Vernacular Voices. Kirsten A. Fudeman
Without damaging or shattering it,
In a similar way, but even more adeptly,
God entered into the virgin and afterward came out again.)
If the Christian thinks he has stumbled across a fool, the Jew declares, he most assuredly has not (ll. 35–36)! How could a virgin give birth? How could God, so great that the whole world cannot contain him, be enclosed in the belly of a woman? How could the One who has always existed have had a beginning? How could one God be three? Speech follows speech, with the eloquence of the Christian matching that of the Jew. The turning point comes when the Christian interprets for the Jew the prophecy of Isa. 11:1–2: “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding” (NRSV). The Christian explains, “La verge c’est la virge; par la flor doiz entendre celui qui en la virge daigna por nos descendre” (ll. 385–86) (The branch is the virgin; by the flower you must understand the one who deigned to come down for us in the virgin). Other verses from Isaiah and Jeremiah are offered by the Christian and, finally, a paraphrase of Moses’ words in Deut. 28:66, which medieval Christians commonly understood as referring to the Jews’ failure to recognize Christ.67
Sez que dit de sa mort Moÿsés, vostre maistre[s]?
“El fust verras ta vie devant tes ieus pendue.
Ta vie ert devant toi, ne par toi n’ert creüe.”
Cil qui fu mis en croiz, cist estoit nostre vie
Qui pendoit devant vos et nel creüstes mie. (ll. 419–23)68
(Do you know what Moses, your teacher, said about His death?
“You will see your life hanging before you on the cross.
Your life will be before you, but you will not believe it.”
The one who was placed on a cross, He was our life,
Which was hanging right before you, and yet you did not believe.)
The Jew, finally convinced of the Christian’s authority, proclaims that the Messiah has come and says, “ge me vo[i]s baptoier et ma mauvaitie secte gerpir et renoier” (ll. 429–30)69 (I am going to get baptized and forsake and renounce my wicked sect). The Christian has the last words: “Bien est; bien ai tendu a ce que j’ai mené, puis que j’ai un juÿf a creance amené” (ll. 431–32) (Good. Rightly I persevered in accomplishing my task, for I led a Jew to faith). We might add: in French.
Hebrew-French Diglossia
The characteristics of the use of Old French versus Hebrew among medieval French-speaking Jews fall into a classic pattern that scholars call “diglossia.” Diglossia is the stable and widespread use of two or more distinct codes (styles, dialects, languages) in a culture, each with specific functions. Traditionally, it has referred to the use of two related languages or dialects, a usage established by Charles Ferguson using such examples as the coexistence of Standard French and Haitian Creole in Haiti.70 Here I assume the broader interpretation of diglossia introduced by Joshua Fishman that covers the coexistence of unrelated languages, each with separate functions.71
In a diglossic situation, high (H) linguistic varieties are prestige tongues, generally learned through formal education, and low (L) varieties are mother tongues, acquired by infants. Among medieval French-speaking Jews, Hebrew was the high linguistic variety and a regional variety of French the low one. This diglossic situation was set in a larger society that was itself diglossic, with the high variety being Latin and the low one again regional varieties of French.
Drawing on Fishman’s work, within a diglossic culture, the high linguistic variety
(1) typically has greater prestige than the low variety;
(2) has a rich literary heritage, which often includes the liturgy and sacred texts;
(3) is learned in formal settings;
(4) is highly codified, with fairly established rules of grammar, spelling, pronunciation, and so on;
(5) is used for most written and formal spoken purposes; and
(6) is generally not used for ordinary conversation.
All of this is true of Hebrew during the period in question. Hebrew’s prestige was great. It was believed to be the language in which God’s finger wrote the tablets of the covenant given at Horeb (Deut. 9:10).72 Its rich literary tradition stretches back to antiquity. It was transmitted through formal education, whether in the home or outside it, and its spelling and grammar were standardized to a great extent, even if, to quote Angel Sáenz-Badillos, the Romance-speaking Jews who wrote in Hebrew sometimes used “poor style, dubious morphology, and questionable syntax.”73 Within a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, linguistic framework, these irregularities of style and grammar are best viewed less subjectively. Sara Japhet and Robert Salters ask, “are they not rather the result of various forces brought to bear on the language, giving it new direction?”74
We have already seen that medieval French Jews used Hebrew for most written purposes. It is impossible to know how often they used Hebrew in conversation, but the times at which Jews spoke Hebrew to one another would have certainly been outnumbered by their interactions, with each other and with Christians, in their mother tongue, French.
Linguists beginning with Ferguson have shown that two languages in a diglossic relationship often interact in similar ways. Lexical borrowing from the high variety into the low one is common. Words are also borrowed, though less often, from the low variety into the high one. Both types of borrowing took place in medieval French Jewish society. Hebraico-French texts regularly feature Hebrew or Aramaic borrowings, for example, ḥatan (“bridegroom”), kallah (“bride”), and ‘asqer (“engage in study of the law”). (This last example bears a French infinitival suffix.)75 The opposite is also amply attested: for example, Hebrew texts written in response to the martyrdom of over thirty Jews in Blois in 1171 incorporate the Old French words peau (skin, hide), vaire (pale, mottled; made of squirrel or miniver), and golier (debauchee), as do many other medieval Hebrew documents produced in France, most famously the commentaries of Rashi of Troyes.
Low linguistic varieties typically exert a phonological influence on high varieties, and often a grammatical influence as well. In medieval northern France, the pronunciation of Hebrew was influenced by French, as were its morphology and syntax.76 Although these phenomena generally fall beyond the scope of this book, I note a few examples here. In the documents relating to the Blois massacre of 1171 invoked above, the gender and form of the Hebrew masculine noun ‘or (hide) is adapted to the gender of its French counterpart, peau, resulting in feminine ‘orah, which seems to be a hapax legomenon.77 In a Hebrew-French glossary of bird and animal names in a miscellany owned by the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma, discussed in Chapter 3, the gender of the Hebrew possessive suffix is sometimes influenced by the vernacular translation of the Hebrew word to which it refers. Thus, the masculine noun ‘atalef (bat), translated into Old French as feminine pie (magpie), is described as “the bird [‘of, m.] that is wrapped [me‘ulaf, m.] in her wings [bi-knafeyha].” The last word bears a third-person singular feminine suffix.
We have already pointed out that high linguistic varieties tend to be used for formal, written purposes, and low linguistic varieties for informal, conversational ones. While this is essentially true, we must also heed the words of scholars such as Jan Ziolkowski, who, writing about the Latin Middle Ages, has warned against distinguishing between “oral and literate … or popular and learned” too sharply.78 French may have been used by medieval Jews primarily for oral purposes, but this book would not have been written if they had not sometimes put it in writing. Hebrew was fundamentally a written language, but this did not prevent an oral culture from growing up around it.79 Even illiterate Jews spoke Hebrew aloud while praying or reciting