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
