Judeo-Provençal
Judeo-Provençal, or Judeo-Occitan, is a dialect of Occitan historically spoken by Jews in the South of France. In the Middle Ages, it was spoken by the Jews of Occitania and, following waves of expulsions from the Kingdom of France between 1306 and 1501, by Papal Jews in the Comtat Venaissin during the modern period.
The language has been referred to by many names, including Judeo-Provençal, Judeo-Occitan, Judéo-Comtadin, Hébraïco-Comtadin, Hébraïco-Provençal, and Shuadit. Scholars use these names differently. Cyril Aslanov retains the traditional Judeo-Provençal, while cautioning that the term wrongly suggests a single distinct language: each Jewish community of Occitania spoke the local variety of Occitan that it shared with its Christian surroundings. Adam Strich prefer Judeo-Occitan, on the grounds that linguists now generally reserve "Provençal" for a single dialect of Occitan rather than for the language as a whole. George Jochnowitz uses Judeo-Provençal for the medieval language, preserved in texts in Hebrew script, and Shuadit for the modern language, recorded in Latin characters. The name Shuadit (or Chuadit) goes back to Zosa Szajkowski, who claimed in 1948 that the Jews of the Comtat Venaissin had called their language שוַאדיט (shvadyt), a word he derived from Hebrew yəhudit ('Jewish'). The claim was accepted by Max Weinreich and most subsequent scholars, but its validity is now disputed. For Strich, the word is attested only once, in a poem written by a non-Jewish author after the annexation of the Comtat to France, and its form does not match the way Comtadine Jews are known to have pronounced Hebrew yəhudit. Aslanov likewise considers it far from certain that the Jews of the Comtat ever used the word for their language. Jochnowitz, however, accepts the derivation: in his view, a sound change of Hebrew /y/ to [š], seen in words such as chadayim 'hands' (from Hebrew yadayim), would have regularly turned Yehudit into Shuadit.
The surviving documentation falls into two groups: medieval texts, written before the final expulsion of the Jews from France in 1395 and reflecting Old Occitan, and modern texts from the period of confinement in the Comtat Venaissin.
Middle Ages
The earliest evidence consists of Occitan words inserted as glosses in medieval works written in Hebrew. The oldest of these is the Ittur of Isaac ben Abba Mari of Marseilles, written between 1170 and 1193. Others appear in David Kimhi's Sefer ha-Shorashim ('Book of Roots') from the 13th century. Two longer texts survive. A 14th-century prayer book for women contains an Occitan translation of the liturgy and is the longest extant Jewish text in Old Occitan. It is known for a blessing in which the speaker thanks God 'who made me a woman', where the traditional Hebrew text reads 'who made me according to his will'. Its word order, however, follows the Hebrew original closely. The longest original composition is the Roman d'Esther of Crescas del Caylar, a physician of Avignon, written in the 1320s: a verse romance on the Book of Esther of which fewer than 450 lines survive from a once much longer work.
Modern period
The modern period is documented first by the òbras (or obro), liturgical poems of the 17th and 18th centuries that alternate Hebrew and Provençal lines, many of them recited during circumcisions and mostly attributed to Mardochée Astruc. Several of these poems were published in 1891 by Emperor Pedro II of Brazil. Astruc also wrote a tragedy on Esther, printed in 1774. The most important modern source is Harcanot et Barcanot, a comedy written around 1820 by Israël Bédarride. Although set in pre-Revolutionary Carpentras and composed after the community had dispersed, it is considered to reflect the spoken language of the former Comtat. A travel report published in 1843 includes a transcription of the Shema prayer in Latin letters, documenting the community's distinctive pronunciation of Hebrew at that date. In the 1890s, Raoul Hirschler published wordlists collected from elderly informants, children of the last generation of Jews raised in the Comtat. In this later period the script situation was reversed: the texts are written in Latin letters and are filled with words of Hebrew or Aramaic origin, whose embedded forms can be difficult to identify.
Middle Ages
Jews were present in southern Gaul from Roman times, perhaps as early as the first century CE, although there is no certainty that the communities attested in the early Middle Ages descend from them. The first important community is documented at Narbonne under Frankish rule, where Pepin the Short installed a Babylonian Jew, Makhir ben Yehudah Zakkai, at the head of a Jewish fief. The language of these early Narbonne Jews is unknown: it cannot have been Provençal, which is not attested before about 1060, and given the community's Babylonian origins it may long have remained Arabic. By the mid-12th century, however, the local Jews no longer understood Arabic, which is why David Kimhi produced his Sefer ha-Shorashim as a Hebrew adaptation of an Arabic original. In the 12th and 13th centuries the bulk of Occitan-speaking Jewry lived in Languedoc, around Béziers. Their situation deteriorated after the Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229), which brought Languedoc under French control and introduced the Inquisition.
Modern period
Within the enclave, the Jews suffered violence and were progressively confined. In the second half of the 15th century they were restricted to a single street, the carrière, in each town where they lived, in 1453 in Cavaillon and in 1486 in Carpentras. From 1555, the bull Cum nimis absurdum of Pope Paul IV imposed a policy of ghettoisation, and from 1624 the Jews of the enclave could reside only in the ghettos of Avignon, Carpentras, Cavaillon and L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, which came to be known as the "four holy communities". This isolation lasted from 1501 to 1791, and in such circumstances, as Jochnowitz observes, it was natural for the community's language to diverge from that of its neighbours; the modern Jewish variety was spoken only in these four towns.
Judeo-Provençal had a number of phonological characteristics that are not found in other Occitan dialects. One of the most salient features is that, in words derived from Latin, Provençal /ʒ/ and /dʒ/ were realized /ʃ/ and /tʃ/. Other phonetic features have been recorded. Words borrowed from Hebrew were pronounced according to the distinctive Provençal phonetic norm of Hebrew. Among other features, the letters samekh, sin, tsade and taw raphe were all pronounced /f/. Hebrew words were largely adapted to Provençal phonology.
