one. Three centuries later, in an extensive glossary compiled by Judah Romano in Rome to clarify difficult terms in Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah, the meaning of la‘az is again limited to “foreign” language, probably synonymous with “vernacular.” Other terms are introduced here as well: Latino refers to someone who does not speak Hebrew, but likely refers to Romance rather than Latin.98 In the Arukh and elsewhere, the expression lashon romi does not mean “speech/language of Rome,” which would be a literal translation referring to some form of Latin, but rather “a hybrid language, strongly graecicizing, perhaps that spoken in the central-southern regions of Italy under Byzantine influence.”99 Rom in medieval Hebrew sources is Byzantium, the medieval Roman empire and not the ancient imperial city; Byzantine (and South Italian) Jews were Romaniotes. In general, the non-Hebrew lo‘azim, including Italian volgare, were derided by learned Jews as notzrì, Christian (from “Nazarene”), and this attitude meant that it was not used as a creative literary language by Jews before the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, short glosses in medieval texts indicate that the Italian Jews were developing their own written and spoken vernacular, which we now call “Judeo-Italian,” based on vulgar Latin.100 Jewish women, and not a few men, would have profited from translations of the Scriptures and the prayer book written specifically for them in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.101
Greek speakers are found in today’s Salento only in nine communities south of Lecce, but the medieval Hellenophonic zone was much larger.102 The language spoken in the Grecìa salentina is a particular dialect called by its users griko or grika: “milume grika” means “we speak grika.” This word is not Greek; it corresponds neither to Latin graecus nor ancient Greek γραικός. Gerhard Rohlfs suggested that it was the term that the ancient South Italians, speaking an Italic language related to Latin, called their Greek-speaking neighbors in Magna Graecia.103 It remains unclear whether the dialect represents a survival of ancient Greek or a medieval phenomenon.104 Regardless of its antiquity, the term and the dialect survived through and beyond the Byzantine period.105 After unification in 1861, when Italian was imposed as the country’s official language, griko speakers in the Salento continued to use their traditional dialect among family and friends, while the Romance vernacular was used for everyday business and Italian only for official matters and largely unavailable higher education.106
Griko is illuminated by considering its use among Jews. After being expelled from Spain in 1492 and from the Salento by the Spanish rulers in 1541, the affected Jews went mostly to Thessalonike, part of the Ottoman Empire, or to Corfu, under Venetian rule. In both places they found Romaniote (formerly Byzantine) Jews, Italian Jews from Rome, Ashkenazim, and Sephardim practicing their distinctive liturgical rites. Visitors to early modern Corfu record that there were communities of Jews of diverse origin that included both gregi—Jews from the Salento who spoke griko—and others from Apulia who used pugghisu, “Puglian,” the Salentine Romance vernacular.107 These communities had names derived from their languages: qehillah apulyanit (the Apulian community, using Romance) and qehillah griqa, or griga, using Salentine Greek.108 The linguistic term was thus a cultural signifier for both Jews and Christians.
The ancient Greeks labeled those who did not speak their language barbaroi, “barbarians,” and this term is also used to describe the Libyan heathens in the Byzantine dedication of the rebuilt walls of Taranto [139].109 Today, ppoppiti, with the same kind of staccato syllables as barbaroi, is used to describe the inhabitants of the southern Salento by those who live along and beyond its northern limit and speak an Apulian rather than a Salentine dialect.110 Ppoppiti has also come to connote boorish, unlettered peasants, just as speaking a non-Greek tongue once implied other kinds of cultural and behavioral barbarisms. As usual, when the term is adopted by those who have been identified pejoratively—when it becomes an emic rather than an etic label—it loses much of its negative force.111
This chapter has demonstrated ways in which language is a linchpin of identity. Hebrew users were at least bilingual because they were always part of a larger community that did not share their language. Greek and Latin speakers, especially those who lived in a monolingual village, lacked such linguistic pressures, but their verbal interaction is apparent in their public texts nonetheless. Despite the erasure of the Jewish communities of the Salento by the sixteenth century, both the Jews and their sacred language have left traces in the local record. In addition to the toponyms that refer to Jewish streets or neighborhoods, we noted in the previous chapter the derogatory labels Sciuteì and Sçiudèu applied to the inhabitants of two southern towns. In Taranto, during the procession of the “Perdoni” characteristic of Holy Week, those seeking pardon from sin walk in pairs to venerate tombs in the city’s churches and are greeted in the street with u salamelecche, a respectful inclination that surely derives either from the Arabic salaam aleikum or the Hebrew shalom aleichem, peace be with you.112 Few today understand the origin or meaning of the phrase.113 While I cannot prove that Hebrew words penetrated the local dialects, they did in Rome and may have done so here.114 In any event, the Salento vernaculars mix linguistic elements from Greek and Latin, and this is one of the features that conferred a unique regional identity. Even now, the inhabitants of one town in the Salento can identify those of another by their dialect. As was the case in the Middle Ages and earlier, language continues to be used as a method of inclusion and exclusion.
CHAPTER 3
Appearance
It is often said that “clothes make the man,” and appearance is indeed the most obvious signal of identity.1 Before names are exchanged and languages employed in spoken discourse, impressions have already been formed on the basis of appearance.2 Instinctively, and not always correctly, we interpret such cues as physiognomy, dress, and jewelry in order to categorize and judge others according to gender, status, and even religious or cultural or ethnic affiliation. The elements of appearance thus communicate social identities in a nonverbal manner.3 Yet because the meanings and relative importance of the components of appearance vary according to context, messages sent by the wearer of a certain costume may not be perceived, or even received, by his or her viewers. The people we meet have likely conferred upon us a social identity based entirely on appearance without our even being aware of it.
How can we apprehend the appearance of medieval Salentine men, women, and children who belonged to a range of social, religious, and cultural groups? First, we can examine both skeletal remains and artifacts retrieved from tombs. Physical remains tell us something about the size and health of these people, and grave goods provide evidence for contemporary dress and ornament. Second, painted representations of individuals, often called “donor portraits,”4 are especially valuable; even if they do not report what the supplicant really looked like or what he or she actually wore, the depictions are at least related to patrons’ and viewers’ aspirations and expectations about appearance. Third, certain realistic details in the religious imagery so prominent in South Italian medieval art may also reveal contemporary practices in clothing, hairstyle, and adornment; convincing work has been done on the interpretation of such “realia” in Byzantine religious art.5 Finally, textual sources sometimes convey information about the ways in which the various elements of appearance communicated meaning in their own time. In this chapter, I analyze archaeological, artistic, and textual sources to uncover the most significant components of appearance: physiognomy, dress, jewelry, and hairstyle.
Physiognomy
Skeletal material from medieval southern Italy is limited but still informative about stature and diseases that might affect appearance. Tenth- and eleventh-century skeletal remains from the medieval village of Quattro Macine provided a male adult specimen approximately 1.672 meters (5.48 feet) tall and a female 1.515 meters (4.97 feet) tall (from tomb XI, [102]).6
