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
