Vernacular Voices - Kirsten A. Fudeman Jewish Culture and Contexts

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Middle Ages into earlier times and other lands; the roles of French and Hebrew in texts and in daily life; the evolution of Hebraico-French textual production; the narrative structure and themes of the Hebrew-French wedding songs; and the distinctiveness of the written and spoken French of medieval Jews. The discussion in Chapter 2 about the Blois incident of 1171 focuses on several texts written in Hebrew, not French, but these texts illuminate verbal, vernacular interactions between Jews and Christians.

      As we have already seen from the discussion of Judeo-French language and literature as a field of inquiry, much of the research already done on Hebraico-French textual production has focused on individual texts and glosses. While some scholars, notably D. S. Blondheim, Hiram Peri, and Pnina Navè, have taken a comparative approach and considered Hebraico-French texts within the larger context of Judeo-Romance,19 there has not yet been a concentrated attempt to place Hebraico-French texts within the context of Old French textual production in general or the history of the Jews in France. One of my goals has been to consider these larger issues, a task facilitated by the fine work on individual manuscripts, texts, and glosses published by other scholars.

      The geographical boundaries of this study are determined by the location of Jewish settlements known to have produced Hebraico-French texts, as well as the extension of the French-speaking area during the medieval period. The second is easier to establish, and I will do so here in broad terms.

      Today’s France covered three main linguistic regions during the Middle Ages. In the north, most of the population spoke dialects of French (langue d’oïl), while in the south, which falls outside the boundaries of this study, most people spoke dialects of Occitan (langue d’oc). A large pocket in the east was the domain of Francoprovençal. Other languages were also represented within this territory. For example, the north was home to pockets of Breton, Flemish, German, and Walloon speakers, and the south to speakers of Basque and Catalan. The use of French extended into today’s Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Luxembourg, not to mention various courts where French served as a language of culture.20 Outside the continent, French was spoken in Norman Sicily (1060–), Lusignan Cyprus (1192–), the crusader states of Outremer, and especially England. The Normans who invaded England in 1066 brought their dialect of French with them, and while many of the inhabitants of England remained Anglo-Saxon speaking, the Jews of England, for the most part of Norman heritage, spoke primarily in French.21 Some knew English as well.22 At least one prominent Anglo-Jewish family, that of Elijah Menahem ben Moses of London, came from the Rhineland,23 and descent from Rhenish families, combined with cultural contacts between the Jews of England and those of the Rhineland, would have led to some exposure to German among English Jews, even if it was not spoken in the Anglo-Jewish community itself.

      Where did Jews compose Hebraico-French texts? In most cases, we are not able to assign a precise geographical origin to Hebraico-French texts or to the Hebrew manuscripts that contain them. According to Colette Sirat, only 3 percent of medieval Hebrew manuscripts contain a precise indication of this sort.24 Nevertheless, in a number of cases, we are able to determine the region, and occasionally the town, where particular Hebraico-French texts or sets of glosses were composed or copied. First, limiting ourselves to the territory belonging to today’s France, we know of Hebraico-French texts originating or written in the dialects of Champagne (e.g., Rashi’s and Joseph Kara’s glosses), Lorraine (several poetic compositions), Normandy (glosses), Picardy (sermon fragments), and the Loire valley (an incantation), among others.25 The colophon of a Hebrew-French glossary to the Bible held by the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma states not only the name of the scribe (Jehiel ben Eleazar) but also the date he completed the manuscript (16 Av 5039 [1279]) and the place, Delsberg, today Delemont of the Swiss Jura (formerly Thalisperc).26 The author of the Troyes elegy seems to have been from Lorraine, as both his name, Jacob bar Judah of Lotra (Lotharingia), and the dialect of the elegy indicate.27 In fact, the number of Hebraico-French texts in the Lorraine dialect (Lotharingian) is significant enough to win for Lorraine the title of Hebraico-French textual center. It is notoriously difficult to ascertain whether certain Hebrew manuscripts were produced on the continent or in England,28 but one Hebraico-French text of certain English provenance is a glossary of bird names edited by Menahem Banitt from ms. Valmadonna 1. We can also mention the Old French glosses of Moses and Elijah of London. The present study focuses on the heart of Hebraico-French textual production, the region that medieval Jews called Tsarefat, which we can roughly translate “northern France,” although its borders reached beyond northern France and especially into the Rhineland. When I refer to “France” in this book, I usually mean Tsarefat.29

      Cultural and linguistic boundaries among medieval French, English, and German Jews were porous, and in some sense they formed a single culture, that of Ashkenaz.30 Eleventh- to twelfth-century French Jewish scholars such as Rashi and Joseph Kara studied in German-speaking lands, and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Rhenish Jewish scholars like Meir of Rothenberg and Ephraim of Regensburg studied in northern France. The Tosafist commentators of France and Germany and the English rabbis cited each other’s scholarship.31 French, German, and English Jewish scribes all used the same basic script style.32 There is, however, reason to distinguish among these groups, as medieval Jews did themselves: for example, Aryeh Graboïs has commented on the medieval Jewish differentiation between the Rhine basin, Lorraine, and northern France.33 In a study like the present one, in particular, it makes sense to study the Jewish communities of medieval France apart from others in Ashkenaz. The Jews living in English- and German-speaking milieus belong, by definition, to other speech communities—a fact that is reinforced by the distinction between the terms la‘az (literally, “a language other than Hebrew,” but generally used by medieval exegetes to refer to French) and leshon ashkenaz (“language of Ashkenaz,” i.e., German). The multilingual situation of England raises its own problems and complications, as has been discussed by Robert C. Stacey. Jews there primarily spoke French, and this increasingly set them apart after the Anglo-Norman period as English gained importance as a mother tongue for all non-Jews, regardless of social class or family origins.34

      The terminus a quo of the present study is relatively straightforward, determined by the earliest known Jewish glosses in Old French in the eleventh century. The terminus ad quem is more difficult to establish. Philip Augustus’s expulsion of the Jews from the royal domain in 1182 did not end the Jewish presence in medieval France. Their exile was relatively short-lived (in 1198 he announced that they could return); and the royal domain at that time consisted, in the words of William Jordan, only of a “more or less narrow strip of territory, not entirely uninterrupted, running from the Beauvaisis in the north to Bourges in the south.”35 It was the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that would prove catastrophic to Jewish settlements in England and France. The Jews were expelled from England by Edward I in 1290 and from the French royal domain during the reigns of Philip IV the Fair (1306), Charles IV the Fair (1322), and Charles VI the Mad (1394). (Whether there was a formal edict of expulsion in 1322 is unclear.)36 After 1322, according to Jordan, the presence of Jews in the French royal domain (whose area had increased significantly since Philip Augustus’s ascension to the throne) was negligible.37 Some Jews remained in French-speaking borderlands, such as the Franche-Comté, but they were hardly more welcome there, and soon after the expulsion from the royal domain in 1322, they were expelled from the Franche-Comté as well. As reported by Jordan, they are believed to have returned there “relatively quickly” as Capetian influence diminished.38 We do have two late bilingual Hebrew-French documents from the Franche-Comté, but they date from before the expulsion of 1322: these are two account books prepared by an association of Jews based in Vesoul, located in today’s France not far from the German and Swiss borders. The earliest date in the account books is 1300, and the latest 1318.39

      Jews expelled from the French royal domain also moved into areas such as Flanders in the northeast, and Savoy, the Dauphiné, Comtat-Venaissin, and Provence, all beyond the Rhône. Some moved even further east or south, contributing to the significant number of Hebraico-French texts preserved in libraries and archives in northern Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. Others settled in the Iberian kingdoms.40

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