Not all of the special terms in Hebraico-French texts come from Hebrew. Melder (“study, meditate on [a text]”), originally from Greek (μελ-ετάω) through Latin (meletāre), was fully integrated into the Jews’ French, as demonstrated by its participation in phonological and morphological processes. Its phonological shape changes in accordance with regional phonological processes such as /l/-deletion in Lotharingian, and its inflections in accordance with its grammatical context.117 While Christian-authored texts contain prefixed forms of Latin meletāre, it seems that from the Middle Ages onward, unprefixed cognates occur almost exclusively in Jewish texts, whether Greek or Romance (French, Italian, Provençal, Portuguese, Spanish).118
Ḥaldrube (“camel’s hump,” “hunchback’s hump”), cognate with Classical Arabic ḥádaba and modern Spanish joroba and apparently borrowed into French from Hispano-Arabic, is given as a French term in numerous contexts, including the glosses of Rashi, Joseph Kara, and pseudo-Gershom, and the Hebrew-French glossaries of Basel, Leipzig, and Paris.119 Another word that appears in multiple contexts is the bird name herupe, which is given as the Old French translation of Hebrew dukhifat (an unclean bird sometimes translated into English as “hoopoe”) by Rashi, as well as in brief glossaries in ms. Valmadonna 1 and Cod. Parm. 2342 (on the latter, see Chapter 3) and in the much more extensive Basel, Leipzig, Paris, and Parma (Cod. Parm. 2924) glossaries.120 Herupe, which may be onomatopoeic, is not, to my knowledge, attested in non-Jewish texts in Old French, which call the hoopoe hupe or huhud.121 Note that the existing evidence shows only that ḥaldrube and herupe existed in a French Jewish scholarly register, although either might have potentially been used in non-scholarly contexts as well (in the case of ḥaldrube, presumably only with the sense “hunchback’s hump”).
In many Jewish texts in Old French of diverse geographic provenance, the word for “God” is Gé.122 The more typical Old French oblique forms Dié and Dé are also attested, even in manuscripts from the same regions.123 Deriving Gé (pronounced [dže] and later [že]) from Latin Dĕus or Old French Dié is straightforward,124 and so it is likely that Jews were not alone in pronouncing the name of God thus some of the time. The solemn significance of the name meant that its spelling was particularly bound to the Latin one in Christian-authored texts. Indeed, we know from Ch. Théodore Gossen’s study of Picard that even when medieval French speakers’ pronunciations of the word for “God” varied, their spellings rarely did.125 But Jewish scribes, relatively free from spelling conventions based on Latin, were free to use a distinctively Jewish graphie.
Hebrew words for cardinal directions also seem to have infiltrated the Jews’ French to some extent. In at least two Hebrew-French glossaries, Hebrew ha-qadmoni (“the Easterner”; Joel 2:20) is glossed into French using a hybrid Hebrew-French term, ber MIZRAḤ. (“man of the east”),126 and mizraḥ is attested as a French Jewish word for “east” elsewhere as well.127 A glossary once held in Turin glosses yemin ha-‘ir (2 Sam. 24:5; “the right/south side of the city”) as a DAROM de la vile (“to the south of the city”), with Hebrew darom used instead of French sud to translate Hebrew yamin (“right hand; south”).128 The Paris glossary edited by Lambert and Brandin translates ruaḥha-yam (Ezek. 42:19; “the west side”) as le ongle de ma‘arav (“the west corner”).129 W. Bacher, in his review of that edition, considers the small number of instances where Hebrew is used in translating other Hebrew terms as evidence of the purity of the Jews’ French,130 but one might ask, in a text whose purpose seems to be the translation of Hebrew words into the vernacular, why use Hebrew in the glosses at all? In each case, the Hebrew word used in the so-called vernacular translation is different from the one it translates, and I suggest that the use of Hebrew terms highlights the near synonymy of darom and yamin (“south”), qadmon and mizraḥ (“east”), and ha-yam (“the sea” and thence “west, westward,” from the position of the Mediterranean relative to Palestine), and ma‘arav (“west”). At the same time, the occasional use of Hebrew terms asserts the Jewish identity shared by glossator and reader without impeding understanding. We might add that the glossator’s French and Jewish identities are both salient, making code-switching an unmarked choice.131 Still another example of the use of Hebrew direction words in the Jews’ French comes from the Troyes elegy. One of the thirteen martyrs is called lo qadmeneis, with qadmeneis formed by adding a French suffix to the Hebrew root qadmon (“east”), as discussed below.
Medieval Jewish texts in Old French also contain hybrid words created by combining pieces from both Hebrew and French. Composers of macaronic poetry from the early sixteenth century onward, including Teofilo Folengo, sometimes added Latin endings to vernacular roots and words for a burlesque effect,132 but in medieval Jewish texts, the roots tend to be from the learned tongue and the endings from the vernacular, and the intent is not burlesque. They are more akin to borrowings in any number of languages that participate in derivational and inflectional processes—an example is French je sunbathais (“I was sunbathing”). The root sunbath- (from English) bears the French first-person singular imperfect ending -ais.133
The Troyes elegy preserves two such words: ‘asqer (“to study the law”) and qadmeneis (“Easterner”).134 Qadmeneis combines a Hebrew root (qadmon [“eastern”]) with the Old French adjectival suffix –eis (mod. Fr. –ais; “belonging to, originating in”). Qadmon also means “ancient, primeval,” and cultural contacts between French- and German-speaking Jews were close, so for some French speakers, qadmeneis would have evoked a presumable form akin to modern Yiddish kadmoynish (“ancient, primeval”).135 The martyr described as lo qadmeneis in the elegy seems to have been both an Easterner and an old man: he approaches the fire with particular dignity and the poet declares, de bone ore fu nez!, a double entendre meaning both “it is fortunate that he was born” and “he was born at a good hour, i.e., early” (cf. mod. Fr. de bonne heure [“early”]).136 Qadmeneis occurs in the rhyme, and it may be a literary flourish, the result of one individual’s linguistic creativity. (It also occurs in a list of the martyrs’ names from the Mainz Memorbuch,137 but we cannot discount the possibility that the writer of that list knew the elegy.) Even so, the author’s use of qadmeneis implies a belief that at least part of his intended audience would understand it and perhaps even derive pleasure from his linguistic creativity.
‘Asqer (“to study the law”) is built from the Hebrew-Aramaic root ‘-s-q and the French infinitival ending -er.138 Like melder (“study”) (discussed above) in the line before it (medeient, 3pl imperfect), it is fully integrated into the sentential syntax of the following stanza. Embedded as it is in the middle of its line, it cannot be a poetic response to the exigencies of rhyme.
Troblee eit notre joie e notre deduit
D’[i]sos qui medeie[n]t la Torah e l’aveie[n]t en lor co[n]duit.
Os ne fineie[n]t d’‘asqer e lo jor e la nuit.139
(Our joy and pleasure are troubled
By those who studied Torah and had it in their safekeeping.
They did not stop studying the law by day or by night.)
As is often the case in mixed-language poetry, the exceptional words—here medeient and ‘asqer—depart in a fundamental way from the author’s lexical choices in other parts of the text.140 The elegy’s French vocabulary has been described as “courtly” by Susan Einbinder,141 and the passage given above begins with a phrase that would be at home in romances such as Thomas of Britain’s Tristan