Vernacular Voices. Kirsten A. Fudeman
by Banitt’s remarks about the Jews’ French is reason enough to reconsider his evidence against medieval Jewish linguistic distinctiveness in northern France. Preferring an idyllic vision of medieval Franco-Jewish integration and stability, Banitt argued that French-speaking Jews in the Middle Ages (1) were not segregated, (2) were fully assimilated into Christian society, and (3) tended to remain in one locale, deliberately focusing on three factors commonly cited as contributing to the rise of Jewish languages— segregation, lack of assimilation, and migration.42 In arguing that the Jews were fully assimilated into Christian society, Banitt rightly emphasizes the small size of most Jewish communities but goes too far when he declares, “Paris never had more than one hundred Jews.”43 Even Rabinowitz, whom Banitt cites in this discussion and whose own study must be consulted with care,44 puts the Jewish population of Paris in the hundreds, noting that the number of adult taxpayers numbered 121 and 85 in 1292 and 1298, respectively, according to rolls published by Isidore Loeb.45 Other scholars have given even higher estimates, as discussed later in this chapter. In order to emphasize the dialectal purity of Jewish speech, Banitt dwelled on the tendency of many medieval French Jews to stay within seigniorial domains. But while there were certainly real barriers to Jewish movement into and out of lordships, it did exist, even before the first expulsion of the Jews from the royal domain in 1182.46 Banitt wrote that the Jews prayed in French and that certain unnamed offices were performed only in French.47 Jews prayed in French at times, but existing medieval French- and Ashkenazi-rite prayer books are written almost exclusively in Hebrew, as he certainly knew. Much of Banitt’s article is devoted to a seemingly meticulous presentation and refutation of “Judeo-French vocabulary” directed primarily against the work of Raphael Levy, who included many common Old French words in his studies (for example, kant [“when”]) because he was interested in the totality of the Jews’ French lexicon, not just distinctive vocabulary items.48 Banitt says little about the most distinctive lexical items in medieval Jewish texts in Old French, some of which are discussed below, dismissing them as few in number and unimportant.49 In arguing against Levy, Banitt occasionally explains words from Levy’s studies in cavalier fashion, including asseser, which he relates to assesser through the noun asseseance and defines as “ ‘raffermir’ sa voix, quand on est brûlé vif” (“strengthen” one’s voice, when burned alive). Banitt does not note that this is a definition that he himself invented based on the word’s context in the Troyes elegy and that assesser’s attested, unrelated meaning is “assess, value; assess for tax purposes.” (I have since argued that the word in the elegy is properly read as assenser [“instruct”].)50
Banitt titled his diatribe against the notion of a Jewish French “Une langue fantôme: Le judéo-français.” The adjective phantom can mean imaginary or nonexistent; the noun refers to something with no physical reality as well as something dreaded or despised. Judeo-French was indeed one of Banitt’s phantoms. Whether it was a phantom language depends entirely on what we take “Judeo-French” to mean. Medieval Jewish texts in French were written for and by Jews in Hebrew letters, and they contain distinctive lexical items, most of them from Hebrew. According to definitions of “Jewish language” put forward by various scholars, the Jews’ medieval French is one.51 Although some scholars may prefer more stringent definitions that disqualify the Jews’ medieval French from being called a Jewish language, it will be shown below that, based on the written evidence we have, calling the Jews’ medieval French “identical” to or “indistinguishable” from the medieval French spoken and written by Christians is untenable.
When east and west European Jewish scholars born near the turn of the twentieth century confronted the question of Jewish linguistic distinctiveness in medieval France, they often did so having already taken some sort of a stand on Yiddish, even if only a private one. For those who associated Yiddish with crowded and dirty ghettos, a lack of cultivation, and marginalization and persecution, the proposal that Jews living in France in a time before ghettos also spoke a distinctly Jewish vernacular may have been an uncomfortable, even intolerable one. Specifically, I have raised the possibility that Banitt’s rejection of the idea of a distinctively Jewish way of speaking medieval French was influenced by associations like these, and perhaps also by the emphasis of the earlier Wissenschaft des Judentums movement on Jewish integration. Scholars relatively unfettered by these biases were sometimes held by ideological agendas of their own. Claiming that great scholars like Rashi did speak a distinctly Jewish variety of Old French might be said to play a redemptive role, raising the stature of all Jewish languages; focusing on differences between Jewish languages and co-territorial non-Jewish languages reinforces Jewish unity. We have seen that Weinreich associated Yiddish with genius, and that Agus, another defender of Judeo-French, exalted Jewish difference in other, non-linguistic realms.
When one assimilates the views of other scholars without considering the forces that helped shape them or subjecting them to critical analysis, one risks becoming handicapped by their biases and prejudices even without sharing them. Recent scholarship on medieval French-speaking Jews and their literature has frequently cited Banitt’s article “Une langue fantôme” as the last word on the question of whether the Jews’ French was distinctive. As we have seen, however, the many flaws in Banitt’s argument require us to step back and consider this question anew. Yes, the Jews of France generally spoke French. But they used it in a distinctively Jewish way—writing it in the Hebrew script and incorporating Hebrew and other Jewish lexical items.
In the rest of this chapter I put aside the question of whether the Jews spoke “Judeo-French” or a “Jewish language,” because any answers we might propose would depend on our definitions of these terms. Instead, referring to the Jews’ French simply as “French,” but recognizing that languages are dynamic systems and that linguistic variation is the norm rather than the exception, I focus on ways in which the components of medieval Jewish identities asserted themselves through language, especially the vernacular. I also consider whether the Jews’ French might have differed structurally from that of non-Jews and, if so, to suggest avenues for future research.
Religious Difference, Linguistic Difference
The Jews of medieval France lived and worked among Christians: Rigord (d. c. 1209), self-identified chronicler of the kings of France and author of the Gesta Philippi Augusti, mentions Christian servants in Jewish households and relationships between Christians and the Jews who loaned them money or who bought grain and animals from them.52 But their religion ensured a certain level of social distinctiveness. Dietary laws meant that observant Jews bought meat from Jewish butchers and took wine and meals with other Jews, not Christians. They had their own educational system and their own means of administering justice. They often clustered together in residential streets or neighborhoods that were nevertheless not exclusive, and they tended to marry within the group.53 Can a distinctive dialect or way of speaking arise or be maintained under such conditions? Studies of language variation in modern populations have shown that it can,54 and they harmonize with broader findings about the influence of close-knit social networks on language variation and change.55 To take only two examples, Charles Boberg finds significant differences between the vowels produced by English speakers of Ashkenazic Jewish, Italian, and Irish descent who have grown up in Montreal,56 and he relates them to residential patterns as well as to the minority status of English there. Concentrations of Jews in particular neighborhoods encourage the creation and maintenance of close social networks that both reinforce shared elements of linguistic difference within the group and resist assimilation to patterns of linguistic variation outside the group.57 Perfect homogeneity is not a prerequisite: the Jewish neighborhoods of Montreal are no more exclusive than the medieval rues des Juifs and juiveries. Clive Holes, citing “religious cleavage,” shows that Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims in Bahrain have spoken dramatically different dialects for one hundred fifty to two hundred years despite living in close proximity to one another. Sunnis and Shi’is are segregated: they often live with others of their faith, they socialize among themselves, and they tend to marry within the group. Sunnis and Shi’is also differ from each other in education level, the kinds of employment they engage in, and social custom. All of these also held true for many, though not all, medieval French-speaking Jews.
That