Judeo-French

Judeo-French, also called Zarphatic or Western Loez, is a variant of Old French⁴⁵ spoken in the Middle Ages by the Jews of northern and eastern France, and by Rhineland Jewish communities of Mainz, Worms, Speyer, Frankfurt am Main and Aix-la-Chapelle in the early Middle Ages until the dominance of Yiddish.⁴⁵ Some have conjectured that the language influenced the development of Yiddish.⁶⁷ It was also spoken by French Jews who moved to Norman England.⁸ Judeo-French was largely identical to Old French, with French Jews adopting the same regional variants as their non-Jewish neighbours. Its main distinguishing features are its use of Hebrew script and an independent literary tradition, with limited Hebrew influence to verbs and vocabulary.⁴⁹¹⁰

Other designations include Western Loez, and Zarphatic, coined by Solomon Birnbaum.⁸ The latter comes from the Hebrew name for France, Tzarfat (צרפת), which was originally used in the Hebrew Bible as a name for the city of Sarepta, in Phoenicia.

Unlike most other Jewish languages which had many loan words from Hebrew, Judeo-French had relatively few.¹¹ While some scholars disagree on whether it constitutes a distinct dialect or language from Old French,¹² the majority view holds that that the two were not significantly different, with French Jews adopting the same regional variants as their non-Jewish neighbours. Its main distinguishing features are its unique writing system, using Hebrew characters, and its independent literary tradition.⁴⁵

Most of the elements from the Hebrew language are found in the function words (articles, prepositions, etc.), though there are some changes to verbs and vocabulary.¹⁰ According to Marc Kiwitt, "the major part of linguistic data attested in Judeo-French sources is simply common Old French written in Hebrew script, with some texts showing little to no register variation in comparison with Christian Old French sources", due to their degree of social integration within the Christian majority until the end of the 13th century.⁹

Since Judeo-French was the vernacular of Rhineland Jewish communities in the early Middle Ages, it left traces in Yiddish vocabulary, and in the Gallicised names Jews used for their own communities, such as Aspire (Speyer), Germèse (Worms), and Magence (Mainz).⁴

Judeo-French textual production developed in three successive stages: isolated Old French glosses within Hebrew texts (Bible and Talmud commentaries, prayer books) from the second half of the 11th century; Hebrew-French biblical glossaries of several thousand words each, from the early 13th to the early 14th century; and texts written entirely in French, attested from the second half of the 13th century to around 1300.²¹

The language first appeared in this form in the 11th century in glosses of the Torah and Talmud written by the rabbis Moshe HaDarshan and Rashi,¹³² and became secularised by the 13th century, when it was used in varied domains such as poetry, wedding songs, medical treatises, and astronomy.²

Judeo-French texts were concentrated in Northern and Eastern France, particularly in the communities of Champagne (centred on Troyes), Normandy (Rouen), and Lorraine, which maintained close cultural ties with the Rhenish communities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz. Texts were also produced in Norman England, whose Jewish communities remained linked to those of Normandy until the expulsion of 1290.²

The Judeo-French language disappeared from the Kingdom of France following the two waves of expulsion of Jews in 1306 and 1394, which effectively ended the Jewish presence in Northern France.¹² From the beginning of this declining period in the 14th century, surviving texts originate exclusively from Eastern France (Alsace, Lorraine, and the Free County of Burgundy), which were not affected by the expulsion of 1306.²¹ It has been estimated that between 95% and 98% of the texts produced in France by Jews has disappeared and been destroyed in the course of time.¹⁴¹¹⁵

After the expulsions, French Jews carried Judeo-French with them to Germany, Hungary, and Italy, though their language progressively diverged from its medieval form and eventually went extinct.² Some manuscripts produced in Italy and Germany during the late 14th and even 15th centuries contain Judeo-French texts,¹⁶¹ the latest known being a charoset recipe from a 1470 prayer book.² According to Kiwitt, it remains uncertain whether these reflect a living language community or simply the scribal copying of earlier, now lost, models.¹

Judeo-French was written using the Hebrew writing system and the Tiberian system for diacritical markers and reflected some Latin writing traditions that help to distinguish it from a solely phonetic reproduction of spoken language.¹³²

Not all Hebrew graphemes are used in Judeo-French: the graphemes kaph (כ), samekh (ס), and tav (ת), are rare, and ḥet (ח) and ʕayin (ע) are omitted entirely.¹⁰