and to one another, day after day.
This book is concerned with the roles played by language in shaping identity and culture. How did language affect how Jews thought, how they interacted with one another and with Christians, and who they perceived themselves to be? What circumstances and forces led to the genesis of a medieval Jewish textual tradition in French and helped shape it? Who were the writers, and how did they choose to write in the vernacular or Hebrew? What types of speech-related behaviors did Jews see in Christians, and which inspired trust or distrust? How and in what terms did Jews define their relationship to the larger French-speaking community? In beginning to offer answers to these and other questions I draw on a variety of sources, of which the most important are three sets of medieval Jewish texts produced in northern France: Old French texts in Hebrew letters, bilingual Hebrew-French texts, and selected Hebrew texts that are explicitly preoccupied with verbal interactions with Christians. A fundamental assumption underlying this book is that by studying language, we will be able to sketch a more comprehensive picture of the Jewish community in medieval France and better understand the way the Jews themselves perceived their relationship to and place within the larger Jewish and Christian communities. This is what “identity” refers to in this book: the consciousness of individuals that they exist in relation to communities, and the ways in which objective characteristics of those communities contribute to the way individuals represent themselves and are represented by others.3
A major theme that emerges from studying the historical, literary, and scholarly documents treated in the following chapters is that language was a tremendous force behind the construction of Jewish identity in the twelfth, thirteenth, and early fourteenth centuries and a means of expressing, maintaining, and preserving that identity. Many or most Jews living in northern France during that period assimilated major elements of the vernacular culture, and certain aspects of their identity were intimately bound to the status of French as their mother tongue, with all that entailed. Especially relevant here is that Jews partook of French-language culture, enjoying and to a limited extent producing literature in medieval French. Most of their textual production was in Hebrew, but in linguistically mixed texts, French, their mother tongue, seems literally to seep through the cracks in the form of glosses, lines of poetry, and occasionally complete poems and prose texts in French. More subtly we find medieval French influence on the spelling, morphology, syntax, and semantics of their Hebrew, and Hebrew influence on the way they used French. Although it appears that in many situations the Jews’ French was more or less indistinguishable from that of Christians, there is extensive written evidence that in other situations, the Jews’ French was distinctive and that its distinctiveness resulted especially from Hebrew influence. Jews used the Hebrew alphabet for writing French. They incorporated Hebrew loanwords into their written French and, we may assume, their spoken French as well. Words in their French texts sometimes combine a Hebrew root with French suffixes, and sentences in bilingual texts sometimes begin in one language and end in the other. Another type of interaction between French and Hebrew in the Jews’ daily lives is seen in documents like the letters written in response to the Blois incident of 1171, which use Hebrew to report conversations that took place in French. Knowing that the conversations have been translated not only from one language to another but also from one system of symbolic references to another helps the scholar read them with greater sophistication.
Did medieval Christians recognize or think they could recognize a Jew based on his or her vernacular speech? Could a Jew recognize a fellow Jew just by the way he or she spoke French? These are two of the questions I attempt to answer in Chapter 1. I argue that while there can be no doubt that the mother tongue of most northern French Jews in the Middle Ages was French (the same varieties of French spoken and written by Christians), in some situations the Jews’ French was made distinctively Jewish through their use of Hebrew loanwords and code-switching. The most prominent linguistic marker of Jewishness, however, remained Hebrew, even though only some Jews learned it well, and some Christian scholars also studied it.
Chapter 2, comprising three main sections, offers a close reading of Hebrew texts written in response to the burning of over thirty Jews in Blois in 1171. In the first section, I argue that one of these texts, called the Orleans letter, serves as both a record and an attempt to explain and understand the tragedy that befell the Jewish community of Blois, and I speculate that the explanation may lie in the words of Prov. 6:16–19. I argue furthermore that the authors of the Orleans and three other letters pay special attention to linguistic behaviors and to the way that Christians used speech and silence during the incident. In the second section, I argue that the Blois letters, as well as later accounts of the incident from Ephraim of Bonn and Joseph Ha-Cohen, point to deep differences between the linguistic channels available to medieval Jewish men and women and illuminate the relationship of gender to formality and informality in language. Limitations on women’s access to Hebrew meant that even women with some knowledge of the language were less able to engage in style-shifting, limiting in turn the repertoire of public identities that they were able to assume. Finally, the Blois documents and the Blois incident itself demonstrate the extent to which the Jews were integrated into Christian society but at the same time were set apart. For their own safety and self-preservation, the Jews sought help from those in authority, all the while remaining deeply distrustful of them. The interplay of French and Hebrew in the unfolding of the Blois incident is illustrative of this complex Jewish-Christian relationship.
Chapter 3 is concerned with bilingual Hebrew-French manuscripts that graphically illustrate the dual identity of the medieval French-speaking Jewish community. Jewish texts in French appeared centuries later than non-Jewish texts in French, but even late medieval Jewish texts in French are strikingly similar in certain respects to the earliest Old French texts, which date from the ninth and tenth centuries. Why did a medieval Jewish textual tradition in French take so long to emerge? And why should it be similar to a Christian tradition that predated it by centuries? An exploration of similarities and differences between Christian and Jewish society and the Latin and Hebrew textual traditions offers possible answers to these and other questions.
Chapter 4 begins with two bilingual Hebrew-French wedding songs and their manuscripts and ends with thirteenth- and fourteenth-century persecutions and expulsions of the Jews. Analyzing the wedding songs from the standpoints of language, ritual, community, and identity, I argue that their lover-warriors and noble brides challenge the notion of a French identity that is inextricably bound to Christian beliefs and that the songs present a forceful vision of a dual French-Jewish identity at odds with the representations of Jews in Christian texts from the same period.
These four chapters, framed by an introduction and an epilogue, are ordered deliberately. The central question of Chapter 1, whether and how the Jews’ vernacular differed from the French spoken all around them by non-Jews, is central to the book’s larger concern with language and identity. Chapter 2 addresses documents that reveal an authorial concern with speech and serves as a reminder that despite this book’s concern with vernacular texts, most medieval Jewish documents from northern France are in Hebrew. Both chronologically and conceptually, it precedes the discussion of the remaining chapters: Chapter 3 builds on the first chapter by offering a closer and more extensive look at Jewish texts in Old French and also, through its focus on the development of literary languages, serves as a bridge to Chapter 4, an examination of specific Hebraico-French literary texts, two wedding songs. The limits of this study are addressed further below.
Judeo-French, Hebraico-French, and the Scholars Who Have Studied Them
In this volume I use the term “Hebraico-French” to refer to Old and
