Vernacular Voices. Kirsten A. Fudeman

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      CHAPTER 1

      Language and Identity

      “I am a Hebrew”

      Near the end of the first millennium, it is told, a Jewish apostate from Blois named Seḥoq ben Esther Israeli made his way to a city on the edge of Tsarefat, where he hid his apostasy, married, and pursued all manner of wickedness.¹ Not satisfied with being “ruler and judge” in his wife’s home,² Seḥoq plotted to take over the property of a pious Jew who lived nearby, hiring twelve Gentile men to kill him. The chain of events that ensued nearly destroyed the Jewish community.

      If this “terrible tale” (ma‘aseh nora’), as Abraham Berliner calls it, reports historical truth, it is a truth obscured by literary symbols and conventions. Kenneth Stow analyzes the evil protagonist’s name as a reminder of the ambiguities and dangers of converts: “He is seḥoq [sic], joke, or even a gamble; ben esther, the fictionalized heroine, but one who had to deny her Jewishness to play the role—and whose identity, therefore, remained and still remains always in doubt; yisraeli, perhaps a play on the much debated question of Verus Israel. Did that title belong to the Jew or the Christian? Seḥoq obviously tried to be both.”³ (We might also translate Seḥoq as “Laughter” or “Laughingstock”; Verus Israel refers here to the Christian church’s claim of being the new and only true Israel.)⁴

      The name of the protagonist is unvocalized in the manuscript, and intriguingly enough, its spelling (

      Biblical allusions in the story serve as reminders of other brushes with mass destruction. The pious Jew is of the house of Levi, like Moses (Exod. 2:1), and God stiffens Seḥoq’s heart as he did those of Pharaoh and the men Joshua fought, against terrible odds, in conquering land for Israel.⁶ Seḥoq identifies himself to the Jewish communities he visits with words from Jonah, which in this context evoke God’s eleventh-hour pardon of Nineveh: “He went from there to the towns with Jewish communities that he found. He stirred them with deceitful words, saying to them, ‘I am a Hebrew’ [Jon. 1:9]. The house of Jacob felt compassion for him, and they provided for him according to their custom in every town that he visited.”⁷ Seḥoq convinces the Jews he visits that he is one of them by his words “I am a Hebrew,” identifying himself with a linguistic or ethnic, rather than religious, term. Christians and Jews alike studied Hebrew during the Middle Ages,⁸ but only the Jews formed a Hebrew textual community. Hebrew and Jewishness were such close associates that in Latin, Old French, and many other languages (including modern English), words meaning “Hebrew” come also to mean “Jew,” and saying “I am a Hebrew” is—or should be—tantamount to saying, “I am a Jew.” But Seḥoq is a deceiver.

      Sociolinguistics is concerned with language variation, of which we perceive two major sorts in the story of Seḥoq ben Esther and in the picture of medieval French Jewry sketched in the introduction. The first is variation between individuals or groups. The Jews of medieval northern France inhabited a multicolored linguistic environment in which the mother tongue was most often a variety of French and the father tongue Latin or Hebrew, depending on one’s religious community. French speakers were conscious of regional, situational, and social variation within their own language (see below). Some came into contact with native speakers of other languages.

      The second type of variation at least implicit in the story of Seḥoq is highly individual. Modern sociolinguistic research has shown that individuals change the way they speak depending on topic, audience, and setting. They may use language, consciously or unconsciously, to resemble their audience more closely and to build or reinforce alliances; they may even use language to do the opposite.⁹ Sarah Bunin Benor, for example, has shown that American Jews who have chosen to become Orthodox dynamically construct and maintain their orthodox identity through many behaviors, including linguistic ones. They may acquire Hebrew and Yiddish loanwords and distinctly Jewish syntactic constructions, phonological processes, and intonational contours.¹⁰ Keeping in mind that Seḥoq may be a fictional character, we can assume that in convincing Jews he met that he was one of them, it was not only what he said that was important but also how he said it.

      As Gabrielle Spiegel has observed, certain pre- and post-structuralisms have viewed language “not as a window on the world it transparently reflects, but as constructing that world, that is, as creating rather than imitating reality.”¹¹ If we wish to explore whether and how medieval French Jews’ spoken language helped construct their world and their identities, it is crucial first to determine how they spoke and whether their speech ever identified them as Jews, setting them apart from Christians. Only then may we ask whether and how the Jews’ vernacular contributed to the shaping of their identities and affected the way they presented themselves and were perceived by each other and by others, and, to return to Seḥoq ben Esther, what speech characteristics such an apostate might have adopted so as to construct and reinforce the illusion that he was an observant Jew.

      “Une langue fantôme”?

      Robert Le Page and Andrée Tabouret-Keller have stated the uncontroversial but sometimes overlooked truth that “everybody’s (layman’s and scholar’s) theories and suppositions about language and society are powerfully conditioned by the culture and tradition within which he/she works—conditioned, that is, either positively or negatively.”¹² Sara Japhet has located the strongest conditioning factors in “the unconscious, psychic empathy of the scholar with the object of his research.”¹³ Current research on the vernacular of the Jews of medieval northern France inevitably builds on the work of two European-born Jewish men whose contributions to our understanding of the issue have been among the most extensive, lasting, and influential: Max Weinreich (b. 1894 in Latvia, d. 1969 in New York) and Max Berenblut, better known by the name he took after making aliyah to Israel, Menahem Banitt (b. 1914 in Antwerp, d. 2007 in Tel Aviv).¹⁴