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c h a p te r 1 Language and Identity ‘‘I am a Hebrew’’ Near the end of the first millennium, it is told, a Jewish apostate from Blois named Seh .oq ben Esther Israeli made his way to a city on the edge of Tsarefat , where he hid his apostasy, married, and pursued all manner of wickedness .1 Not satisfied with being ‘‘ruler and judge’’ in his wife’s home,2 Seh .oq plotted to take over the property of a pious Jew who lived nearby, hiring twelve Gentile men to kill him. The chain of events that ensued nearly destroyed the Jewish community. If this ‘‘terrible tale’’ (ma‘aseh nora’), as Abraham Berliner calls it, reports historical truth, it is a truth obscured by literary symbols and conventions. Kenneth Stow analyzes the evil protagonist’s name as a reminder of the ambiguities and dangers of converts: ‘‘He is s .eh .oq [sic], joke, or even a gamble; ben esther, the fictionalized heroine, but one who had to deny her Jewishness to play the role—and whose identity, therefore, remained and still remains always in doubt; yisraeli, perhaps a play on the much debated question of Verus Israel. Did that title belong to the Jew or the Christian? Seh .oq obviously tried to be both.’’3 (We might also translate Seh .oq as ‘‘Laughter’’ or ‘‘Laughingstock ’’; Verus Israel refers here to the Christian church’s claim of being the new and only true Israel.)4 The name of the protagonist is unvocalized in the manuscript, and intriguingly enough, its spelling ( ) also admits a second interpretation: Shah .uq (‘‘Rubbed out,’’ ‘‘Pulverized’’). The two interpretations (Seh .oq: ‘‘Laughter,’’ ‘‘Laughingstock’’; Shah .uq: ‘‘Rubbed out’’) encapsulate two of the most important aspects of the Purim holiday: laughter and obliteration. Language and Identity 27 Seh .oq is a new Amalek, a Haman, and the proposed second reading recalls the blotting out of Haman’s name with noise during the public reading of the Book of Esther on the feast of Purim, in accordance with Deut. 25:19, which enjoins the Jews to blot out the memory of Amalek.5 In 2 Sam. 22:43, the root sh-h .-q is used to refer to the obliteration of enemies. As for Seh .oq’s matronym (ben Esther), it evokes Haman’s nemesis, suggesting well before the plot unfolds that this enemy of the Jewish people will be thwarted. Biblical allusions in the story serve as reminders of other brushes with mass destruction. The pious Jew is of the house of Levi, like Moses (Exod. 2:1), and God stiffens Seh .oq’s heart as he did those of Pharaoh and the men Joshua fought, against terrible odds, in conquering land for Israel.6 Seh .oq identifies himself to the Jewish communities he visits with words from Jonah, which in this context evoke God’s eleventh-hour pardon of Nineveh: ‘‘He went from there to the towns with Jewish communities that he found. He stirred them with deceitful words, saying to them, ‘I am a Hebrew’ [Jon. 1:9]. The house of Jacob felt compassion for him, and they provided for him according to their custom in every town that he visited.’’7 Seh .oq convinces the Jews he visits that he is one of them by his words ‘‘I am a Hebrew,’’ identifying himself with a linguistic or ethnic, rather than religious, term. Christians and Jews alike studied Hebrew during the Middle Ages,8 but only the Jews formed a Hebrew textual community. Hebrew and Jewishness were such close associates that in Latin, Old French, and many other languages (including modern English), words meaning ‘‘Hebrew’’ come also to mean ‘‘Jew,’’ and saying ‘‘I am a Hebrew’’ is—or should be—tantamount to saying, ‘‘I am a Jew.’’ But Seh .oq is a deceiver. Sociolinguistics is concerned with language variation, of which we perceive two major sorts in the story of Seh .oq ben Esther and in the picture of medieval French Jewry sketched in the introduction. The first is variation between individuals or groups. The Jews of medieval northern France inhabited a multicolored linguistic environment in which the mother tongue was most often a variety of French and the father tongue Latin or Hebrew, depending on one’s religious community. French speakers were conscious of regional, situational, and social variation within their own language (see below). Some came into contact with native speakers of other languages. The second type of variation at least...

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