Kirsten Fudeman's study of the language—vernacular and Hebrew—of medieval French Jews provides a welcome, fresh perspective on medieval Jewish history and culture. Fudeman is interested in the way that language shaped identity: she asks how language affected the way that Jews thought, interacted with one another and with Christians, and understood themselves (2). At the book's core are the Hebraico-French texts, including glosses, poems, prayers, and annotations, that survive in medieval Jewish manuscripts dating primarily from the eleventh century to the fifteenth century. Fudeman is a scholar of linguistics, and this is evident in her careful attention to word and letter and to the way that authors and scribes moved between Hebrew and French in vernacular interventions in Hebrew manuscripts. In all of the chapters, analysis takes place at every level of the text, including the individual word. For Fudeman, linguistic choices, whether Hebrew or French, are never accidental — they always tell us something. As Fudeman explains, “The choice to switch from one language to another carries social meaning, and the languages themselves reflect aspects of the identities of both participants or sets of participants in the discourse, regardless of whether that discourse is oral or written” (45).

The introduction frames the study, its intent and methodologies, and provides explanations of linguistic theory and terms necessary to comprehend the arguments that form the basis of the study. It also provides a helpful discussion of the linguistic complexities of the medieval French Jewish community, a diglossic community whose spoken language was a French dialect and whose written language was predominantly, although not exclusively, Hebrew. Their Hebrew was influenced and informed by their French and their French by their Hebrew. Fudeman details the nature of French and Hebrew interaction, describing instances where loanwords from one language enter the other, noting that Hebrew roots are sometimes joined with French suffixes, bilingual texts sometimes begin sentences in one language and end them in another, and so on. Although the evidence here is necessarily from the written record, she presumes a similar effect in speech.

Chapter One on language and identity addresses French Jews as a diglossic community, exploring the languages they employed and the way that their linguistic choices can help us to understand their dual identities as French and Jewish. She employs the methodology of sociolinguistics to uncover the relationship between speech and self. Among other questions, Fudeman asks whether Jews would have been distinguishable from gentiles by their speech. She points out that if there had been a distinctive mode of speaking French, gentiles would almost certainly have mentioned it, yet they do not. Still, “to say that the Jews spoke the language of non-Jewish neighbors is not to say that they spoke it in an identical way” (41). Code-switching is an important aspect of French Jewish speech and writing. As is true in all diglossic cultures, each language has specific functions even when they overlap in space. Scholarly texts written in Hebrew were often taught and commented upon in French, for example. A simple Venn diagram illustrates Hebrew and French language spaces and their overlap (58). Fudeman's linguistic analysis of the way in which French and Hebrew interact in poetry and prose texts—including examples from the Maḥzor Vitry, Joseph Kara's commentary on Isaiah, and an anonymous sermon—brings out elements of distinctive French-Jewish identity that traditional literary and historical analyses miss.

The realities of Jewish participation in French vernacular culture outlined in Chapter One serve as evidence in Chapter Two, “Speech and Silence,” where Fudeman examines the documents concerning the infamous Blois incident of 1171, in which over thirty Jews were put to death for the alleged murder of a Christian child. Much has been written about the Blois incident and the extant sources, and Fudeman provides a good survey of the state of scholarship. Her focus on language and her familiarity with a range of contemporary literatures and linguistic contexts allows her to make some fresh contributions to our reading of the sources. Fudeman argues that the character of the language in the so-called “Blois letters” supports a twelfth-century origin in spite of the fact that they exist only in a fifteenth-century copy. She understands the Orléans letter, considered by most scholars as a digression or even a completely separate letter, as a key to understanding the rest of the material, with speech and slander the point of connection (71). Turning to contemporary texts in both Hebrew and French, she explores the association of private speech with slander, public speech with truth. She points out that the independent letters that make up the Blois corpus “though plural, were indeed combined into a single text,” and she suggests convincingly that “in this tightly constructed series of letters where words and phrases have been carefully chosen for their surface meaning or allusive power or both, the power and significance of speech and silence are given special place” (75–76). The point here is not to use the language of the Blois letters to recreate with certainty what happened in 1171, but to use the Blois letters to illuminate the culture of medieval French Jews living simultaneously in two interwoven worlds. In the final section of the chapter on speech, Fudeman turns her attention to the figure of Pucelline, not just to address her role in the unfolding of the Blois disaster, but as a way to explore broader questions of gender and language.

In Chapter Three Fudeman looks at the admittedly small corpus of Jewish literature written in Old French. She characterizes Jewish vernacular material as primarily religious in nature, appearing in the margins or in blank spaces of Hebrew manuscripts, and, for the most part, either private and context-specific (e.g., colophons), or a record of oral traditions, including things meant to be recited or sung. Fudeman takes all this to indicate that “a medieval Jewish literary tradition in French never fully came into being and that Old French texts in Hebrew letters remained bound to their Hebrew context” (123). She points to Jewish cultural affinity with Christian French culture and explores some possible reasons why Jews seem not to have developed a broad vernacular tradition similar to that of Christians. The strong association of French with the spoken word is part of that answer. Fudeman notes that the increasing use of Hebraico-French from the twelfth century onward coincides with a period of increasing tension and crisis for Jews living in French lands, and suggests that this may not be coincidental: “It may be no accident that a Hebraico-French literary tradition…seems to have begun to take shape during the thirteenth century, when specific episodes like the burning of thirteen innocents in Troyes and a general climate of persecution challenged the Jews' place in France like never before…Asserting the French aspects of their identity took on a new but futile urgency, and one way they did this was to compose French-language poetry” (122).

The final chapter looks at two bilingual French-Hebrew wedding poems, one surviving in the Jewish Theological Seminary copy of the Maḥzor Vitry, JTS MS 8092, and the other in a miscellany, Zentralbibliothek Zurich MS Heid. 51, set alongside a number of piyyutim. An appendix provides a detailed description, annotated edition, transliteration, and translation of the latter poem, and crisp images accompany the description of the poems. Fudeman discusses the way the poems would have been performed, framing them in terms of public ritual and collective identity formation. She explores Hebrew and French influences and references in the poem, following Samuel Rosenberg in highlighting the fact that the Hebrew-French wedding songs “bring together not only two languages but also two cultures…” (135).

Although there is quite a lot of technical analysis in the book, it is beautifully written and extremely readable. Fudeman elegantly weaves together linguistics, literary analysis, French and Jewish history, fully in command of the scholarship in each area. To a certain extent the payoff of this work is limited by source and methodology. Fudeman is working with a fairly small body of material, with limited information on much of it. There is only so far one can take the sources on the Blois incident, for example. But even when the sources are limited, what Fudeman adds is a critical shift in our orientation toward the material, as when, at the end of her discussion of secrets and whispers, she shares a French proverb “A la cort le roi chascuns i est por soi” as a reminder that the Jews who wrote these letters were operating in a French cultural orbit (75).

Fudeman's attention to the long-neglected Jewish vernacular gets to the heart of identity questions. Readers familiar with the work of Susan Einbinder will see her influence here. Fudeman's work adds to our increasing understanding of the extent to which French Jews understood themselves to be French. Obvious as it sounds, it is in the French vernacular (or vernaculars) that we see this most clearly. This question of perception (“what did France and French mean to medieval Jews?”) is central in much recent work in medieval Jewish history, and Fudeman identifies the work of scholars like Yisrael Yuval and Ivan Marcus on First Crusade chronicles as providing a model for her approach in this work. With a finely-tuned ear to the uses and function of language, Fudeman brings new shades to our reading of French-Jewish culture, and anyone interested in medieval European Jewish history will certainly want to read this book.