Vernacular Voices: Language and Identity in Medieval French Jewish Communities

By Kirsten A. Fudeman

A thirteenth-century text purporting to represent a debate between a Jew and a Christian begins with the latter's exposition of the virgin birth, something the Jew finds incomprehensible at the most basic level, for reasons other than theological: "Speak to me in French and explain your words!" he says. "Gloss for me in French what you are saying in Latin!" While the Christian and the Jew of the debate both inhabit the so-called Latin Middle Ages, the Jew is no more comfortable with Latin than the Christian would be with Hebrew. Communication between the two is possible only through the vernacular.

In Vernacular Voices, Kirsten Fudeman looks at the roles played by language, and especially medieval French and Hebrew, in shaping identity and culture. How did language affect the way 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 rise of a medieval Jewish tradition in French? Who were the writers, and why did they sometimes choose to write in the vernacular rather than Hebrew? How and in what terms did Jews define their relationship to the larger French-speaking community?

Drawing on a variety of texts written in medieval French and Hebrew, including biblical glosses, medical and culinary recipes, incantations, prayers for the dead, wedding songs, and letters, Fudeman challenges readers to open their ears to the everyday voices of medieval French-speaking Jews and to consider French elements in Hebrew manuscripts not as a marginal phenomenon but as reflections of a vibrant and full vernacular existence. Applying analytical strategies from linguistics, literature, and history, she demonstrates that language played a central role in the formation, expression, and maintenance of medieval Jewish identity and that it brought Christians and Jews together even as it set them apart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jun 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9780812205350

Book preview

Vernacular Voices

JEWISH CULTURE AND CONTEXTS

Published in association with the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies of the University of Pennsylvania

David B. Ruderman, Series Editor

Advisory Board

Richard I. Cohen

Moshe Idel

Alan Mintz

Deborah Dash Moore

Ada Rapoport-Albert

Michael D. Swartz

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Vernacular Voices

Language and Identity in Medieval French Jewish Communities

Kirsten A. Fudeman

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA · OXFORD

Copyright © 2010 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fudeman, Kirsten Anne.

Vernacular voices : language and identity in medieval French Jewish communities / Kirsten A. Fudeman.

 p. cm. — (Jewish culture and contexts)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4250-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Hebrew language, Medieval—France. 2. Jews— France—Languages—History. 3. Jews—France—Identity. 4. Jews—France—History—To 1500. I. Title.

PJ4995.F8F83 2010

492.4′7—dc22

2009050751

For Alexander and Gregory

CONTENTS

Notes on Translations and Transcription and Typographical Conventions

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: The Medieval French Jewish Community in Its Linguistic Context

Chapter 1. Language and Identity

Chapter 2. Speech and Silence, Male and Female in Jewish-Christian Relations: Blois, 1171

Chapter 3. Texts of Two Colors

Chapter 4. Hebrew-French Wedding Songs: Expressions of Identity

Epilogue

Appendix 1. Hebraico-French Glosses and Texts

Appendix 2. The Medieval Jewish Wedding Song ‘Uri liqra’ti yafah, gentis kallah einoreie

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

NOTES ON TRANSLATIONS AND TRANSCRIPTION AND TYPOGRAPHICAL CONVENTIONS

Translations from French and Hebrew, both medieval and modern, are mine, unless otherwise noted. A general exception is Bible verses, for which I generally chose the NRSV (New Revised Standard Version) or NJPS (Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. The New JPS Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text) translation, duly identified, after comparing them to the Hebrew.

Different types of texts seemed to require different presentations. For Hebrew texts containing only one or two isolated French glosses, I chose to present the Hebrew text along with an English translation, inserting the French word or words in the translation between square brackets. For texts containing significant portions in both Hebrew and French, I present the Hebrew-letter transcription, a transliteration of the Hebrew integrated with romanization of the Old French, and finally an English translation. Where a Hebrew text is readily available, I present only the English translation. Particularly in block quotes, I use small capitals to identify transliterations and translations of Hebrew portions and differentiate them from romanization and translations of French. In Hebrew texts, [!] indicates sic, and a rafe (horizontal line above a letter) does double duty for rafe and a scribal mark resembling an inverted circumflex. Square brackets enclose editorial emendations or explanations, and parentheses letters or words to be subtracted.

Strict transliteration, when provided, has been carried out according to the table of equivalences reproduced here. Although two transliteration symbols are used twice (s for samekh and sin, t for tet and taw), medieval Jews’ general avoidance of samekh and taw for writing French words leads to a one-to-one correspondence of transliteration symbols and Hebrew letters in the strict transliteration of French. Final and non-final forms of Hebrew letters are not differentiated in strict transliteration because their distribution is regular.

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

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 ways in which objective characteristics of those communities contribute to the way individuals represent themselves and are represented by others.³

A major theme that emerges from studying the historical, literary, and scholarly documents treated in the following chapters is that language was a tremendous force behind the construction of Jewish identity in the twelfth, thirteenth, and early fourteenth centuries and a means of expressing, maintaining, and preserving that identity. Many or most Jews living in northern France during that period assimilated major elements of the vernacular culture, and certain aspects of their identity were intimately bound to the status of French as their mother tongue, with all that entailed. Especially relevant here is that Jews partook of French-language culture, enjoying and to a limited extent producing literature in medieval French. Most of their textual production was in Hebrew, but in linguistically mixed texts, French, their mother tongue, seems literally to seep through the cracks in the form of glosses, lines of poetry, and occasionally complete poems and prose texts in French. More subtly we find medieval French influence on the spelling, morphology, syntax, and semantics of their Hebrew, and Hebrew influence on the way they used French. Although it appears that in many situations the Jews’ French was more or less indistinguishable from that of Christians, there is extensive written evidence that in other situations, the Jews’ French was distinctive and that its distinctiveness resulted especially from Hebrew influence. Jews used the Hebrew alphabet for writing French. They incorporated Hebrew loanwords into their written French and, we may assume, their spoken French as well. Words in their French texts sometimes combine a Hebrew root with French suffixes, and sentences in bilingual texts sometimes begin in one language and end in the other. Another type of interaction between French and Hebrew in the Jews’ daily lives is seen in documents like the letters written in response to the Blois incident of 1171, which use Hebrew to report conversations that took place in French. Knowing that the conversations have been translated not only from one language to another but also from one system of symbolic references to another helps the scholar read them with greater sophistication.

Did medieval Christians recognize or think they could recognize a Jew based on his or her vernacular speech? Could a Jew recognize a fellow Jew just by the way he or she spoke French? These are two of the questions I attempt to answer in Chapter 1. I argue that while there can be no doubt that the mother tongue of most northern French Jews in the Middle Ages was French (the same varieties of French spoken and written by Christians), in some situations the Jews’ French was made distinctively Jewish through their use of Hebrew loanwords and code-switching. The most prominent linguistic marker of Jewishness, however, remained Hebrew, even though only some Jews learned it well, and some Christian scholars also studied it.

Chapter 2, comprising three main sections, offers a close reading of Hebrew texts written in response to the burning of over thirty Jews in Blois in 1171. In the first section, I argue that one of these texts, called the Orleans letter, serves as both a record and an attempt to explain and understand the tragedy that befell the Jewish community of Blois, and I speculate that the explanation may lie in the words of Prov. 6:16–19. I argue furthermore that the authors of the Orleans and three other letters pay special attention to linguistic behaviors and to the way that Christians used speech and silence during the incident. In the second section, I argue that the Blois letters, as well as later accounts of the incident from Ephraim of Bonn and Joseph Ha-Cohen, point to deep differences between the linguistic channels available to medieval Jewish men and women and illuminate the relationship of gender to formality and informality in language. Limitations on women’s access to Hebrew meant that even women with some knowledge of the language were less able to engage in style-shifting, limiting in turn the repertoire of public identities that they were able to assume. Finally, the Blois documents and the Blois incident itself demonstrate the extent to which the Jews were integrated into Christian society but at the same time were set apart. For their own safety and self-preservation, the Jews sought help from those in authority, all the while remaining deeply distrustful of them. The interplay of French and Hebrew in the unfolding of the Blois incident is illustrative of this complex Jewish-Christian relationship.

Chapter 3 is concerned with bilingual Hebrew-French manuscripts that graphically illustrate the dual identity of the medieval French-speaking Jewish community. Jewish texts in French appeared centuries later than non-Jewish texts in French, but even late medieval Jewish texts in French are strikingly similar in certain respects to the earliest Old French texts, which date from the ninth and tenth centuries. Why did a medieval Jewish textual tradition in French take so long to emerge? And why should it be similar to a Christian tradition that predated it by centuries? An exploration of similarities and differences between Christian and Jewish society and the Latin and Hebrew textual traditions offers possible answers to these and other questions.

Chapter 4 begins with two bilingual Hebrew-French wedding songs and their manuscripts and ends with thirteenth- and fourteenth-century persecutions and expulsions of the Jews. Analyzing the wedding songs from the standpoints of language, ritual, community, and identity, I argue that their lover-warriors and noble brides challenge the notion of a French identity that is inextricably bound to Christian beliefs and that the songs present a forceful vision of a dual French-Jewish identity at odds with the representations of Jews in Christian texts from the same period.

These four chapters, framed by an introduction and an epilogue, are ordered deliberately. The central question of Chapter 1, whether and how the Jews’ vernacular differed from the French spoken all around them by non-Jews, is central to the book’s larger concern with language and identity. Chapter 2 addresses documents that reveal an authorial concern with speech and serves as a reminder that despite this book’s concern with vernacular texts, most medieval Jewish documents from northern France are in Hebrew. Both chronologically and conceptually, it precedes the discussion of the remaining chapters: Chapter 3 builds on the first chapter by offering a closer and more extensive look at Jewish texts in Old French and also, through its focus on the development of literary languages, serves as a bridge to Chapter 4, an examination of specific Hebraico-French literary texts, two wedding songs. The limits of this study are addressed further below.

Judeo-French, Hebraico-French, and the Scholars Who Have Studied Them

In this volume I use the term Hebraico-French to refer to Old and Middle French texts written in Hebrew letters. (The scholarly division between these two stages of the language is generally placed in the first half of the fourteenth century, but there was never a moment of transition: speakers called their language simply romanz or françois.)⁴ Even if some of the texts discussed here are bilingual, composed in both Hebrew and French, Hebraico-French texts are not necessarily linguistically mixed: Hebraico refers solely to the alphabet used.⁵

Except in discussions of earlier scholarship, I avoid using the term Judeo-French to describe texts. Although favored by many scholars, including Raphael Levy and D. S. Blondheim, the term Judeo-French is ambiguous, since it has been used to describe French texts recorded in the Hebrew alphabet, as well as a hypothetical Jewish dialect of Old French whose existence will be taken up in Chapter 1. The Comencement de sapience (Beginning of wisdom), a 1273 French translation by Hagin le Juif of an astrological treatise by Abraham ibn Ezra, is unique in being the only known Jewish text in Old French to have been written in the Roman alphabet, the reason being that Hagin dictated it to a certain Obert de Montdidier, a Gentile. Some have suggested that Hagin did not know how to write; more precisely, it seems that he did not know how to write in the Latin alphabet. The translation itself seems to have been intended for an erudite Christian patron, Henry Bate, in whose house (in Malines) the translation was made.⁶ We might call Hagin’s translation a French Jewish text, a term that applies equally well to Hebraico-French texts but that I generally avoid because it, too, is ambiguous and can refer simply to any Jewish text written in French or produced in a French-speaking area. Mathieu (Mahieu) le Juif, a possible Jewish convert to Christianity about whom little is known, wrote poetry in Old French on worldly themes. Neither his subject matter nor his audience nor the script in which his work is recorded (the Latin one) justify calling his poetry Jewish.⁷

Although scholars have long been aware of the existence of Hebraico-French glosses, and to a lesser extent, texts, we can date the beginnings of intense scholarly interest in Hebraico-French literature and Judeo-French language to the mid- to late nineteenth century. The most famous of the early researchers were Arsène Darmesteter (1846–1888) and David S. Blondheim (1884–1934). Both edited and published Hebraico-French texts and glosses but died tragically young.⁸ Among their most famous publications are compilations begun by Darmesteter and completed by Blondheim of the Old French glosses scattered throughout the biblical and talmudic commentaries of the celebrated medieval commentator Rabbi Shlomo Yitsḥaqi (Solomon ben Isaac) of Troyes, better known as Rashi (1040–1105). Blondheim was a particularly fine editor, and I have often been impressed by the exceptional accuracy of his work.

Here we must also mention Louis Brandin, who in 1905, along with Mayer Lambert, published an edition of a Hebrew-French glossary owned by the Bibliothèque nationale de France.⁹ This volume was one of the first to make the major genre of the medieval Hebrew-French glossary available to a wide modern public, even if the glossaries themselves, of which several survive today, had already been studied to some extent by scholars such as Darmesteter, Joseph Österreicher, and Leopold Zunz.

In the mid- and late twentieth century, major researchers in the field of Judeo-French studies included Menahem Banitt, Hiram Peri (formerly Heinz Pflaum), and Raphael Levy. Menahem Banitt (born Max Berenblut) edited with great skill and meticulousness a number of Jewish texts in French, among them two major glossaries, Le glossaire de Bâle and Le glossaire de Leipzig, and various shorter works. He engaged in extensive historical, linguistic, and graphic analysis of these texts and others and explored issues such as the Judeo-French dialect question and the use of the vernacular in medieval Jewish education. Peri’s contributions to the field include a fine edition of two Jewish hymns in Old French and a survey of Jewish prayer in the vernacular. Levy is most famous for his edition of the aforementioned Comencement de sapience and for his lexicographical work. Levy’s lexicographical and other linguistic studies of Judeo-French were criticized by Banitt as selective and non-scientific.¹⁰ Nonetheless, they are valuable resources for the modern scholar, who, for example, can use Levy’s Trésor de la langue des Juifs français au moyen âge or Contribution à la lexicographie française selon d’anciens textes d’origine juive to identify attestations of particular Old French words in Jewish texts. Other twentieth-century scholars who have made important contributions to the field include Moché Catane (born Paul Klein; 1920–1995) and Joseph Greenberg, who published editions of Rashi’s Old French glosses, and who studied glosses by Joseph Kara and Rashbam (Rabbi Samuel ben Meir), respectively, as well.¹¹

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in Jewish texts and glosses in French. Scholars Daniel Fano and Yona Bar-Maoz, working on the Miqra’ot Gedolot HaKeter project in Israel, have performed meticulous comparative analysis of Old French glosses found in manuscripts of medieval commentaries in Hebrew, in many cases correcting transmission errors. This makes the Miqra’ot Gedolot HaKeter series the most reliable source available to scholars wishing to study the glosses of the northern French commentators in full context. Cyril Aslanov has published selected Old French glosses from commentaries on Ezekiel by Joseph Kara and Eleazar of Beaugency, and I have published the glosses from Kara’s commentary on Isaiah and glosses from fragments of his commentary on Psalms, as well as analysis of Kara’s Job glosses, and studies of one Hebrew-French wedding song and the Troyes elegy. Jordan Penkower has prepared editions of glosses from the commentaries of Rashi and pseudo-Rashi. Marc Kiwitt and Stefanie Zaun have both worked extensively on a Hebraico-French medical treatise from the late thirteenth century or early fourteenth century, and Kiwitt has also worked extensively on glossaries.

The importance of the Hebraico-French corpus is perhaps best illustrated by the fascination it engenders in scholars in related fields. These include Samuel Rosenberg and Wendy Pfeffer, specialists in medieval French literature, and Susan Einbinder, specialist in medieval Hebrew literature and Jewish history, who have all written studies of individual Hebraico-French poetic compositions. The specialized knowledge of medieval French and Jewish history, literature, and music that these scholars possess gives their studies a freshness and originality that I have found stimulating, and like them, I strive always to study Hebraico-French texts in their larger social, cultural, and historical context.

Despite these many contributions to the study of Jewish literature in French, this corpus is sometimes ignored or deemphasized by modern scholars. To be fair, this is not without reason: it is far smaller and more limited in terms of genre than the corpus of medieval Jewish texts in Hebrew or of medieval French texts in the Latin alphabet. Marius Sala estimates the number of Hebraico-French manuscripts at at least one hundred.¹² Although I believe the actual number is somewhat higher, most are Hebrew manuscripts that contain only words in French. (See Appendix 1.) Moreover, the Hebraico-French texts that we do have tend to be short, often containing fewer than ten lines. Only eleven Hebraico-French poetic works are known, including a mere couplet in a longer Hebrew text. Aside from Hebrew-French glossaries, only one full-length Hebraico-French text is known—this is the aforementioned medical treatise.¹³

It is nonetheless striking that from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, Hebraico-French poetry was often mentioned in surveys of Old French literature, such as Lajard’s Histoire littéraire de la France, or the surveys written by Paul Zumthor and Urban T. Holmes.¹⁴ In more recent general works, these poems are typically not mentioned.

Jewish studies scholars have remained more or less conscious of Hebraico-French texts and glosses ever since Darmesteter brought the Troyes elegy to the public’s attention. Nonetheless, the Hebraico-French corpus often seems to be overlooked by scholars studying medieval Jewish literature in Hebrew and Arabic. Chaim Rabin, contrasting the abundance of Judeo-Arabic texts with the (relative) absence of Jewish vernacular texts in continental Europe, asserts, In France, pre-1290 England, and Germany, mishnaic Hebrew was the language for all written purposes, including religious poetry (there being no worldly poetry in that society).¹⁵ Norman Golb writes of medieval Normandy during the Angevin period, [Hebraic culture] was all embracing, including the study and practice of Jewish law, religious worship, the formulation of communal and regional enactments, and personal written expression, all taking place in Hebrew rather than in Latin or French.¹⁶ That Hebraic culture embraced Jewish life in medieval France cannot be denied; and on almost every occasion that a medieval French-speaking Jew put pen to parchment, it was indeed to write in Hebrew.¹⁷ But if Hebrew culture was all-embracing in some respects, then vernacular culture was all-embracing in others. The vernacular was the mother tongue and the spoken language par excellence for all ages and both genders. Hebrew was indeed the language of Jewish law, worship, communal enactments, and a host of other matters, but discussion of these was carried on not only in Hebrew but also in the vernacular. The content and structure of Hebrew-French biblical glossaries, for example, suggest that the study and teaching of the Hebrew Bible was accomplished through the medium of the spoken language. Evidence also suggests that in addition to the written, Hebrew Bible, the Jews of medieval France had an oral, vernacular version, called by Banitt the Old French Vulgate.¹⁸

Limits of This Study

This study focuses on the relationship between language, history, and identity, and at its core are Hebraico-French and Hebrew-French texts that survive in medieval Jewish manuscripts, some published previously, some newly edited for this project. This core determined which of the many threads that make up the linguistic culture of medieval French-speaking Jews would be taken up here, and which I would leave for other scholars or future studies. The focus on Hebraico-French texts has led me to pursue topics such as influences on the genesis of Hebraico-French writing, even when it led away from the French 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