Vernacular Voices. Kirsten A. Fudeman
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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 sometimes obscure the original forms of French words or render them irrecoverable; 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