Vernacular Voices: Language and Identity in Medieval French Jewish Communities

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

a p p e nd i x 2 The Medieval Jewish Wedding Song ‘Uri liqra’ti yafah, gentis kallah einoreie The medieval Jewish wedding song ‘Uri liqra’ti yafah, gentis kallah einoreie, discussed in Chapter 4, has never before been published. Until now, scholars writing about Jewish literature in Old French seem to have been unaware of its existence, echoing the assertion of D. S. Blondheim, who wrote of the wedding song beginning El giv‘at ha-levonah, ‘‘C’est la seule pièce de vers connue où l’on voit l’alternance du français et de l’hébreu, et c’est la seule chanson [de la France médiévale] destinée à être chantée à un mariage juif.’’1 I offer an edition, transliteration, and English translation of the song here. Transcription Conventions and Linguistic Features of the Text If we treat sin and shin as separate letters, seven Hebrew letters are not used for writing Old French in ‘Uri liqra’ti yafah: h .et, kaf, samekh, ayin, tsade, shin, and taw. Strict transliteration of the Old French portions is provided below, following such editors of Romance-language texts recorded in the Hebrew alphabet as Arsène Darmesteter, Samuel Armistead and Joseph Silverman, Giuseppe Sermoneta, and Marc Kiwitt.2 It has been carried out according to the table of equivalences in the front matter, with the following differences: letters containing a dagesh are written as capitals; bet and pe are transcribed as v and f when they bear a rafe and are transcribed as b and p elsewhere; and vowel diacritics (see the table in this appendix) have been transliterated in superscript for the French portions of the text, with long vowels differentiated from short vowels by means of a circumflex. 160 appendix 2 a patah . â qames . e segol ê s .ere i h .ireq u qibbus . û shureq o h .olem : shewa* * The Hebrew vowel sign called shewa may have no sound (silent shewa) or a slight sound (vocal shewa). The Old French portions of the text appear to be written in the Lotharingian dialect, as are all the other independent Jewish poetic works in Old French published so far.3 This suggests that Lorraine was a major center of Jewish verse in French, that Jews there recorded their vernacular poetry more consistently than in other regions, or simply that manuscripts containing the poetry survived more often. Dialectal features include the following: 1. /ł/ has been deleted, rather than vocalized, before consonants:4 e.g., vara (1.4; 8.4), fat (2.2), ma (2.3), chevache (6.2), tote (6.3), dos (6.4; 7.3) for valra (valdra, vaudra); falt, faut; mal, mau; chevalche, chevauche ; tolte, toute; dous. 2. n’r and l’r clusters have not developed to epenthetic ndr or ldr:5 tein[r]as (2.3) and vara (⬍valra) (1.4; 8.4). 3. ei for tonic free e: Class 1 infinitives end in the text in -yyr (e.g., pa sê yyr [paseir] 1.3) and feminine past participles and words derived from them in -yy’h (e.g., ’e yynwo reê yy’: h [einoreie] 1.1). 4. taire 7.4, reflecting palatalization of a to e  (spelled ai, ei, and e) before dentals, palatals, and sometimes r.6 5. Parasitic i, as in einoreie (1.1; 8.1). 6. Leie 3.4 ⬍ Latin lectus. Wartburg lists a number of similar forms from the northeast and east, including lye  (Thaon), le y (Lorraine), lée (Somme-Tourbe), leı̈e (Argonne).7 Other linguistic features of the text are as follows: Graphic Features Simple vowels and diphthongs 1. Vowels are frequently represented twice, e.g., fat (pa ’â t); tu (tu wû ) 2.2; chevache (č: yywwa ’a č: ’) 6.2. Medieval Jewish Wedding Song 161 2. Nasal [ã] is sometimes represented by a waw or diacritic representing o, cf. gront (g: ro ’: t) 4.2; delaiemont (d: yyla yy: mwo n: t) 4.3; dossemont (dwo s: m: wn: t) 5.4; and po[n]ras (pwr’s) 7.1. Similarly, defonse (de yypwo n: s: ’) rhymes with dotansse (dwo t: n: s) 5.1; 5.2. This seems to be a spelling carried over from Hebrew. In biblical Hebrew, qames . (ā) is pronounced o in certain contexts, including usually in a closed syllable . In medieval Hebrew texts, scribes often render this...