The Jewish diaspora in medieval northern France mastered Hebrew and Aramaic, since their main knowledge resources (Bible, Talmud, and Responsa literature) were written in these languages. However, Old French was their vernacular as it was for the Christian population. This medieval Judeo-French literacy is documented in various literary, scientific, and religious texts dating from the 11th to the 14th centuries. Their peculiarity lies in the fact that the Old French texts were written in Hebrew script. Most relevant is the fact that the Jews augmented commentaries on important religious texts like Bible and Talmud with Old French glosses and collected them in Hebrew-French Bible glossaries.
The overall objective of this project is to explore the entanglement of Hebrew-French Jewish culture with the non-Jewish vernacular intellectual environment from the 12th to the 14th centuries. The project focuses on Hebrew-French Bible glossaria, a hitherto almost uncharted territory. By applying state-of-the-art digital tools, it will lay a solid artefactual, philological, and linguistic groundwork to portray Jewish religious education as part of the shared intellectual heritage of the French-speaking world in the region of the langue d’oïl. By bringing together unique expertise from Jewish and Romance Studies, this project will add to a fundamental re-evaluation of Jewish culture in Medieval France, according to which the Jews strove to be a powerful part of European educational culture.