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
