One such writer was Gautier de Coinci (1177/78–1236), a northern French monk and writer of miracle stories and lyric poetry known for his hatred of the Jews and love of the Virgin Mary. In D’un Archevesque qui fu a Tholete, Gautier declares, “Jez bruïroie toz ensanble” (I would burn them all together),81 and in a song to Mary, “Tant les het mes corages, je ne le puis nïer, / S’iere rois, jes feroie tous en un puis nïer” (My heart hates them so much, I cannot deny it, that if I were king, I would have them all drowned in a well).82 As genuine as this hatred seems, Gautier’s anti-Jewish storylines and themes can be traced to Latin sources, and he seems to have written about the Jews not so much because they belonged to his society but because they were the example, par excellence, of the blind unbeliever, Augustinian witnesses to the truth of Christianity, and because their intellectualism and familiarity with Scripture threatened Christian souls.83 His miracle stories tell us little about how the Jews of his time lived and interacted with Christians.
Miri Rubin traces the evolution of one story—that of the Jewish boy in the oven—from its Greek origins in the sixth century or before (Evagrius Scholasticus of Antioch, c. 536–600, recorded it in his Historia ecclesiastica) through the fifteenth century in France, England, Germany, and elsewhere, in literature and art.84 Details change in these adaptations (one is by Gautier),85 and some of them may indeed reflect realities of particular times and places. Nevertheless, the Jews in this and other stories are types, constructed and elaborated for specific didactic and polemical purposes, not reliable representations of living Jews.
Two examples from later centuries are instructive. By the fifteenth century in Germany, Yiddish was well established, yet non-Jewish writers of the period rarely give examples of distinctively Jewish expressions in literary texts such as religious folk plays. Instead, “Jews are ridiculed through chanting or shouting meaningless syllables, presumably Jewish prayer [in Hebrew].”86 In pre- and post-Revolutionary France, few writers apart from the abbé Henri Grégoire dwelled on the many regional varieties of French and Occitan. “Language differences are real,” David Bell writes, “but their extent, and the extent to which they matter, lie at least partly in the ear of the listener.”87 Whereas in modern scholarship, asserting or denying medieval French Jewish linguistic difference (likewise, asserting the linguistic diversity of early modern France, as David Bell has shown) has served at least two particular ideological agendas, it is not clear that discussing distinctive features of the Jews’ French—for example, Hebrew loanwords, if Christians were aware of them, and a Jewish “accent,” if one existed—would have served medieval Christian writers. If the distinctive features were subtle, involving phonological features like vowel height and rounding, those same writers might not even have been capable of commenting on them. Medieval Tsarefat was a land of great linguistic diversity. Portraying a Jew as speaking French with a slightly idiosyncratic pronunciation would not have been an effective way of calling attention to his or her otherness in a land where there was no standard language.88
Gentile writers do call attention to the Jews’ use of Hebrew. In Routbeuf’s Miracle de Théophile (thirteenth century), Salatin conjures the devil with nonsense words.
Bagahi laca bachahé
Lamac cahi achabahé
Karrelyos
Lamac lamec bachalyos
Cabahagi sabalyos
Baryolas
Lagozatha cabyolas
Samahac et famyolas
Harrahya. (ll. 160–68)89
Salatin is not obviously Jewish, but his predecessors in earlier versions of the story by Gautier de Coinci and Adgar are. Vincent de Beauvais also portrays Theophilus’s helper as Jewish.90 The nonsense words from Rutebeuf’s version are not really Hebrew, but popular audiences probably understood them to be. After Salatin pronounces these words, the devil asks him not to torture him anymore, “Ne en ebrieu ne en latin” (in Hebrew or Latin; l. 203).91 In a medieval mystery play, Jews address Pilate with real and imitation Hebrew mixed with Latin: “chodus, chados, adonai sebaos, sesim, sossim, chochun yochun or nor yochun or nor gun yinbrahei et ysmahel ly ly lancze lare uczerando ate lahu dilando, sicut vir melior yesse ceuia ceuca ceu capiasse amel.”92
Jordan gives a number of vivid examples of the fear and loathing inspired by Hebrew writing, particularly in England, though the situation seems to have been similar in France. His analysis of “ecclesiastical legislation against loud chanting by Jews in synagogue or actions in procession to burials” is striking: “the cultic signs were wrong, the sounds were wrong.”93 Judaism was an inverted form of Christianity and Hebrew a devilish foil to Latin. The mid-fourteenth-century Book of Sir John Mandeville, which circulated in the British isles and on the continent, portrayed Hebrew as dangerous.94 Odo, author of Ysagoge in Theologiam, believed that Hebrew could be used to draw Jews to the Church,95 but others believed the opposite: when the Dominican cleric Robert of Reading became a Jew in the late thirteenth century, some blamed the seductive powers of Hebrew.96
We cannot discount the possibility that what Gentiles heard as Hebrew was sometimes a mixture of Hebrew and French, its imagined ancestor the mixed Hebrew and Latin of the Jews addressing Pilate seen above. Again, examples taken from other contexts are instructive. In 1596 Thomas Platter of Switzerland visited Avignon and noted that the women’s synagogue was “underground, a veritable cellar, getting its light from a room above through an opening. A blind rabbi preaches there to women, in bad Hebrew, for the dialect of the Jews of Avignon is mixed with Languedocean words. In the room above, however, they preach to men in good Hebrew.”97 The “dialect of the Jews of Avignon” was not Hebrew at all but rather Shuadit (Judeo-Occitan), a Romance language with many Hebrew loanwords. But Platter reverses the matter, considering it a Hebrew corrupted by lexical borrowing from the local Occitan dialect. Yiddish is sometimes called “Hebrew” by people who do not know any better, and sometimes even by those who do. The Jewish-born Christian Gerson, baptized a Christian in 1605, claimed to know real Hebrew, as opposed to Yiddish.98 Wagenseil wrote that a Christian “who hears [the Jews] speak German [!] must conclude that they speak nothing but pure Hebrew, for practically no single word comes out intelligible.”99
This said, the writings of medieval Christian observers concentrate Jewish linguistic difference in the use of Hebrew for scholarship and worship, and not in day-to-day conversation. An exception is a mid- to late thirteenth-century account of the ritual crucifixion of Adam of Bristol, discussed by Robert Stacey: “God the Son … startles the Jewish perpetrators of Adam’s murder by addressing them in Hebrew, a language unknown to any Bristol Christians (according to the tale), and therefore utilized by the Jewish characters for secret communications between themselves that they did not want their Christian neighbors to understand—in this case, of course, for their plans to murder Adam of Bristol.”100 Even here, we must ask to what the “Hebrew” of the Jews’ secret conversations really corresponded: was it more or less pure, or did it have a substantial French component?
To return to the story of Seḥoq ben Esther, Seḥoq’s self-identification as a “Hebrew” makes him appear Jewish. His actions reveal that he is a Christian: “He abandoned His Torah and His laws and statutes that He had commanded Moses His servant. And he served the god of the Gentiles and the idols of the sons of Esau that neither see nor hear nor eat nor smell [Deut. 4:28]; he clung to these, serving them and bowing down to them, and of God, our fortress, he had no understanding.” There is a kernel of truth in Seḥoq’s words, “I am a Hebrew”: brought up in the Jewish faith, we assume that he received some sort of Jewish education. He is a “Hebrew,” a member of the Jewish textual and cultural community, even if he is not a “Jew.” In the way Seḥoq joined forces with Gentiles to hurt the Jews, he resembles historical figures like Nicholas Donin, who in the first half of the thirteenth century denounced particular talmudic passages to Christian authorities and opposed Jewish scholars in the Talmud trial