In most instances, however, including the transliteration of Hebrew borrowings into English and Hebrew titles in the notes and bibliography, I have opted for a simpler, general-purpose system of transliteration, omitting aleph at the beginnings of words; using ts for tsade, sh for shin, w, o, or u for waw, as appropriate, and y or i for yod, as appropriate; using v, kh, and f where called for; and indicating vowels but not vowel length. In quoting other scholars’ work, I retain their transliteration conventions. (The only one not listed above is ẓ for tsade.) Furthermore, the names of Jewish scholars are given in the form most often encountered in American scholarship: I write Joseph Kara, for example, instead of Joseph Qara. As in much American scholarship, my transliteration of Hebrew words reflects their pronunciation in modern Hebrew, rather than their pronunciation by medieval Frenchspeaking Jews, who, for example, pronounced final taw as /s/ (cf. today’s Ashkenazic pronunciation). An exception is my use of w for consonantal waw in transcribing medieval texts; however, in titles of modern works, as well as in the title of the Maḥzor Vitry, I have used v instead.
While it is more standard in academic works to put titles of short poems in quotation marks, I put them in italics here so as to avoid confusion with the symbols for aleph (’) and ayin (‘).
Finally, la‘az technically refers to a language other than Hebrew, but in the texts discussed in this book, it refers to French.
ABBREVIATIONS
| AND | William Rothwell et al., eds., Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2nd ed. (London: Manley Publishing for the Modern Humanities Research Association, 2005) |
| CCCM | Corpus christianorum. Continuatio mediaevalis. |
| EJ | Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, eds., Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007) |
| f. | feminine |
| JQR | Jewish Quarterly Review |
| m. | masculine |
| MED | Hans Kurath, Sherman Kuhn, and Robert E. Lewis, eds., Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1952–) |
| NJPS | Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. The New JPS Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text |
| NRSV | New Revised Standard Version |
| REJ | Revue des Études juives |
| T-L | Adolf Tobler, Erhard Lommatzsch, and Hans Helmut Christmann, Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1925–2002) |
| Troyes elegy | Edition in Kirsten A. Fudeman, “Restoring a vernacular Jewish voice: The Old French Elegy of Troyes.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 15 (2008): 190–221 |
INTRODUCTION
The Medieval French Jewish Community in Its Linguistic Context
Gloss It for Me in French!
A thirteenth-century text called the Desputoison du juyf et du crestien (Disputation between the Jew and the Christian) records a fictional debate between two men.1 Though side by side, they seem to come from two different worlds, separated not only by creed but also language. The text begins with the Christian declaring one of the mysteries of his faith, the virgin birth, in Latin. At the most basic of levels, the Jew does not understand. “Parole a moi françois,” he says, “et espon tes paroles. … Ce que diz en latin, en françois le me glose!” (Speak to me in French and explain your words! … Gloss for me in French what you are saying in Latin!) The Christian obliges him, the dialogue continues, and, as is typical in texts of this genre, the Jew is won over to the Christian’s way of thinking.
The Christian and Jew of the debate both inhabit the so-called Latin Middle Ages of Ernst Robert Curtius and Erich Auerbach,2 but only the Christian is comfortable with Latin. Had he persisted in speaking that language, or had the Jew insisted on using Hebrew, there could have been no exchange of ideas. Communication between them was possible only through French.
In the area roughly corresponding to today’s northern France, French, the vernacular, was the linguistic point of contact between medieval Latin culture and medieval Hebrew culture and the medium through which Christians and Jews communicated with one another. Though during this time Latin and Hebrew had greater prestige than French, having been used to record sacred Scripture, liturgy, and countless other texts, and being preferred by scholars, it was French that Jews and Christians spoke most often in the territory that concerns us here, among themselves and to one another, day after day.
This book is concerned with the roles played by language in shaping identity and culture. How did language affect how Jews thought, how they interacted with one another and with Christians, and who they perceived themselves to be? What circumstances and forces led to the genesis of a medieval Jewish textual tradition in French and helped shape it? Who were the writers, and how did they choose to write in the vernacular or Hebrew? What types of speech-related behaviors did Jews see in Christians, and which inspired trust or distrust? How and in what terms did Jews define their relationship to the larger French-speaking community? In beginning to offer answers to these and other questions I draw on a variety of sources, of which the most important are three sets of medieval Jewish texts produced in northern France: Old French texts in Hebrew letters, bilingual Hebrew-French texts, and selected Hebrew texts that are explicitly preoccupied with verbal interactions with Christians. A fundamental assumption underlying this book is that by studying language, we will be able to sketch a more comprehensive picture of the Jewish community in medieval France and better understand the way the Jews themselves perceived their relationship to and place within the larger Jewish and Christian communities. This is what “identity” refers to in this book: the consciousness of individuals that they exist in relation to communities, and the