period, “[Hebraic culture] was all embracing, including the study and practice of Jewish law, religious worship, the formulation of communal and regional enactments, and personal written expression, all taking place in Hebrew rather than in Latin or French.”16 That Hebraic culture embraced Jewish life in medieval France cannot be denied; and on almost every occasion that a medieval French-speaking Jew put pen to parchment, it was indeed to write in Hebrew.17 But if Hebrew culture was all-embracing in some respects, then vernacular culture was all-embracing in others. The vernacular was the mother tongue and the spoken language par excellence for all ages and both genders. Hebrew was indeed the language of Jewish law, worship, communal enactments, and a host of other matters, but discussion of these was carried on not only in Hebrew but also in the vernacular. The content and structure of Hebrew-French biblical glossaries, for example, suggest that the study and teaching of the Hebrew Bible was accomplished through the medium of the spoken language. Evidence also suggests that in addition to the written, Hebrew Bible, the Jews of medieval France had an oral, vernacular version, called by Banitt the Old French Vulgate.18
Limits of This Study
This study focuses on the relationship between language, history, and identity, and at its core are Hebraico-French and Hebrew-French texts that survive in medieval Jewish manuscripts, some published previously, some newly edited for this project. This core determined which of the many threads that make up the linguistic culture of medieval French-speaking Jews would be taken up here, and which I would leave for other scholars or future studies. The focus on Hebraico-French texts has led me to pursue topics such as influences on the genesis of Hebraico-French writing, even when it led away from the French Middle Ages into earlier times and other lands; the roles of French and Hebrew in texts and in daily life; the evolution of Hebraico-French textual production; the narrative structure and themes of the Hebrew-French wedding songs; and the distinctiveness of the written and spoken French of medieval Jews. The discussion in Chapter 2 about the Blois incident of 1171 focuses on several texts written in Hebrew, not French, but these texts illuminate verbal, vernacular interactions between Jews and Christians.
As we have already seen from the discussion of Judeo-French language and literature as a field of inquiry, much of the research already done on Hebraico-French textual production has focused on individual texts and glosses. While some scholars, notably D. S. Blondheim, Hiram Peri, and Pnina Navè, have taken a comparative approach and considered Hebraico-French texts within the larger context of Judeo-Romance,19 there has not yet been a concentrated attempt to place Hebraico-French texts within the context of Old French textual production in general or the history of the Jews in France. One of my goals has been to consider these larger issues, a task facilitated by the fine work on individual manuscripts, texts, and glosses published by other scholars.
The geographical boundaries of this study are determined by the location of Jewish settlements known to have produced Hebraico-French texts, as well as the extension of the French-speaking area during the medieval period. The second is easier to establish, and I will do so here in broad terms.
Today’s France covered three main linguistic regions during the Middle Ages. In the north, most of the population spoke dialects of French (langue d’oïl), while in the south, which falls outside the boundaries of this study, most people spoke dialects of Occitan (langue d’oc). A large pocket in the east was the domain of Francoprovençal. Other languages were also represented within this territory. For example, the north was home to pockets of Breton, Flemish, German, and Walloon speakers, and the south to speakers of Basque and Catalan. The use of French extended into today’s Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Luxembourg, not to mention various courts where French served as a language of culture.20 Outside the continent, French was spoken in Norman Sicily (1060–), Lusignan Cyprus (1192–), the crusader states of Outremer, and especially England. The Normans who invaded England in 1066 brought their dialect of French with them, and while many of the inhabitants of England remained Anglo-Saxon speaking, the Jews of England, for the most part of Norman heritage, spoke primarily in French.21 Some knew English as well.22 At least one prominent Anglo-Jewish family, that of Elijah Menahem ben Moses of London, came from the Rhineland,23 and descent from Rhenish families, combined with cultural contacts between the Jews of England and those of the Rhineland, would have led to some exposure to German among English Jews, even if it was not spoken in the Anglo-Jewish community itself.
Where did Jews compose Hebraico-French texts? In most cases, we are not able to assign a precise geographical origin to Hebraico-French texts or to the Hebrew manuscripts that contain them. According to Colette Sirat, only 3 percent of medieval Hebrew manuscripts contain a precise indication of this sort.24 Nevertheless, in a number of cases, we are able to determine the region, and occasionally the town, where particular Hebraico-French texts or sets of glosses were composed or copied. First, limiting ourselves to the territory belonging to today’s France, we know of Hebraico-French texts originating or written in the dialects of Champagne (e.g., Rashi’s and Joseph Kara’s glosses), Lorraine (several poetic compositions), Normandy (glosses), Picardy (sermon fragments), and the Loire valley (an incantation), among others.25 The colophon of a Hebrew-French glossary to the Bible held by the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma states not only the name of the scribe (Jehiel ben Eleazar) but also the date he completed the manuscript (16 Av 5039 [1279]) and the place, Delsberg, today Delemont of the Swiss Jura (formerly Thalisperc).26 The author of the Troyes elegy seems to have been from Lorraine, as both his name, Jacob bar Judah of Lotra (Lotharingia), and the dialect of the elegy indicate.27 In fact, the number of Hebraico-French texts in the Lorraine dialect (Lotharingian) is significant enough to win for Lorraine the title of Hebraico-French textual center. It is notoriously difficult to ascertain whether certain Hebrew manuscripts were produced on the continent or in England,28 but one Hebraico-French text of certain English provenance is a glossary of bird names edited by Menahem Banitt from ms. Valmadonna 1. We can also mention the Old French glosses of Moses and Elijah of London. The present study focuses on the heart of Hebraico-French textual production, the region that medieval Jews called Tsarefat, which we can roughly translate “northern France,” although its borders reached beyond northern France and especially into the Rhineland. When I refer to “France” in this book, I usually mean Tsarefat.29
Cultural and linguistic boundaries among medieval French, English, and German Jews were porous, and in some sense they formed a single culture, that of Ashkenaz.30 Eleventh- to twelfth-century French Jewish scholars such as Rashi and Joseph Kara studied in German-speaking lands, and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Rhenish Jewish scholars like Meir of Rothenberg and Ephraim of Regensburg studied in northern France. The Tosafist commentators of France and Germany and the English rabbis cited each other’s scholarship.31 French, German, and English Jewish scribes all used the same basic script style.32 There is, however, reason to distinguish among these groups, as medieval Jews did themselves: for example, Aryeh Graboïs has commented on the medieval Jewish differentiation between the Rhine basin, Lorraine, and northern France.33 In a study like the present one, in particular, it makes sense to study the Jewish communities of medieval France apart from others in Ashkenaz. The Jews living in English- and German-speaking milieus belong, by definition, to other speech communities—a fact that is reinforced by the distinction between the terms la‘az (literally, “a language other than Hebrew,” but generally used by medieval exegetes to refer to French) and leshon ashkenaz (“language of Ashkenaz,” i.e., German). The multilingual situation of England raises its own problems and complications, as has been discussed by Robert C. Stacey. Jews there primarily spoke French, and this increasingly set them apart after the Anglo-Norman period as English gained importance as a mother tongue for all non-Jews, regardless of social class or family origins.34
The terminus a quo of the present study is relatively straightforward, determined by the earliest known Jewish glosses in Old French in the eleventh century. The terminus ad quem is more difficult to establish. Philip Augustus’s expulsion of the Jews from
