The Medieval Salento. Linda Safran
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also has a significant number of texts in Hebrew, and this does have parallels elsewhere in Italy. Nevertheless, even expanding the geographical and temporal parameters to offset the paucity of Jewish remains yields less than a handful of synagogue dedications and epitaphs from only five sites. From other sources we know of many more Jewish communities in the Terra d’Otranto, especially in the late medieval and early modern periods.3 There is no doubt that these communities maintained Hebrew as their sacred tongue and continued to produce religious and scientific manuscripts until the sixteenth century, but they are both geographically and materially underrepresented here.
The southern Salento (the province of Lecce) preserves more than twice as many Greek texts as Latin ones, whereas in the northern Salento (most of the provinces of Brindisi and Taranto) Latin inscriptions outnumber Greek ones by a ratio of approximately three to one. (The south also had two-thirds of the sites known to have a Jewish presence.) If my inscriptional and graffiti evidence is an accurate indication of a larger truth about spoken Greek and Latin, we would conclude that there were relatively more Greek speakers in the southern part of the Salento and relatively more Latin in the north. Indeed, some scholars have made more sweeping claims about the precise borders of a Greek-speaking south and a Latin-speaking north.4 But inscriptional language is not the same as speech and the surviving material evidence may not be representative of larger communities of speakers. Even a modest painted inscription or a poorly carved tombstone denotes a certain level of social or financial means and depends on the availability of skilled craftsmen and other factors. When language is a product of sociolinguistic choice, a patron might choose a less common tongue to reach a particular subset of his potential audience.5
Dominant and alloglot (minority) languages probably could be found in most sizable communities in the Salento, even if it is not possible to document this archaeologically. Considering only the precisely dated material evidence, we see an increase in the use of Latin for formal texts beginning in the twelfth century, particularly after midcentury, and Latin texts continue to outnumber Greek ones in the thirteenth century; in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, however, the two languages are evenly distributed over the extant dated texts. In other words, while we might have expected the proportion of Latin texts to rise on pace with its increasing value as a language of power and administration—an increase that is apparent from documentary sources—dated Greek texts remained just as abundant. By contrast, the limited evidence for Jewish sites indicates that these were razed or reused by the tenth century (when Hebrew epitaphs disappear) or the thirteenth century (when synagogues are converted to churches at Trani) or later (late fifteenth century, when the synagogue of Lecce is destroyed). Such actions resulted in the loss of most Hebrew inscriptions even though manuscript and documentary evidence for continuous Jewish cultural activity survives.6
The proportions in which the various types of texts are preserved in Greek and Latin reveal some surprising differences. There are more Latin dedicatory inscriptions, perhaps because the latter tend to be epigraphs carved in stone and often still in situ in Roman-rite churches. On the other hand, there are three times as many devotional texts in Greek as in Latin, which may reveal something about differing expressions of piety—not that users of Greek were more pious, but perhaps that their public piety was more likely to be recorded in written form while Latin (actually Romance) speakers may have offered objects or images to their churches instead. Perhaps later Greek speech communities, such as that at Vaste in 1379/80 [157], had a greater need for visible public prayers than their neighbors because of the ever-declining numbers of Orthodox clergy and the infiltration of non-Orthodox church practices (see Chapter 6). If the early bilingual Hebrew-Latin epitaphs are excluded, there are eight times as many funerary texts in Greek as in Latin. Such a great disparity surely is due to multiple factors that probably include Orthodox funerary customs and local habits of display and imitation. Given the size of the sampling and absence of corroborating evidence, it is not possible to make claims about greater Greek literacy or financial clout. In the end, we cannot even be sure that differences in linguistic proportion are meaningful, as both absolute and relative numbers of texts are products of what has survived and what has been published or made accessible.
In addition to the texts in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek that figure in the Database and are discussed below, other languages were occasionally used for public texts. The former pavement of the Norman cathedral at Brindisi illustrated the story of Roland and labeled those scenes in French (Rollant, l’arcevesque Torpin) [21.sc].7 Kufic or pseudo-Kufic script is used to evoke Arabic at San Pietro at Otranto, Santa Maria di Cerrate near Squinzano, and elsewhere, but the comprehensibility of these texts was probably nil and their meanings nonverbal and abstract.8 There was an Armenian community at Ceglie, near Bari, beginning in 990,9 and two funerary stelae in the Salento record Armenian names, but the language of both is Greek [111, 159]. The use of these other tongues was very restricted, and we can seriously discuss the local population’s languages and literacy only in terms of Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and their associated vernaculars, alone and in combination.
The official imposition of a Tuscan variety of Italian since the nineteenth century has not erased traces of earlier languages and dialects in the Salento. The region’s linguistic picture seems always to have been complicated by the interaction of alloglot tongues with one or more majority languages. In general, the dialects called “Salentine” by linguists have many analogies with those in Sicily and southern Calabria, although they display greater lexical archaism and a significant admixture of Greek is apparent in semantics, phonology, and syntax. In the north, such sites as Taranto and Massafra have an Apulian dialect, with pronunciations different from those farther south and a linguistic system more akin to that of Naples.10 Except for this northern fringe, the linguistic map corresponds well to the entity I defined in the Introduction as “the Salento.”
Hebrew
Medieval Jews, or at least the Jewish intellectuals who led them, believed that the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet were identical with the Torah and with the name of God himself: God had used these letters, rotated and in combination, to create the entire world.11 For Jewish mystics, the Hebrew language “was not regarded as a means or a tool, but as the subject and ultimate purpose of speculation.”12 As noted in Chapter 1, Hebrew names were mandatory for Jews because Hebrew was the language spoken by God and his angels; even some Christian sources agreed.13 As was the case with keeping their names, maintaining the Hebrew language was one of the criteria for the Jews’ liberation from Egypt and its identity as a chosen people.14
Jewish prayers were almost all in the holy tongue, the lashon ha-kodesh, although a few prayers persisted in Greek for many centuries.15 A medieval Italian source permitted certain intercessory prayers to be recited in Aramaic, particularly those directed to the angels “appointed [as supervisors] over the gates of prayer” although not to those who serve as one’s “guardian angels” or constant spiritual companions.16 The same text indicates that it is a mitzvah—a positive commandment—to translate Torah readings into the vernacular, although whether this translation is to be done ad hoc or from a prepared translation is not clear. Although this vernacular proviso was already noted in the Talmud, its relevance to thirteenth-century Italy is evident from the author’s personal statement: “My opinion is that of my brother, Rabbi Judah, who says the principle behind the translation is to comment on the words of Torah for women and the ignorant who do not understand the holy language.”17 This halakhic (legal) text, Shibolei ha-Leqet (“Gleaned Ears”), was written in Rome in the mid-thirteenth century by Zidkiyahu ben Abraham ha-Rofe (“the doctor”), a member of the learned Anav family, which traced its origins in Italy to forced exile from Israel under the Roman rulers Pompey and Titus. The work is an invaluable source of information on many aspects of medieval Italian Jewish life and is cited often in this book.18
While Jews lived, worshipped, and died in southern Italy until the sixteenth century, material evidence for their presence consists mainly of funerary inscriptions that do not postdate the tenth century. Late antique epitaphs in the region consistently combined