Judeo-Romance in Italy and France (Judeo-Italian, Judeo-French, Judeo-Occitan) (original) (raw)

It is thus not an easy task to connect the Judeo-Romance medieval and early modern texts with the dialects recorded (almost) up to the present day in Italy and Southern France: not only are there some missing links in the chain, as not all chronological phases are equally and satisfactorily documented, but also, and foremost, one has to rely on different kinds of sources representative of different discursive traditions. As a commonality, Hebrew (or Hebrew-Aramaic) constitutes an important part in both the written literary texts (11th-16th centuries) and the modern spoken dialects. Over the centuries, the Holy Tongue was a lexical reservoir for all Jewish languages, providing a great number of loanwords and calques belonging to different semantic fields, especially to the religious and legal ones. Moreover, in traditional Jewish communities Hebrew played a cultural role roughly comparable to that of Latin in Christian milieu: the linguistic repertoire of the Jews may be conceived as a diglossic system where Hebrew functioned as the High Language-endowed with great prestige, used in formal contexts and in written communication, learned in school-and the Romance (as well as other) vernaculars as Low Languages-the speakers' native tongue, commonly used in daily life, acquired as children. 4 This is a somewhat simplified view of a more complex and dynamic situation, and it is intended for the group as a whole: on the individual level, things could vary. Jewish communities were often stratified from the social and educational standpoints, so that their members' repertoires were far from uniform; knowledge of languages other than Hebrew and the local vernacular was not unusual because of the mobility of individuals and the cultural heritage of Judeo-Arabic Spain and Sicily (see article "Judezmo (Ladino, Judeo-Spanish)"); women were normally precluded from learning Hebrew, although they could understand and use some words and sentences. Finally, the historical changes that had taken place in Europe since the late 18th century deeply affected traditional Jewish lifestyle-once citizens of the new national states, the Jews did not dwell anymore in special quarters, attend their own schools, or exercise a limited number of professions; they experienced forms of sociocultural interaction hitherto unknown, modifying their linguistic habits and the values associated to each language. Thus, during the 19th and 20th centuries, Judeo-Italian and Judeo-Occitan dialects lost much of their social functionality and viability-the linguistic heritage of Frenchspeaking Jews had vanished many centuries beforehand.