In the next section we turn to Jewish linguistic distinctiveness from the perspective of the Jewish community itself, drawing on evidence from glosses and Old French texts written in Hebrew letters. Appropriately, it was Hebrew that left the most lasting mark of difference of the written records of the Jews’ French.
Acts of Identity
The relationship between speech and self is at the heart of much sociolinguistic research. For Le Page and Tabouret-Keller, linguistic behavior is made up of deliberate “acts of identity,” choices that individuals make about language so as to resemble or be unlike certain people or groups, depending on whether they wish to be identified with or distinguished from them.103 Paul Wexler considers distinctive features of Jewish languages “voluntary acts of linguistic creativity” and their fusion of Jewish and non-Jewish elements “part of the group’s desire for independent linguistic expression.”104 We could interpret the distinctive Jewish features of Hebraico-French texts as evidence of a distinctively Jewish dialect of Old French, but as we have already seen, such an approach is highly dependent on definitions of technical terms, with assessments of the same sets of objective linguistic data differing radically depending on scholars’ theoretical constructs. Instead I would like to build on the work of Le Page, Tabouret-Keller, Wexler, and others and propose that instantiations of medieval Franco-Jewish linguistic distinctiveness represent “voluntary acts of linguistic creativity” that alternately reveal, reinforce, or actively construct a consciousness of Jewish difference.105 In contrast, though the French language also contributed to the identity of medieval French Jews, speaking French was not itself an active choice; it was imposed on them by the environment. A child does not choose his or her mother tongue. (Writing in French, rather than the more usual Hebrew, was an active choice, an idea I return to in Chapters 3 and 4.)
Medieval Jewish communities in Tsarefat were embedded in a larger, French-speaking community made up of Jews and non-Jews. For the Jews of England and Jewish communities near linguistic frontiers (for example, French-German, French-Occitan), the situation was even more complex. This was reflected in the way Jews used language and particularly in the alternation between Hebrew and French in medieval Jewish manuscripts that we can call “code-switching.”106 The choice to switch from one language to another carries social meaning, and the languages themselves reflect aspects of the identities of both participants or sets of participants in the discourse, regardless of whether that discourse is oral or written.107 The subject matter of medieval Hebrew-French manuscripts assures the writers, themselves Jews, of a primarily Jewish readership or, in the case of texts intended for oral performance, audience. In such contexts, where the two languages reflect salient aspects of both participants’ (writer’s and reader’s/audience’s) identities, it is the overall pattern of using two languages that carries social meaning rather than particular instances of code-switching.108 The existence of code-switching between Hebrew and French is one of the clearest illustrations that medieval Jewish writers belonged simultaneously to two linguistic communities.
The most common type of code-switching in Jewish texts in Old French involves isolated Hebrew words. Many of the same words occur in other Jewish languages and can be considered symbols of unity between far-flung Jewish communities. Many have no apt vernacular translation, but many do (for example, rasha‘ [“wicked”], mizraḥ [“east”], sha‘ah [“hour, time”]), suggesting that the Hebrew words served both practical and stylistic purposes. Most of the Hebrew words in Jewish French texts come from the religious sphere, denoting, for example, people and other beings (e.g., ḥatan [“bridegroom”], kallah [“bride”], kohen [“priest”], qadosh [“martyr”], mal’akhim [“angels”]),109 texts (e.g., torah),110 ritual objects (e.g., shofar [“instrument made from the horn of a ram or other animal”]),111 concepts (e.g., galut [“(Jewish) exile”], qedushah [“sanctification, martyrdom”], teshuvah [“return, repentance”], zekhut [“right, merit”]),112 or the Temple, its parts, and the items found there (lo mishkan [“the Temple”] [lo is French], dukhan [“platform”]).113 In the written documents that have come down to us, it is Hebrew-French code-switching, including the use of Hebrew vocabulary items (regardless of their frequency or limitations on contexts in which they were used), that renders medieval Jews’ French most distinctive.
In Hebraico-French poetry, the mixing of occasional Hebrew words creates a “poétique des contrastes,” a linguistic texturing considered by Paul Zumthor a fundamental tendency of medieval literary aesthetics.114 In this stanza from a hymn for Rosh Hashanah in Old French, avot (“fathers”) is used instead of Old French peres; shofar, which has no true equivalent in Old French, designates the ritual ram’s horn sounded during the service for the new year.
Les anfanz des AVOT sages i apris, bian anseneiz,
A tocher do SHOFAR ce setein mais cheke an sont peneiz;
Roi de rainçon, remanbr[e] l’amor d’anci[a]nz: ver soi eteiant adoneiz; Lus anfanz si acreis[s]e come éteiles de ciel, plus ne seiant mal meneiz.115
(The well-taught children of the wise and learnèd FOREFATHERS
take pains to sound the SHOFAR in this, the seventh month, each year;
King of Redemption, remember the love of the Ancients: they dedicated themselves to you;
multiply their children like stars in the heavens, may they not be harassed anymore.)
Jews writing in Old French regularly called the bride kallah and the bridegroom ḥatan, as in the final stanza of the wedding song beginning El giv‘at ha-levonah (To the hill of frankincense) (see Chapter 4), and it can be argued that these have no real vernacular equivalents, because they denote a specifically Jewish bride and bridegroom.
ET SHEN SELA‘ HA-EITAN
tu ve[n]ras ja eiproveir
EL TOKH GINNAT HA-BITAN
Ou li ḤATAN fu livreiz
HE-ḤATAN QOLO NATAN
Il a dit a seis priveiz
Bia chanteir einuie ce saveiz
Le ḤATAN e la KALLAH an la cheire sus leveiz!116
(THE TOOTH OF THE HARD ROCK
You will come to experience it
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE PALACE GARDEN
Where the bridegroom was turned over,
THE BRIDEGROOM GAVE FORTH HIS VOICE
He said to his attendants
“I’m bored by this fine singing, you know.”
Raise the BRIDEGROOM and the BRIDE upon the throne!)
This stanza is remarkable for another reason: the