dé are also attested, even in manuscripts from the same regions.¹²³ Deriving Gé (pronounced [dže] and later [že]) from Latin Dĕus or Old French Dié is straightforward,¹²⁴ and so it is likely that Jews were not alone in pronouncing the name of God thus some of the time. The solemn significance of the name meant that its spelling was particularly bound to the Latin one in Christian-authored texts. Indeed, we know from Ch. Théodore Gossen’s study of Picard that even when medieval French speakers’ pronunciations of the word for “God” varied, their spellings rarely did.¹²⁵ But Jewish scribes, relatively free from spelling conventions based on Latin, were free to use a distinctively Jewish graphie.

Hebrew words for cardinal directions also seem to have infiltrated the Jews’ French to some extent. In at least two Hebrew-French glossaries, Hebrew ha-qadmoni (“the Easterner”; Joel 2:20) is glossed into French using a hybrid Hebrew-French term, ber MIZRAḤ. (“man of the east”),¹²⁶ and mizraḥ is attested as a French Jewish word for “east” elsewhere as well.¹²⁷ A glossary once held in Turin glosses yemin ha-‘ir (2 Sam. 24:5; “the right/south side of the city”) as a DAROM de la vile (“to the south of the city”), with Hebrew darom used instead of French sud to translate Hebrew yamin (“right hand; south”).¹²⁸ The Paris glossary edited by Lambert and Brandin translates ruaḥha-yam (Ezek. 42:19; “the west side”) as le ongle de ma‘arav (“the west corner”).¹²⁹ W. Bacher, in his review of that edition, considers the small number of instances where Hebrew is used in translating other Hebrew terms as evidence of the purity of the Jews’ French,¹³⁰ but one might ask, in a text whose purpose seems to be the translation of Hebrew words into the vernacular, why use Hebrew in the glosses at all? In each case, the Hebrew word used in the so-called vernacular translation is different from the one it translates, and I suggest that the use of Hebrew terms highlights the near synonymy of darom and yamin (“south”), qadmon and mizraḥ (“east”), and ha-yam (“the sea” and thence “west, westward,” from the position of the Mediterranean relative to Palestine), and ma‘arav (“west”). At the same time, the occasional use of Hebrew terms asserts the Jewish identity shared by glossator and reader without impeding understanding. We might add that the glossator’s French and Jewish identities are both salient, making code-switching an unmarked choice.¹³¹ Still another example of the use of Hebrew direction words in the Jews’ French comes from the Troyes elegy. One of the thirteen martyrs is called lo qadmeneis, with qadmeneis formed by adding a French suffix to the Hebrew root qadmon (“east”), as discussed below.

Medieval Jewish texts in Old French also contain hybrid words created by combining pieces from both Hebrew and French. Composers of macaronic poetry from the early sixteenth century onward, including Teofilo Folengo, sometimes added Latin endings to vernacular roots and words for a burlesque effect,¹³² but in medieval Jewish texts, the roots tend to be from the learned tongue and the endings from the vernacular, and the intent is not burlesque. They are more akin to borrowings in any number of languages that participate in derivational and inflectional processes—an example is French je sunbathais (“I was sunbathing”). The root sunbath- (from English) bears the French first-person singular imperfect ending -ais.¹³³

The Troyes elegy preserves two such words: ‘asqer (“to study the law”) and qadmeneis (“Easterner”).¹³⁴ Qadmeneis combines a Hebrew root (qadmon [“eastern”]) with the Old French adjectival suffix –eis (mod. Fr. –ais; “belonging to, originating in”). Qadmon also means “ancient, primeval,” and cultural contacts between French- and German-speaking Jews were close, so for some French speakers, qadmeneis would have evoked a presumable form akin to modern Yiddish kadmoynish (“ancient, primeval”).¹³⁵ The martyr described as lo qadmeneis in the elegy seems to have been both an Easterner and an old man: he approaches the fire with particular dignity and the poet declares, de bone ore fu nez!, a double entendre meaning both “it is fortunate that he was born” and “he was born at a good hour, i.e., early” (cf. mod. Fr. de bonne heure [“early”]).¹³⁶ Qadmeneis occurs in the rhyme, and it may be a literary flourish, the result of one individual’s linguistic creativity. (It also occurs in a list of the martyrs’ names from the Mainz Memorbuch,¹³⁷ but we cannot discount the possibility that the writer of that list knew the elegy.) Even so, the author’s use of qadmeneis implies a belief that at least part of his intended audience would understand it and perhaps even derive pleasure from his linguistic creativity.

‘Asqer (“to study the law”) is built from the Hebrew-Aramaic root ‘-s-q and the French infinitival ending -er.¹³⁸ Like melder (“study”) (discussed above) in the line before it (medeient, 3pl imperfect), it is fully integrated into the sentential syntax of the following stanza. Embedded as it is in the middle of its line, it cannot be a poetic response to the exigencies of rhyme.

Troblee eit notre joie e notre deduit

D’[i]sos qui medeie[n]t la Torah e l’aveie[n]t en lor co[n]duit.

Os ne fineie[n]t d’‘asqer e lo jor e la nuit.¹³⁹

(Our joy and pleasure are troubled

By those who studied Torah and had it in their safekeeping.

They did not stop studying the law by day or by night.)

As is often the case in mixed-language poetry, the exceptional words—here medeient and ‘asqer—depart in a fundamental way from the author’s lexical choices in other parts of the text.¹⁴⁰ The elegy’s French vocabulary has been described as “courtly” by Susan Einbinder,¹⁴¹ and the passage given above begins with a phrase that would be at home in romances such as Thomas of Britain’s Tristan or Chrétien de Troyes’ Cligès, where suffering accompanies and intensifies emotional and physical joy, and vice versa. Joie e deduit is a common doublet used to express joy in the romance genre. Equally common are the words describing pain and suffering in the elegy: sofrir (suffer), dolor (grief), poine (pain).¹⁴² Meder (melder) and ‘asqer, in contrast, belong to a semantic field concerned with Jewish study, and their use contributes to a “poétique de contrastes.”

I have come across at least one possible example of the opposite kind of hybridity. Eight manuscripts of Joseph Kara’s (b. 1050–1055, d. 1120–1030) commentary to Jeremiah gloss Hebrew we-hitpalleshu (“and roll yourselves [in dust, etc.]” Jer. 25:34) as velopu/volopu, which seems to consist of the Old French root velop-/volop- (cf. infinitive veloper, voloper; “envelop”) and a Hebrew plural suffix. (The expected reflexive pronoun is missing.) It is possible that all eight manuscripts reflect an earlier copying error. It is equally possible, however, that Kara wished the morphological structure of the French gloss to mimic that of the Hebrew, possibly to call attention to the fact that, in the second-person plural imperative, Hebrew makes a distinction between masculine (hitpalleshu) and feminine (hitpalleshnah) that French does not.¹⁴³

Words like ‘asqer, qadmeneis, and volopu may represent the coupling of Hebrew and French in medieval Jewish texts at its most intimate, but medieval texts in both Old French and Hebrew offer many more examples of switching from one language to the other for practical or stylistic reasons. In medieval Hebrew texts, French words are sometimes set off by linking expressions such as (she-)qorin (“[that] they call”), (she-)lo‘azin (“[that] they render in French,” or lit. “a language other than Hebrew”), or be-la‘az (“in a language other than Hebrew,” i.e., French). At other times the words are fully integrated into the Hebrew syntax, preceded by the Hebrew definite article prefix ha- (“the”) or prepositional prefixes meaning “to” or “in,” or the conjunction we- (“and”). The Maḥzor Vitry contains many examples of this kind.

(THEY WASH THEIR HANDS AND THEY SAY THE BLESSING “ ‘AL NETILAT YADAYIM” [i.e., the blessing recited upon washing the hands]. AND THEY PRESENT THE BOWL FILLED WITH HERBS AND TAKE SOME OF THE chervil [Old French cerfueil] AND HE SAYS THE BLESSING “BORE’ PERI HA-ADA-MAH” [i.e., the blessing recited over products of the soil].)¹⁴⁴

Old French cerfueil (“chervil, wild thyme”) is prefixed with the Hebrew definite article ha- and governed by the preposition min (“from”). In the next example, two French nouns are conjoined with the Hebrew conjunction we- (“and”).

(OVER [THINGS MADE FROM] THE FIVE KINDS OF CEREALS, SUCH AS PASTIES AND BISCUIT [oblees WE-chantel] … THEY SAY THE BLESSING “HA-MOṢI’ LEḤEM [MIN] HA-AREṢ” [i.e., the blessing recited over bread].)¹⁴⁵

In his commentaries, Joseph Kara sometimes weaves Hebrew and French together into a single piece of grammatical fabric. The final word of his Old French gloss on Isa. 6:8, Des (“God”), is written clearly. It is in the nominative (subject) case. Its verb is Hebrew omer (“says”).

Des O[MER] ET MI ESHLA[KH]?

(God SAYS WHOM SHALL I SEND?)¹⁴⁶

In his comments on Isa. 66:18, Kara begins a sentence in Old French, ending with the past participle of the verb doner (doneid), “give.” He could have followed it with the Old French subordinating conjunction que (“that”) but instead uses the Hebrew equivalent, she-, and completes the sentence in Hebrew.

BA’AH. BE-L[A‘AZ]: ço me fera avenir e tu m’a[s] doneid SHE-AQABBEṢ ET KOL HA-GOYIM WE-HA-LESHONOT U-VA’UWE-RA’U ET KEVODI (“BA’AH” [COMING; Isa. 66:18]. In french: That will make me approach; and you have allowed me TO GATHER [LIT. THAT I WILL GATHER] ALL NATIONS AND TONGUES, AND THEY WILL COME AND SEE MY GLORY)¹⁴⁷

In these two examples, Kara switches from one language to the other with no apparent didactic or illustrative purpose. Not so in the next, where the Hebrew preposition el intervenes between a third-person singular French verb (future tense) dirad (“will say”) and a French noun phrase, ta virtance (“your faithfulness”). In Hebraico-French texts, function words are often run together. It is nonetheless striking that there is no space between the preposition and possessive article here, coming as they do from two different languages. This phrase glosses Hebrew yodia‘ el-amittekha (“declare your faithfulness”; Isa. 38:19).

dirad EL ta virtance BE-L[A‘AZ]

(will say TO [i.e., will declare] your faithfulness IN FRENCH)¹⁴⁸

French dire (“say”) normally would not take a preposition in this context, but the Hebrew verb it glosses (yodia‘: “will make known”) does. So that the gloss might reflect word for word the structure of the Hebrew original, Kara incorporates the Hebrew preposition.

The thirteenth-century Hebrew-French wedding song beginning El giv‘at ha-levonah, from the New York manuscript of the Maḥzor Vitry, contains another example of the weaving together of Hebrew and French through syntactic government. The Hebrew noun phrase et shen sela‘ ha-eitan (“the tooth of the hard rock”) is the object of a verb, as shown by the presence of the accusative particle et. The governing verb is not Hebrew, but French: the infinitive eiproveir (“try, put to the test, experience”).

ET SHEN SELA‘ HA-EITAN

tu ve[n]ras ja eiproveir

(You will come to experience the tooth of the hard rock.)¹⁴⁹

The Hebrew-French wedding songs, discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4, stand as proof that medieval Jews mixed Hebrew and French in their oral artistic culture.

Another artifact of the Jews’ oral culture is an Old French sermon fragment remarkable for the occasional use it makes of Hebrew for concepts easily expressible in the vernacular, such as sha‘ah (hour, time) and rasha‘ (wicked). Not so surprisingly, Hebrew is also used for proper names like yeḥezqel (Ezekiel), nevukhadne’ṣṣar (Nebuchadnezzar), and miṣrayim (Egypt), as well as words identifying the beginnings of Bible verses, such as wayyassev (and he led; Exod. 13:18), and words denoting culture-specific figures, objects, and concepts such as kohen (priest), kohen gadol (chief priest), and par‘oh (Pharaoh). The syntax of the French is also heavily influenced by that of Hebrew. We read, for example:

Parole ansanble les anfanz de YISRA[’EL] e retornerount e pozerount devant PI HAḤIROT antre MIGDOL i antre la mer devant BA‘AL ṢEFON ancountre lui pozerez sur la mer.¹⁵⁰

(Speak with the children of Israel and they will turn around and encamp before PI-HAḤIROTH between MIGDOL and the sea, in front of BA’AL TSEFON; you will camp opposite this place, on the shore.)

Old French antre (between) is repeated here, not in accordance with French grammar but rather to copy the syntax of the Hebrew bein … u-vein: bein Migdol u-vein ha-yam.

The Hebrew element is balanced by the use of French for Bible verses that a highly literate Jew would have learned also in Hebrew, as well as by decidedly non-Jewish turns of phrase like notre Sire (our Lord) and mer ruve (Red Sea): we might have expected to find Dé or Gé, words for God found in other Hebraico-French texts, or mer des roseaux (Sea of Reeds), the literal translation of the Hebrew yam-suf.¹⁵¹

Fure[n]t tous os d’au[n]cetrie152 de EFRA’IM, portanz tarjes e vesias d’armures e lances. Os, os. Ce fure[n]t les os ses que avija notre sire os par la mein de YEḤEZQEL la proufete an la plenure de DURA. E de ços os etiant le henas que buvoyt an os NEVUKHADNE’ṢṢAR le RASHA‘. I an la SHA‘AH que avija os notre sire par la mein de YeḤezqel la profete eteiant hurtanz a ce RASHA‘ sor sa boche.

(They were all of the lineage of EPHRAIM, carrying round shields and containers of weapons and spears. Bones, bones. These were the dry bones that our Lord resur rected by the hand of EZEKIEL the prophet on the plain of DURA [cf. EZEK. 37:1–14]. And the goblets that NEBUCHADNEZZAR the WICKED used to drink from were made from these bones. And at the time at which our Lord woke them by the hand of EZEKIEL the prophet, they were striking this WICKED PERSON on the mouth.)