Vernacular Voices. Kirsten A. Fudeman

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СКАЧАТЬ Jews were overwhelmingly speakers of Yiddish: in the 1897 census of the Russian Empire, which included the Polish provinces in the Pale of settlement, over 97 percent of Jewish respondents identified their daily language as Yiddish.³⁵

      It is against this backdrop that we must read Banitt’s arguments against the notion of a Judeo-French dialect. Banitt associates Yiddish with a long and dismal history of Jewish oppression, describing it as the language of Jews who lived “on the margins of Christian society,” “eternal refugees in their wretched ghettos and their ill-fated Judengassen.”³⁶ He understands “Judeo-French” to mean substandard or deformed French.³⁷ He calls D. S. Blondheim’s notion of Judeo-French (characterized especially by loanwords from Hebrew) “a sort of amorphous and heterogeneous language that does not even deserve the name ‘language,’ a koine, whose evolution across time and space seems indiscernible, one ‘Jewish dialect’ among so many others.”³⁸ He continues:

      Tout porte à croire … que les Juifs de France, avant leur expulsion à la fin du XIV^e siècle, parlaient la langue, le dialecte et le patois de ceux au milieu desquels ils vivaient, et ne parlaient que cela: le caennnais à Caen, l’orléanais à Orléans, le troyen à Troyes, son patois bourguignon particulier à Brinon. Les formes picardes et les expressions provençales du champenois (ou lorrain) Colin Muset, les latinismes du Psautier de Metz, les formes provençales et les archaïsmes dans Aucassin et Nicolette, ont-ils jamais fait penser à quelqu’un que leurs auteurs parlaient une “langue vulgaire”, un charabia panaché?³⁹

      (Everything points to this: that the Jews of France, before their expulsion at the end of the fourteenth century, spoke the language, the dialect, and the patois of the people among whom they lived, and they spoke only that: the dialect of Caen in Caen, the dialect of Orleans in Orleans, the dialect of Troyes in Troyes, and in Brinon, its own special variety of Burgundian. The Picard features and the Provençal expressions of the Champenois (or Lorraine) [poet] Colin Muset, the Latinisms of the Metz Psalter, the Provencal elements and archaisms in Aucassin and Nicolette—did they ever make anyone think that their authors spoke a “vulgar tongue,” a motley gobbledygook?)

      Banitt was not blind to the Hebrew borrowings in medieval Jewish texts in French, as his mention of regionalisms in other medieval French works indicates, but he objected to calling attention to them through the use of a special name, Judeo-French. This opinion is justifiable (though we must point out that speaking geographical dialects does not exclude the possibility of speaking them in distinctive ways). What shocks is the phrase “un charabia panaché” (motley gobbledygook) to describe a variety of French marked by Hebrew loanwords, archaisms, and other nonstandard elements. The implication is that Banitt saw Yiddish, too, as a “motley gobbledygook,” and that his stance on Jewish linguistic distinctiveness in medieval France (i.e., that there was none) was colored by his attitudes toward Yiddish.

      “German Jews,” Aschheim writes, “were never able to forget that they shared a common border with the unemancipated Eastern ghetto masses,”⁴⁰ a reality reinforced by Germany’s status as a destination and conduit for east European Jews migrating westward. Banitt was born in Antwerp, Belgium, but it is perhaps worth noting that two circumstances led to a highly visible east European Jewish presence there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which may or may not have influenced Banitt’s views: its status as a major gateway for east Europeans heading toward America and its thriving diamond industry. Simon Schwarzfuchs reports that in 1920–21, 23,656 emigrating Jews passed through Antwerp’s port and that from 1900 to 1939, its Jewish population increased almost sevenfold, from 8,000 to 55,000.⁴¹

      Scholarly writing should be dispassionate, and the emotional engagement revealed by Banitt’s remarks about the Jews’ French is reason enough to reconsider his evidence against medieval Jewish linguistic distinctiveness in northern France. Preferring an idyllic vision of medieval Franco-Jewish integration and stability, Banitt argued that French-speaking Jews in the Middle Ages (1) were not segregated, (2) were fully assimilated into Christian society, and (3) tended to remain in one locale, deliberately focusing on three factors commonly cited as contributing to the rise of Jewish languages— segregation, lack of assimilation, and migration.⁴² In arguing that the Jews were fully assimilated into Christian society, Banitt rightly emphasizes the small size of most Jewish communities but goes too far when he declares, “Paris never had more than one hundred Jews.”⁴³ Even Rabinowitz, whom Banitt cites in this discussion and whose own study must be consulted with care,⁴⁴ puts the Jewish population of Paris in the hundreds, noting that the number of adult taxpayers numbered 121 and 85 in 1292 and 1298, respectively, according to rolls published by Isidore Loeb.⁴⁵ Other scholars have given even higher estimates, as discussed later in this chapter. In order to emphasize the dialectal purity of Jewish speech, Banitt dwelled on the tendency of many medieval French Jews to stay within seigniorial domains. But while there were certainly real barriers to Jewish movement into and out of lordships, it did exist, even before the first expulsion of the Jews from the royal domain in 1182.⁴⁶ Banitt wrote that the Jews prayed in French and that certain unnamed offices were performed only in French.⁴⁷ Jews prayed in French at times, but existing medieval French- and Ashkenazi-rite prayer books are written almost exclusively in Hebrew, as he certainly knew. Much of Banitt’s article is devoted to a seemingly meticulous presentation and refutation of “Judeo-French vocabulary” directed primarily against the work of Raphael Levy, who included many common Old French words in his studies (for example, kant [“when”]) because he was interested in the totality of the Jews’ French lexicon, not just distinctive vocabulary items.⁴⁸ Banitt says little about the most distinctive lexical items in medieval Jewish texts in Old French, some of which are discussed below, dismissing them as few in number and unimportant.⁴⁹ In arguing against Levy, Banitt occasionally explains words from Levy’s studies in cavalier fashion, including asseser, which he relates to assesser through the noun asseseance and defines as “ ‘raffermir’ sa voix, quand on est brûlé vif” (“strengthen” one’s voice, when burned alive). Banitt does not note that this is a definition that he himself invented based on the word’s context in the Troyes elegy and that assesser’s attested, unrelated meaning is “assess, value; assess for tax purposes.” (I have since argued that the word in the elegy is properly read as assenser [“instruct”].)⁵⁰

      Banitt titled his diatribe against the notion of a Jewish French “Une langue fantôme: Le judéo-français.” The adjective phantom can mean imaginary or nonexistent; the noun refers to something with no physical reality as well as something dreaded or despised. Judeo-French was indeed one of Banitt’s phantoms. Whether it was a phantom language depends entirely on what we take “Judeo-French” to mean. Medieval Jewish texts in French were written for and by Jews in Hebrew letters, and they contain distinctive lexical items, most of them from Hebrew. According to definitions of “Jewish language” put forward by various scholars, the Jews’ medieval French is one.⁵¹ Although some scholars may prefer more stringent definitions that disqualify the Jews’ medieval French from being called a Jewish language, it will be shown below that, based on the written evidence we have, calling the Jews’ medieval French “identical” to or “indistinguishable” from the medieval French spoken and written by Christians is untenable.

      When east and west European Jewish scholars born near the turn of the twentieth century confronted the question of Jewish linguistic distinctiveness in medieval France, they often did so having already taken some sort of a stand on Yiddish, even if only a private one. For those who associated Yiddish with crowded and dirty ghettos, a lack of cultivation, and marginalization and persecution, the proposal that Jews living in France in a time before ghettos also spoke a distinctly Jewish vernacular may have been an uncomfortable, even intolerable one. Specifically, I have raised the possibility that Banitt’s rejection of the idea of a distinctively Jewish way of speaking medieval French was influenced by associations like these, and perhaps also by the emphasis of the earlier Wissenschaft des Judentums movement on Jewish integration. Scholars relatively СКАЧАТЬ