Biblical allusions in the story serve as reminders of other brushes with mass destruction. The pious Jew is of the house of Levi, like Moses (Exod. 2:1), and God stiffens Seḥoq’s heart as he did those of Pharaoh and the men Joshua fought, against terrible odds, in conquering land for Israel.6 Seḥoq identifies himself to the Jewish communities he visits with words from Jonah, which in this context evoke God’s eleventh-hour pardon of Nineveh: “He went from there to the towns with Jewish communities that he found. He stirred them with deceitful words, saying to them, ‘I am a Hebrew’ [Jon. 1:9]. The house of Jacob felt compassion for him, and they provided for him according to their custom in every town that he visited.”7 Seḥoq convinces the Jews he visits that he is one of them by his words “I am a Hebrew,” identifying himself with a linguistic or ethnic, rather than religious, term. Christians and Jews alike studied Hebrew during the Middle Ages,8 but only the Jews formed a Hebrew textual community. Hebrew and Jewishness were such close associates that in Latin, Old French, and many other languages (including modern English), words meaning “Hebrew” come also to mean “Jew,” and saying “I am a Hebrew” is—or should be—tantamount to saying, “I am a Jew.” But Seḥoq is a deceiver.
Sociolinguistics is concerned with language variation, of which we perceive two major sorts in the story of Seḥoq ben Esther and in the picture of medieval French Jewry sketched in the introduction. The first is variation between individuals or groups. The Jews of medieval northern France inhabited a multicolored linguistic environment in which the mother tongue was most often a variety of French and the father tongue Latin or Hebrew, depending on one’s religious community. French speakers were conscious of regional, situational, and social variation within their own language (see below). Some came into contact with native speakers of other languages.
The second type of variation at least implicit in the story of Seḥoq is highly individual. Modern sociolinguistic research has shown that individuals change the way they speak depending on topic, audience, and setting. They may use language, consciously or unconsciously, to resemble their audience more closely and to build or reinforce alliances; they may even use language to do the opposite.9 Sarah Bunin Benor, for example, has shown that American Jews who have chosen to become Orthodox dynamically construct and maintain their orthodox identity through many behaviors, including linguistic ones. They may acquire Hebrew and Yiddish loanwords and distinctly Jewish syntactic constructions, phonological processes, and intonational contours.10 Keeping in mind that Seḥoq may be a fictional character, we can assume that in convincing Jews he met that he was one of them, it was not only what he said that was important but also how he said it.
As Gabrielle Spiegel has observed, certain pre- and post-structuralisms have viewed language “not as a window on the world it transparently reflects, but as constructing that world, that is, as creating rather than imitating reality.”11 If we wish to explore whether and how medieval French Jews’ spoken language helped construct their world and their identities, it is crucial first to determine how they spoke and whether their speech ever identified them as Jews, setting them apart from Christians. Only then may we ask whether and how the Jews’ vernacular contributed to the shaping of their identities and affected the way they presented themselves and were perceived by each other and by others, and, to return to Seḥoq ben Esther, what speech characteristics such an apostate might have adopted so as to construct and reinforce the illusion that he was an observant Jew.
“Une langue fantôme”?
Robert Le Page and Andrée Tabouret-Keller have stated the uncontroversial but sometimes overlooked truth that “everybody’s (layman’s and scholar’s) theories and suppositions about language and society are powerfully conditioned by the culture and tradition within which he/she works—conditioned, that is, either positively or negatively.”12 Sara Japhet has located the strongest conditioning factors in “the unconscious, psychic empathy of the scholar with the object of his research.”13 Current research on the vernacular of the Jews of medieval northern France inevitably builds on the work of two European-born Jewish men whose contributions to our understanding of the issue have been among the most extensive, lasting, and influential: Max Weinreich (b. 1894 in Latvia, d. 1969 in New York) and Max Berenblut, better known by the name he took after making aliyah to Israel, Menahem Banitt (b. 1914 in Antwerp, d. 2007 in Tel Aviv).14
In discussions of Jewish languages, scholars often take a comparative approach, and it is worth noting that the hypothesis that there was a distinctively Jewish variety of French in the Middle Ages, often referred to as “Judeo-French,” has been especially well received among scholars who work on Jewish languages more generally.15 It is reasonable to suppose that experience with, or an interest in, a Jewish proclivity to Judaizing local dialects in other parts of the Diaspora, such as North Africa, the Iberian peninsula, and Central and Eastern Europe, may predispose scholars to look favorably upon the hypothesis that the same happened in France, particularly given the Jews’ long presence there (it is believed that Jews first settled in Gaul in Roman times).16 Skepticism about Jewish linguistic varieties or a particular linguistic variety, on the other hand, could have the opposite effect.
There is a correlation between Weinreich’s and Banitt’s attitudes toward Yiddish and their opinions regarding the existence or nonexistence of a distinctive medieval Jewish dialect of French that should make us take pause. Weinreich, who grew up in a German-speaking family, learned Yiddish as a teenager and went on to devote his scholarly career to the language.17 The four-volume Geshikhte fun der Yidisher Shprakh (History of the Yiddish language) is considered his magnum opus.18 Weinreich viewed Jewish linguistic difference positively and, as we shall see, sought out evidence of it in medieval France. Banitt, whose published remarks suggest that he looked on Yiddish with scorn, argued that the Jews’ medieval French was pure and downplayed ways in which it differed from that of non-Jews.
Banitt was strongly influenced by another west European scholar of roughly the same generation, Louis Rabinowitz (b. 1906 Edinburgh, d. 1984).19 In The Social Life of the Jews of Northern France (1938), Rabinowitz famously declared, “apart from the purely religious life, there was an almost complete social assimilation of the life of the Jewish community [in medieval northern France] to that of the general community. In their language, their names, their dress, they were indistinguishable from non-Jews.”20 The reality was more nuanced, as even a reading of Rabinowitz’s own work makes clear.21 We may wonder whether these words reflect wishful thinking for a happier and more peaceful Jewish past; they seem also to express the heartfelt concern with the integration of oppressed minorities and convictions about human equality and worth that were to become increasingly visible in Rabinowitz’s later life, especially in his forceful criticisms of apartheid policies in South Africa.
The scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement from the first half of the nineteenth century to World War I also displayed an interest in the fluency of medieval Jews in the languages spoken around them, artifacts of which include the numerous vernacular glosses in commentaries. Many of the studies Rabinowitz and Banitt relied upon were written by men associated with that school—Abraham Geiger, Samuel Poźnanski, and Leopold Zunz, for example. Wissenschaft des Judentums was driven by a specific political agenda: portraying the Jewish intellectual heritage as equal to the non-Jewish one and the Jews therefore deserving of rights equal to those of non-Jews. Not surprisingly, Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars “consciously avoided” the issue of Jewish national identity, as Japhet reports,22 and they preferred to emphasize the linguistic integration of the Jews of medieval northern France rather than explore evidence of their difference.
Weinreich described Jewish linguistic distinctiveness in heroic terms and portrayed language and community as inseparable. He described Yiddish as a living work of Jewish genius deliberately constructed out of pieces from Hebrew, German, and other vernaculars—among them medieval Jewish