The Medieval Hebrew-French Wedding Song

22 SHOFAR Fall 1992 Vol. 11, No. 1 THE MEDIEVAL HEBREW-FRENCH WEDDING SONG by Samuel N. Rosenberg Samuel N. Rosenberg, Professor of French and Italian at Indiana University, is a specialist in French language and literature of the Middle Ages, with a particular interest in lyric poetry and in Arthurian prose romance. Professor Rosenberg has published numerous books in these and other areas. The Jewish presence in France is very deeply rooted, reaching even further back in time than the French language. The first archeological evidence (Rhone valley, south ofAvignon) dates from the end of the first century C.E., not long after the destruction of the Temple in the year 70, but only toward the end of the fourth century does written testimony become abundant. Over the next few hundreds ofyears, Jewish communities , originally radiating from the South (Narbonne, Marseille, etc.), were established in towns throughout Gaul, and by the eleventh century we find, in the territory of the langue d'oil, a major Jewish presence in the towns of Champagne and Lorraine in particular. While always preserving their Hebrew heritage, the Jews of France (that is, "France" in its modern sense) were nevertheless linguistically assimilated to their Gentile environment and from the beginning participated with their neighbors in the gradual drift from Latin to Romance. Nowhere is this more strikingly illustrated than in the numerous Biblical commentaries, written in Hebrew, which make use ofFrench glosses to elucidate Scriptural meaning. Indeed, such reliance on the familiarity of French began with no lesser an exegete than Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, known as Rashi, who taught in Troyes in the eleventh century and to this day is considered the greatest of all Talmudic commentators. The tradition ofglossing that he initiated and that extended into the late Middle Ages lends persuasive support to the notion /.~ Medieval Hebrew-French Wedding Song 23 that the Jews of nonhern France were at least as much at home in the vernacular as in Hebrew. We have a remarkable little text from the second half of the thineenth century that nicely illustrates the bilingualism of the community. Since it, in fact, weaves alternating verses in Hebrew and French into a single wedding song, it constitutes a fitting symbol of the marriage of two languages-and two cultures-that obtained among the Jews of medieval France.l The composition was clearly intended for performance during the festivities attendant upon a wedding. Though transmitted without music, it was no doubt meant to be sung, cenainly by a group of performers rather than a single individual, and very possibly accompanied by dancing. Dialectical characteristics make it fairly clear that the piece stems from the eastern region ofFrance-probably Lorraine, which had a longstanding and significant Jewish community. It survives in a single manuscript, as an addition, in a separate hand, to a copy of the festival prayerbook known as the Mahzor of Vitry (after the town in Champagne where it was composed ). The manuscript is now housed in the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York. The text was originally brought to the attention of scholars by the Baltimore Romanist David S. Blondheim, who in 1926-27 published it in both Romania and the Revue des EtudesJuives, along with a few other poems and appropriately different but overlapping philological commentaries. In 1927 the two publications were reprinted side by side in an independent volume entitled Poemesjudeo-jranfais du moyen age (paris: Champion). The manuscript transmits the poem entirely in Hebrew characters; that is, the French verses are presented in Hebrew transliteration. Blondheim's REJ edition is dual, in that it reproduces the all-Hebrewlettered text and then offers, alongside it, a hybrid, Roman-lettered version that translates the Hebrew lines into modern French and transliterates the French lines back into medieval French; the presentation in Romania contains only the hybrid version. The present translation into English, along with my commentary, depends heavily on Blondheim's translation of the Hebrew verses and his romanization ofthe French-as well as on his very fine scholarly apparatus. His work, however, leaves a number of 'The text is one of very few Jewish poems making use of the vernacular. There are...