Vernacular Voices. Kirsten A. Fudeman
and texts in their postexpulsion homes until Hebraico-French textual production waned and died with the death of the expulsion generation or soon after. The bilingual wedding song beginning ‘Uri liqra’ti yafah, discussed in Chapter 4, was copied sometime between the late fourteenth century and second decade of the fifteenth, apparently in a German-speaking (or bilingual French-German) environment. A recipe for ḥaroset with ingredients in French (see Chapter 3) was copied in northern Italy in 1470. It seems probable that even at this relatively late date, an undeterminable number of descendents of northern French Jews in northern Italy and elsewhere were continuing to speak and even occasionally to write in their ancestral tongue.41
Vernaculars and Literary Languages
The mobility of individual Jews and entire Jewish communities, by choice or by force, has led Malachi Beit-Arié to call them “agents of cross-cultural contacts and influences and intercultural confrontations.”42 Set Jewish mobility against the backdrop of the already multilingual Middle Ages, and the result is a complex linguistic web woven of threads of many colors. The literary languages Hebrew, Latin, and Aramaic contribute many strands, for written languages can be adapted to different styles, from lofty to most humble. The threads representing medieval vernaculars, of which there were many, split and merge according to geography, social class, and time period. And languages can be mixed: vernacular speech might be interspersed with words or phrases in the learned tongue, a learned text might incorporate vernacular glosses, or a poet might compose a hybrid text, drawing from two or more linguistic and literary traditions at once.
Even the lowliest and least educated Jew born in northern France during the Middle Ages came into contact with a number of different languages in his or her lifetime, of which the most important to Jewish identity and culture would have been French, the mother tongue, and Hebrew, which we might call the father tongue, since it was generally transmitted from fathers and other male authority figures to sons and was based outside the home in the male domains of the yeshiva and synagogue.43 (Note that study and worship would often have taken place in the same physical space, one that may have been used for other purposes as well.)
Hebrew, this father tongue, the holy tongue, was also what we call a literary language by virtue of its conservatism, the relative stability with which it was used over vast stretches of space and time, and its transmission through texts.44 That it was conservative does not mean it was frozen, and we can identify at least three varieties of Hebrew to which educated Jews in the medieval period would have been exposed: biblical, rabbinic, and medieval. Biblical Hebrew is the language of the Hebrew Bible, with modern scholars distinguishing between the language of early biblical poetry, that of pre-exilic prose writings, and that of the latest, post-exilic writings. Rabbinic Hebrew is the language of the texts created by the Jewish sages called the Tannaim (c. 20–200 C.E.) and Amoraim (c. 220 to 360–370 C.E. in the Land of Israel, c. 220–500 C.E. in Babylonia) and is properly divided into Tannaitic and Amoraic Hebrew, with the Amoraic period stretching into the Middle Ages. The Hebrew in which European medieval Jews composed their commentaries, poetry, and other texts grew out of rabbinic Hebrew,45 and though medieval Jews using Hebrew wrote in an array of styles, we can classify them together as medieval Hebrew.46
Two other literary languages of great importance to medieval French Jewish culture were Aramaic and Latin. Medieval Jews encountered Aramaic, a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew, when studying the Gemara, particular sections of the Bible (Gen. 31:47, Jer. 10:11, Dan. 2:4–7:28, Ezra 4:8–6:8 and 7:12–26), Targumim (Aramaic translations or paraphrases of the Bible), and various other texts. Aramaic also influenced Amoraic and medieval Hebrew vocabulary, morphology, and syntax. Among all the languages of the world, “Aramaic is closest but not quite equal in status to that of Hebrew,” Steven Fraade has stated, summing up an idea found in rabbinic sources. It is both “a revealed language” and “a language of revelation.”47
If French and Hebrew, the latter accompanied by and sometimes mixed with Aramaic, can be considered the Jews’ mother and father tongues, then from approximately the eighth or ninth century on, Latin, so important in Christian thought and worship, might be called the “other tongue” and the “language of the other.” One of the four languages, along with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, in which the Torah was given, according to the Midrash, it, too, was a language of revelation.48
Prior to the eighth and ninth centuries, when Romance speakers in Gaul still considered their speech Latin, and Latin texts could be read aloud so that even the uneducated could understand, Latin was not yet the language of the other for Jews living in northern and southern France—it was their mother tongue, as it was for their Christian neighbors. This claim is common sense, although we are hard-pressed to find written evidence for it.49 Few Jewish manuscripts from any region, even fragmentary, survive from that period; the oldest Jewish codices from Latin Europe date from the eleventh century.50 Jewish inscriptions in Latin dating from the eighth century or earlier have been found in Auch, Bordeaux, Narbonne, and perhaps Avignon,51 but not apparently in the north of France. That Jews living in what is now France once had Latin as their mother tongue is perhaps best reflected by particular words of popular Latin origin that are attested in Hebraico-French texts and glosses but that are not attested or are attested only rarely in other medieval French documents. It is possible that these words were used by Jews and non-Jews alike in Latin Gaul but that they gradually fell out of use among non-Jews.52
By the period that concerns us most here, the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, Latin was no longer a living language, and learning it required formal study. Although some Jews in northern France studied Latin, it seems that most did not and that Latin study among Jews was greater in Spain, Provence, and Italy, all of which are known for the production of translations of Latin works into Hebrew.53
We can name specific Spanish, Occitan, and Italian Jews, such as Moses of Palermo (thirteenth century), Immanuel of Rome (b. c. 1261, d. before 1335), and Léon Joseph de Carcassonne (fourteenth to fifteenth century), who are known to have become proficient in Latin. Gersonides (Levi ben Gershom or Gerson, or Léon de Bagnols, 1288–1344) may have known Latin as well, though he wrote exclusively in Hebrew, with Occitan glosses, and there is no textual evidence that he consulted non-Hebrew sources.54
In contrast to the situation in Spain, Occitania, and Italy, evidence regarding the Latin proficiency of individual Jewish scholars from northern France is scarce. It is known that Joseph of Orleans, also known as Joseph Bekhor Shor (mid- to late twelfth century), learned Latin in order to read Christian texts,55 and David Berger has stated in more general terms that Jewish authors concerned with the Jewish-Christian polemic “surely read Latin.” Berger also writes, “When Jewish works … refute Christological interpretations that are found only in Christian commentaries and not in polemics, we have reason to suspect that the Jewish authors got the information from a literary source, and a systematic investigation along these lines may well prove rewarding,” and he mentions a section, “probably interpolated,” in the Munich manuscript of the Nizzaḥon vetus on Psalms that refers to Christian translations and glossa in a way that suggests that the Jewish author had read the texts.56
All too often, however, evidence regarding the Latin knowledge of individual Jewish scholars is ambiguous or altogether lacking. Take the case of Samuel ben Meir, known as Rashbam (c. 1085–1174). Rashbam engaged in discussion with Christian scholars, and it has been claimed that he knew Latin based on his discussion of Exod. 20:13 and the commandment “You shall not murder.”57 Rashbam asserts that the verb r-ṣ-ḥ “always … refers to unjustified homicide.” He contrasts it with h-r-g and m-w-t, which “sometimes refer to unjustified homicide … and sometimes to justifiable homicide,” then continues: “I offer this explanation as an argument against the heretics and they admitted that I was right. Even though in their Latin books [i.e., the Vulgate] the same verb is used to translate the verb [m-w-t] in the phrase (Dt. 32:39) ‘I deal death [amit] and I give life,’ and the verb [r-ṣ-ḥ] in this verse, their translations are