A Transnational History of Bilingual Jewish Charters from Medieval Europe

Throughout medieval Europe, Hebrew records were accepted as evidence of economic and legal activities. European archives, chanceries and cartularies are dotted with Hebrew signatures, lines of text and full-fledged documents. This article limits itself to one form of practical document that is defined, not by content, but by visual and linguistic features: Jewish bilingual charters, mainly in Latin and Hebrew. The article is an exercise in transnational history, comparing bilingual Jewish deeds from tenth- and eleventh-century Catalonia with parallel documents from thirteen-century England, fourteenth-century Germany and Austria at the turn of the fifteenth century. It analyses their bilingualism with particular attention to visuality and orality. The relationships between each pair of languages are examined using a visual criterion: the mise-en-page of the two languages on the parchment or in the book of records. Its conclusion applies as much to the tenth century as to the fourteenth century: Jews asserted their identity not by the content of their language but by the visual presence of Hebrew letters. Jews marked themselves with the Hebrew alphabet, while the content conveyed through these letters—whether in Aramaic, Hebrew, Norman-French, Catalan or German—was secondary.