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
