The relative number of documents extant in Latin, French, and English is an indicator of the uses of literacy, but it bears no relation to the number of words spoken in each language at the time. … French could never compete with English as the mother tongue.^[1]

There is abundant evidence that Jews in medieval England spoke Anglo-Norman, and I am not aware of any evidence that they spoke English.^[2]

The medieval English financier Licoricia of Winchester (d. 1277) was a Jewish woman of wealth and status, among the most important and prolific financiers of her era. She named her youngest son Sweteman (»sweet man«), an English name, equivalent to Yiddish Zussman and semantically linked to his Hebrew name Asher (meaning »fortunate« or »blessed«; cf. Gen. 30.13). Licoricia also had a daughter called Belia (from French or Middle English bel, akin to Yiddish Bayla) and three other sons known as Benedict, Lumbard, and Cok (respectively, a Latinization of Hebrew Baruch or Berechiah, from the Italian placename Lombardy, and an English nickname for Hebrew Yitzchok). Licoricia’s own name was a Latinization of licoris, a word used equally in Anglo-Norman French and Middle English by the thirteenth century.^[3] She lived her entire life between Winchester and Oxford, though she travelled widely throughout England to conduct business and appear in courts that litigated debts owed to or by her. In her professional life, she encountered and used documents in Latin and Hebrew, probably daily, and she lived among English-speaking neighbors and servants within non-segregated Anglo-Jewish communities. In 1244, after her second husband David of Oxford’s death, she successfully sued for possession of her household library, which Henry III had seized as part of an inheritance settlement. This library would have contained many books in Hebrew, but it also included at least three Latin books that the king kept for himself (a Bible, a glossed Psalter, and unspecified decretals), as well as some items deemed potentially »against the law of the Christians or Jews« – though we cannot know in what languages these were written.^[4] What was Licoricia’s mother tongue?

It may have been English. The question, however, is not easy to answer. The very idea of a »mother tongue« for medieval English Jews is a provocation, meant to engage studies of England’s multilingualism, Jewish studies, and sociolinguistics. Feminine and singular, suggesting some natural monolingual identity, the term can be associated with the development of modern nation-states and thus with ideas of nativity and ethnonationalism, much as its Yiddish equivalent mamaloshen can evoke meditation on Jewish languages. In its non-specific linguistic sense, it does not work very well for multilingual environments, like the one in which Licoricia lived, where »different languages are in active use« so that »it is imaginable that the home language of a child differs from its mother’s mother tongue«; instead, it suggests a single »primary-socialisational« language (an L1 or »home language«), and as Sjaak Kroon has argued, »tends to be a symbol of separation of minority and majority, or those with less, as opposed to those with more, power and status«.^[5] In the Middle Ages, at least from the twelfth century on, the lingua materna was commonly associated with the vernacular (in opposition to learned Latin), and could refer to the language one’s mother spoke,^[6] but in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England this might be French or English, or might be both. In medieval Jewish contexts, we can even imagine »home languages« for which we no longer have evidence. Might there have been, for instance, a lost or stunted Judeo-English?

In querying Licoricia’s mother tongue, nonetheless, I make purposeful use of a troublesome term. Despite its problems, the idea of a lingua materna gives us a tool to think with, useful both for the modern identity categories it raises and for its associations with women and domestic learning, a domain largely omitted from previous scholars’ discussions of Anglo-Jewish languages. While those working on Anglo-Jewish history have generally concluded that more than two centuries of medieval English Jews remained French-speaking, in what follows I question scholarly commitments to a singularly French-speaking English Jewry, and I provide some evidence for medieval Anglo-Jews’ use of English, both by gathering the available (written) evidence, and by incorporating the domestic (unwritten) environments of Jewish women into the discussion. I am not, to be clear, suggesting that we assign English instead of French (and other multilingual competencies) to medieval Anglo-Jews, for whom facility with Hebrew, Aramaic, French, and (in some circles) Latin is well established.^[7] Rather, I suggest that we update our claims about their spoken languages in relation to their lived multilingual environments. We can, I argue, confidently and deliberately include English in Anglo-Jewry’s multilingualism.

Whether »spoken French remained as a ›birth vernacular‹« of England into the thirteenth century and beyond »has long been a matter of debate«.^[8] Medieval English Jews should not be excluded from such debate, which entails linguistic, temporal, and regional trends of which they were a part. Deeply ingrained in the historiography of Anglo-Jewry, however, is the idea that English Jews were a small satellite of the French Jewish community. They arrived with the Norman government after the Conquest and maintained close ties to French Jews until 1290, when they were expelled by Edward I. They spoke French amongst themselves and used Hebrew and Aramaic liturgically, with Hebrew also marked as the language of learning and legal transactions. As Pinchas Roth has put it, echoing the vast majority of scholarship on the matter, »I am not aware of any evidence that they spoke English.«^[9] But while the first generations of Jews in medieval England surely spoke French, like the conquerors and Norman nobility who supported their settlement there (and then like England’s literate classes generally in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries), there is in fact surviving evidence for their knowledge of English. Further, as many diasporic or transnational communities know, linguistic diversity and challenges to spoken language maintenance increase with successive generations, and bilingualism and multilingualism in successive generations of children develops similarly to monolingual language acquisition.^[10] We can acknowledge, that is, multiple mother tongues.

Jews had been in England for more than two centuries by the time Edward I expelled them. They lived at close quarters with Christians, usually in urban areas and often in the parts of town associated with trades and mercantile activities, protected and supported by local sheriffs and castle constables. Could spoken French have remained singular or dominant throughout the centuries in such contexts? Likely not. As Thomas Hahn has argued, despite the remarkable production of Anglo-French literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, »native speakers of English [that is, the general population of towns and cities] would have had twice the chance of encountering a twin than a speaker of French«;^[11] and as Shelome Gooden has made clear, our linguistic »histories must include examination of the role of language contact« implicit in such environments.^[12] English would have brushed up against Jews’ French, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, and, in some regions, Welsh. More importantly, if we ignore the full range of possibilities for Anglo-Jews because we accept that their life in medieval England had French origins (the Norman Conquest of 1066) and a French teleology (many Jews who left England in 1290 went to France), we risk unwitting participation in their othering. How could medieval English Jews belong in England if their Frenchness (and implied alignment with the conquering elite) remained unceasingly primary? By imagining Anglo-Jews not using the spoken language of their neighbors, we also imagine them with limited participation in Englishness, even in the assumed »multilingual competence« of their lived environments.^[13] As Roth has rightly noted, »The linguistic implications of a Jewish French-speaking community in thirteenth-century England have not been fully considered.«^[14]

Indeed, we must consider how the social and political constructs we project onto language, whether now or in the past, more commonly reflect how language divides us than how language contact works. As Thomas Paul Bonfiglio argues, a language »borderline« imposed by such constructs »looms large, wide, vague, and porous«, while the anxieties around them suggest »a fundamental ethnolinguistic prejudice: ›our native‹ language, which is ›our birthright,‹ is seen as endangered by the presence of an other who is perceived as a biological contaminant and thus a threat to the matrix of nation, ethnicity, and language.«^[15] The argument for English Jews’ remarkably consistent French speech has foundation in scholarship that argued for just this sort of borderline: for Cecil Roth, for instance, English Jews »were on the whole an offshoot of the communities of Northern France«^[16]; Henry Gerald Richardson argued that the English Jewish community »was English only because it was in England« when in fact it »belonged to the aristocratic French society that governed [much of] Europe«^[17]; Joseph Jacob’s single mention of the »conclusive« spoken French of medieval English Jews aligned them »with the upper classes in general«.^[18] That is, part of the grounds for Anglo-Jews’ French speech has always also been an argument for their wealth, political alignments, and continental character.^[19] In this, however, we have privileged the surviving written record, that is, the »uses of literacy« (to use Michael Clanchy’s term), over the quotidian realities of most English Jews, who would have had various degrees of immersive contact with English.

In Clanchy’s classic discussion of the »literate mentality« and »languages of record« in thirteenth-century England, he (unusually) considered languages and language contact among Anglo-Jews alongside the fact that French »became a common written language in England for business purposes« in the thirteenth century.^[20] Like much of the nobility of the time, Clanchy implies, Anglo-Jews had French without necessarily having French as their L1. For him, Jews were part of a larger culture where »it was not sufficient simply to read the mother tongue [i. e., English]. Ideally ladies (and gentlemen) in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England should be able to read in three languages at least: Latin, French, and English.«^[21] As he suggested by considering this ideal in juxtaposition to his discussion of the languages of English Jews, there is little reason to exclude Jews from this matrix. Since French was the »language of management« and of »royal and baronial enterprises« by the thirteenth century, such that »English, French, and Latin performed distinct social and intellectual functions«, it in fact makes good sense that most archived content associated with medieval Jews provides some evidence that they were familiar with precisely these functions.^[22] If anything, the legal and financial nature of the records that inform our understanding of Anglo-Jews broadly (the vast majority of those records from the thirteenth century) make it more likely that Clanchy’s assessment of the distinct uses of English, French, and Latin persisted for English Jews.

Still, we might contend, Jewish languages are different; »Jews have always had a separate language, or more precisely a set of separate languages, that marked them off as a nation alongside or even within other nations.«^[23] While Yiddish was barely emergent in high medieval Europe, French or Judeo-French may have functioned in just this way (as it could in much of the Ashkenazi world) throughout the life of medieval Anglo-Jewry – that is, as a written language of competence for learned men, who shared glosses on Hebrew and Aramaic texts in the Judeo-French la’az.^[24] But if French (or at least Judeo-French) functioned as a Jewish language in Ashkenaz (including England), that does not preclude Jewish use of English as the primary spoken vernacular of the land. Given the legal contexts of much of the extant records of medieval Anglo-Jewry, we do well to remember that, in thirteenth-century England, a »statement made in court in English or French … might be written down in Latin, or conversely a Latin [or Hebrew] charter might be read in English or French.«^[25] For the Exchequer of the Jews, for instance, while we know that Jewish and Christian scribes often worked side-by-side and that the records they created and used were in Hebrew, Latin, and occasionally French,^[26] this does not tell us which languages these colleagues spoke together, nor what languages Jewish defendants, plaintiffs, or jurors were speaking when they appeared before the Justices. It tells us even less about what language(s) Jews spoke in their domestic and urban contexts, and it certainly does not include consideration of mothers’ tongues.

Though recent work on the use of French in thirteenth-century England has established both that Jews (at least Jewish men) used Judeo-French and that French persisted as a (learned) vernacular into the thirteenth century and well beyond,^[27] the specter of English should loom large. As Jocelyn Wogan-Browne has summarized, it can be true both that »[n]ot all French users [in England] were fully bilingual in English and French« and that we must »move towards fully multilingual paradigms«,^[28] where spoken multilingualism becomes visible through the lens of social interaction, that is, through our ability to imagine the use of more than one language of conversation. And this conversational element is key: where others have relied on men’s written language use alone, we do not necessarily need to correlate written evidence with spoken language. We must also keep in mind the street, the marketplace, the home, and those who were not part of the learned, wealthy, or moneylending classes. There is potentially, to use Jocelyn Wogan-Browne’s term, an »invisible archive« in these places, one that »dispense[s] with the paradigm of English French as a … static ›mother-tongue‹ remnant« to embrace the »living registers of polyglot users« who might use different languages in different groups of speakers or according to different circumstances.^[29]

Even if we focus solely on written evidence, though, it must be acknowledged that there is indeed evidence for English to be found. In general, Anglo-Jews adapted Hebrew to reflect both French and English. Olszowy-Schlanger’s magisterial work on Hebrew and Hebrew-Latin documents from medieval England demonstrates how vocabulary associated with property description, professions, names and placenames, directions, ecclesiastical titles, and administrative systems or processes, is often found in transliterated characters. She emphasizes the primary use of French in this, and she leans on the »Anglo-Norman Dictionary«, commenting »English is very rare.«^[30] However, more than half of the Anglo-French words she documents were fully functioning as English-language words in the thirteenth-century, well documented in the »Middle English Dictionary« or, in a couple of cases, even the »Dictionary of Old English,« thus not decisively showing French dominance. For instance, directional words like »nort«, »west«, »est« or »sud«; the professions of »barber« or »locker« (for locksmith); the word »parish«, the holiday »Candel-ure« (for Candlemas), or the word »ger-sume« (that is, OE wersum or gersum, a financial compensation). Other words Olszowy-Schlanger documents are clearly transliterated from English, such as »house«, »locksmith«, »knifesmith«, »glover«, and »girdler«; the definite article »the«; and a variety of first names and placenames.^[31] Anglo-Jewish scribes, furthermore, developed graphic symbols for transliteration of English. In their Hebrew, they used doubled consonants and diacritics to represent English sounds: a doubled yod could make a /j/ sound (as in Roger), a zayin the /th/ sound (as in the or Hunworth); with diacritics, a kof could represent the /ch/ sound (as in Richard or Norwich); a gimel the /w/ sound (as in Norwich or Newark); and the combination of kaf and shin the /x/ sound (as in Oxford).^[32] These kinds of Anglicizing elements are few but do suggest varying degrees of immersion in English. English Jews’ specialized practices for transliteration of English sounds into Hebrew even suggest the traces of a Judeo-English.

Over recent decades, in fact, scholars have quietly begun to include English among the spoken vernaculars of English Jews, though most claims are hesitant, and no one has hitherto made a sustained argument for it. In a 2008 article on Muriel of Oxford (whom David of Oxford divorced to marry Licoricia of Winchester), for instance, Charlotte Newman Goldy asked, »Even if the language of her home remained some form of French, why would Muriel not be fluent in English?«^[33] In a 2013 chapter on Jewish multilingualism in medieval England, Eva De Visscher suggested that »to function and participate in the society in which they lived, many must have spoken English.«^[34] Olszowy-Schlanger then allowed, »It is more than likely that French-speaking Jews soon acquired a good grasp of Middle English, to which they must have been constantly exposed.«^[35] Eyal Poleg, in a 2019 review of Olszowy-Schlanger’s study, repeated her claims, if more tentatively: »English Jews wrote Hebrew, but generally spoke French, and had some command of Latin and English.«^[36] Around the same time, Anthony Bale, in a contribution to the public history project »Our Migration Story: The Making of Britain«, put it surprisingly bluntly: »English Jews were multilingual: they spoke English and French.«^[37] And Pinchas Roth has recently conceded that, while French was the spoken language of English Jews, »[i]t is possible, and perhaps even likely, that they understood spoken English.«^[38] As David Wasserstein precociously put it in 2000, arguing provisionally for the inclusion of English, »[T]here was a far greater degree and variety of linguistic capability … than we are generally allowed to think by those who have written about the community in the past.«^[39] We have already been, that is, bit by bit, reaching beyond the notion of a static spoken language to consider the complex multilingualism of medieval England.

To be sure, the established multiplicity of language contacts between English Jews and Christians is such that the traditional insistence on monolingual speech alongside high levels of multilingual literacy has an intrinsic oddness. Clanchy posited Hebrew as such an important »language of record« in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England that »indebted magnates of the thirteenth century would probably have come across more writing in Hebrew than in English«, certainly a real possibility at a time when there was, generally, a paucity of English writing to go around.^[40] Olszowy-Schlanger’s work on Jews’ knowledge of Latin and the evidence of Anglo-Hebrew manuscript survivals goes much further in showing sustained interaction between Christians and Jews in Hebrew and Latin record making, book making, and exegesis.^[41] As noted above, several scholars have carefully examined Judeo-French glosses and transliterations in Anglo-Hebrew sources in recent years,^[42] and Ruth Nisse has persuasively made the case for mutual transmission, translation, and adaptation of Latin, Hebrew, and French texts in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England.^[43] Jewish languages in England, in other words, already show diversity and dynamic contact, with a use of French (in legal and learned realms) not dissimilar to that of educated Christians of the same period (for whom we do imagine English).

If we expand this diversity to Anglo-Jewish women’s business and domestic contexts, the case for including spoken English becomes increasingly difficult to dismiss. To begin with, the broad multilingualism of Anglo-Jewish women, similar to Anglo-Jewish men, is a provable reality (that is, it is visible in the surviving archives). There is evidence of Hebrew literacy among Anglo-Jewish women in legal and financial contexts, and enrolled cases in fine rolls, pipe rolls, and Jewish Exchequer rolls show women’s related care for Jewish household libraries.^[44] Licoricia’s suit for her library (1244), for instance, is noted above,^[45] and this might be grouped with similar cases such as that of Belaset of London (1276);^[46] Floria, the daughter of Abraham of Berkhamsted (1236),^[47] and her daughter Contessa (1240);^[48] or the daughters of Morell of Norwich, who paid a fine to have his books after his death (1192).^[49] We also know that Anglo-Jewish women were dealing in the trade and sale of Latin books, often as surety for debts in the university context.^[50] This may explain the presence of Latin books in Licoricia’s Oxford library, as well as two other cases from the last decades of medieval Anglo-Jewry: one in 1278, when a Jewess called Margarina was sued by Oxford Carmelites for unlawfully keeping three Latin books she held in pledge,^[51] and one in 1281, when nine Latin books were delivered to the Domus Conversorum (House of Converts) in London to sustain the sisters Belaset and Hittecote of Oxford.^[52]

Two surviving letters of an Anglo-Jewish convert called Alice of Worcester, in addition, provide good examples of a (formerly) Jewish woman’s use of both Latin and French, and specifically of her participation in a multilingual context where language varied by domain. In one letter to Edward I (ca. 1274–1275), in French, Alice asks the king to confirm that Worcester Cathedral Priory will care for her and her son after their conversion. In the second, in Latin, written to Bishop of Bath and Wells and Lord Chancellor Robert Burnell (ca. 1275–1280), Alice requests assistance because the priory has refused her.^[53] The fact of a former Jewish woman writing a letter in French to be sent to a French-speaking king who was in Gascony at the time, and her use of Latin to address a powerful ecclesiastic, however, confirms not her language of speech but rather her ability to use languages as appropriate to the power structures in which she operated. In this case, Alice’s French (which may of course be her scribe’s rather than hers) is more likely connected to her understanding of the late thirteenth-century’s uses of literacy than to her deficiencies in English (or any other spoken language). In what would have been a complex interplay of written and spoken (she would have had to communicate to her scribe orally), it is reasonable to imagine competencies that do not align with the written record.

Anglo-Jewish women’s multilingualism is also reflected in Christian polemical literature, where Jewish women in particular could be stereotyped for their boundary-crossing use of languages. Where Gerald of Wales’ anecdote (in the »Itinerarium Cambriae«, ca. 1190) of the Jew who travelled with Archdeacon of Shrewsbury Richard Peche (active in the 1180s) and punned on his name (A-N peccé = sin) has been used to argue for Anglo-Jews’ spoken French,^[54] for example, the Latin tale of the ritual murder of Adam of Bristol, a unique survival from the second half of the thirteenth century, may be used to argue for Anglo-Jewish women’s use of English. The tale features two Bristol women who typify much of what I have discussed elsewhere about the »unmarkedness« that English anti-Jewish rhetoric against women engages, and their ability to speak and understand multiple languages, including English, is key to that representation.^[55] All Jews in the Adam of Bristol tale speak French and Hebrew, but the women also know Latin and English.^[56] The male murderer’s sister in this tale is knowledgeable about Latin liturgy, and, when she shows up with an Irish priest, her brother asks her whether the priest »knows English or French«; she replies, »He understands both.«^[57] Since she has just been pretending to be a Christian woman while chatting with this priest in town, the implication is that she has spoken to him in these languages. The murderer’s wife, meanwhile, questions her adherence to Judaism only when faced with a related linguistic shock: the English-speaking Christian child that she and her husband torture (and speak to, repeatedly calling him »Adekin«, an Anglo-Dutch diminutive) suddenly begins speaking Hebrew to her, and she then decides to convert to Christianity.^[58] This conversion moment, accomplished only through a Christ-body that speaks both English and Hebrew, reveals a kind of code switching consistently represented around women in English anti-Jewish literature. They are, particularly when passing for or becoming Christian is central to a narrative, multi-tongued and conversant with English.

Overall, nonetheless, Anglo-Jewish women’s language use is much harder to track than men’s. On the one hand, medieval Anglo-Jewish men wrote in Hebrew: liturgical poems (for example, Meir of Norwich’s piyyutim), halakhic texts (for example, Jacob of London’s Etz Hayyim), and legal documents (for example, Jewish bonds and quitclaims written in Hebrew). Especially in learned contexts, which might include Aramaic, these might feature transliterated Latin or French words, as discussed above, and there is some evidence of Jewish response to Latin- and French-language literature too (for example, Berechiah Ha-Nakdan’s »Mishle Shu’alim« likely relies on Marie de France’s »Ysopet«, his »Dodi v’Nekhdi« on Adelard of Bath’s »Quaestiones naturales«). Anglo-Jewish women, on the other hand – though I am gathering what evidence I can here – simply leave us much less to go by. They, of course, were not the intended audience of Judeo-French glosses or transliterations, nor of Hebrew poetry, Talmud commentaries, or halakhic texts.

Our troublesome concept of the »mother tongue«, then, becomes counterintuitively useful once again, in that it raises the vexed question of what the ordinary Jewish mothers of England, with their inevitably lesser degrees of learning and literacy, might have spoken in their homes. A late medieval gloss on the »Shulchan Arukh« tells us that that Rabbi Y. (Yaakov) of London – likely Jacob ben Judah Hazzan (active in the 1280s) – allowed »all of the Haggadah in the vernacular [la’az], so that the women and children would understand«.^[59] Though this gloss has been used to suggest that, in England, Passover was (or could be) conducted in French,^[60] the fact that a London rabbi in the late thirteenth-century allowed the vernacular(s) of England to be used at the Passover seder for the sake of women and children should make us ask: which vernacular? The Hebrew word la’az may refer to any vernacular or non-Jewish language, and what is known of Anglo-Jewish women’s domestic environments makes the possibility of a medieval English-language Haggadah a live one.^[61] For the purposes of translating or explaining the Haggadah at seders, what would the Jewish women and children of England have most readily understood at this point in history? Even, why must we think that there was only one English vernacular at play in conversation around the table?

Including women in our thinking about Anglo-Jewish languages, indeed, makes it easier to imagine the effects of »natural« language contact between English-speaking Christians and English-speaking Jews (and also to imagine why this contact might sometimes be polemicized). As Rita Franceschini has emphasized, in multilingual contexts »[t]he naturalness and inevitability of language contact – in the sense of its ›unmarkedness‹ – is demonstrated by the fact that it can only be hindered with great effort«,^[62] regardless of what the written records tell us. The idea that »natural« language contact is unmarked – not recorded in writing, not happening in the places where scholars tend to find evidence – mirrors the »unmarkedness« of medieval Anglo-Jewish women in Anglo-Christian eyes generally. Jewish women are both less visible than men in the archives (as their Christian counterparts) and stereotyped as unmarked, imagined to easily pass as Christian in appearance and speech.^[63] The historical anxieties to which such stereotypes advert are visible in Lateran IV’s canon 68 (1215), which demanded identification badges to avoid Christian sexual contact with Jewish or Muslim women, or in Edward I’s later, frustrated decree (1279) that English Jewish women must wear an identifying badge as men do (suggesting, of course, that they were not doing so).^[64] Language use is implicit in these anxieties over unmarkedness; theories of social and multilingual learning, and particularly ideas of spoken language, must rely on fuzzy boundaries.

Mothers’ tongues happen especially in domestic spaces, and Jewish and Christian women in medieval England had the same types of intimate contact that Elisheva Baumgarten has outlined for women in medieval Ashkenaz broadly: they were »medical colleagues and they met as neighbors. Christian women worked in Jewish homes, and Jewish children were cared for in Christian homes.«^[65] As I have discussed elsewhere, these points of contact were augmented by business relationships, small consumption loans between women, and women’s participation in lending and trade with a range of Christian people and institutions throughout England.^[66] As Clanchy intuited some time ago, from his own survey of the extant records of Anglo-Jewish financial business, »The men, and a notable number of women, who had business dealings with Christians, had to understand Latin, French, and English as well.«^[67] When we move this observation from business to home, the idea of a lack of facility with English becomes almost unimaginable, for with whom did Anglo-Jewish women speak, and what would their children have heard or learned casually in the home, with a Christian wetnurse, say, or playing outside with neighborhood children?

In England, the kind of domestic interactions Baumgarten describes are more readily visible than they are in continental sources. As Hannah Meyer has shown, Latin Christian regulatory sources, which are of a different kind than the sources on which Jewish Studies scholarship usually relies, reveal a range of English material that verifies Christian women’s work in Jewish households. As Meyer puts it, the »fears of corruption, transgression and subversion evident in official prohibitions do not appear to have had that much effect upon« women.^[68] Surviving excommunication significations from 1276 (York) and 1278 (Lincoln), for instance, list twenty-five different Christian women working as wetnurses or maidservants in eighteen distinct Jewish households, and these employments were frequent sites of polemical commentary in medieval English literature.^[69] Constant reissuance of prohibitions or excommunications says more about the prevalence of such employment than its successful regulation, and a variety of English statutes – from 1222, 1253, 1271, 1275, and into the late 1280s^[70] – show that concern over miscegenation, shared domestic space, and Christian servants in Jewish homes persisted amongst authorities. In thirteenth-century discussions among rabbis about whether Jewish children could be left alone in Christian households, Jacob of London once again stands out. While French and German rabbis were generally clear that Christian caregivers must be supervised by Jews at all times, Jacob interpreted their rulings this way: »Even if there is no Jew in the house, if there is a Jewish home in the city … [then] it is allowed.«^[71] Jacob’s interpretation likely reflects a pragmatic approach to the shrinking Anglo-Jewish community of the late thirteenth century. If we consider what languages would be spoken in English towns with very few Jewish houses, however, we must certainly include English.

Women’s names can also give us a glimpse of Anglicized linguistic multicompetence. The seal of one English Jewish woman survives intact, for instance, and its legend shows an English name: Mildegod. Mildegod of Oxford held her inherited property on Aldates from the friars of the Hospital of St John in 1253 (now the site of Magdalen College). Her seal, still appended to the Latin half of the chirograph, bears the legend »Sigillum MILDEGODE IVDeae« (Seal of Mildegod the Jewess). Mildegod’s name was perhaps an Englishing of the Hebrew Johanna (ME milde god = God [is] merciful or gracious),^[72] and, as with Licoricia’s son Sweteman, this English name is used in Latin administrative records that concern her throughout her life. While naming practices provide slight data, they do give us some sense of the linguistic culture: Simon Seror’s catalogue of Anglo-Jewish women’s names lists 110 names (not including variants) found in surviving documents pertaining to English Jews. Of these, 53 are of French origin (though this of course does not always mean they are not also English), 16 Hebrew, 14 German, 13 (plainly) English, 9 Latin, 3 Breton, and 2 Norse.^[73] Many of these are likely simple translations of Hebrew names (like Mildegod’s or, for another instance, French Bonne or Latin Bona for the Hebrew Tova), but nonetheless, or as a consequence, they show us more about the linguistic environment than men’s names ever can.

Men consistently used their Hebrew names for both ritual and legal purposes, while women’s naming practices were more fluid. Women’s names do not show up frequently in surviving Hebrew documents (though, when they do, the non-Hebrew forms of their names stay remarkably consistent), and little in Jewish law or custom explicitly dictated how women’s names were to be used in non-Jewish transactions. Moreover, a French study like Seror’s, which relies heavily on calendared translations of Latin records alongside French dictionaries of naming practices, does not adequately account for the possibility that many of the listed French names might be understood as English by the thirteenth century: like licoris (for Licoricia), many common Anglo-Jewish women’s names, habitually understood as French, are related to widely attested English words. For instance, the names Genta, Belia, Floria, and Chera are as likely related to the Middle English words gent, bel, flour, and cher as they are to the French equivalents; even some of the oft-used examples of »exotic« French Anglo-Jewish women’s names – Preciosa and Almonda, for instance – are also in Middle English almaunde and preciouse.^[74] These are of course also cognate with French words, and their status in English is as loan-words from French, but their double attestations in both English and French dictionaries of medieval language use suggests that our fixed idea of Anglo-Jewish Frenchness is more shaky than a century and a half of scholarship on Anglo-Jewish history would have us believe.

If we more deliberately allow for English-speaking medieval Anglo-Jews, moreover, we begin to move away from the prejudicial borderlines discussed above, from the concept of one »mother tongue« to the tongues of Jewish mothers in Jewish-Christian spaces. As Monica Green has suggested, we can broaden our historical understanding by »delineating the possible social and physical spaces in which medieval women may have interacted, and by suggesting some types of sources that might be creatively employed to illuminate what transpired in those spaces«.^[75] We also, in this way, may broaden our conceptions of the multilingual and multicultural milieu of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. Using gender and sociolinguistics as tools of analysis, indeed, reveals a more nuanced story of medieval Anglo-Jewish languages, one that should be more difficult to untangle than past scholarship on Anglo-Jews has often made it seem.

In modern scholarship and in medieval literary representations, the spoken language of medieval English Jews has been imagined variously as monolingual (a French mother tongue), as suspiciously multilingual (as the women in the »Passion of Adam of Bristol«), and as linguistically connected to a separate homeland (France) that always already separated them from Englishness – this despite the evidence offered above, and even though historical and legal documents provide clear evidence of overlapping communities of Christians and Jews that supports the likelihood of shared Englishes, as well as French and perhaps other vernaculars too. In their multilingualism, English Jews were little different from their Christian compatriots, with whom they lived, shopped, raised children, traded, and did business. This is, after all, as Elaine Treharne has summarized, a period

when manuscripts and their contents reflect a far greater sense of linguistic fluidity and permeability, a recognition in many cases of potential negotiation between languages and their literary traditions. This indicates the multilingualism of the literate classes, with English as a first language, spoken by the vast majority of the population … and Anglo-Norman learned and used for new and older forms of literature. … At the highest levels of education, Latinity awaited the scholar or serious cleric, and, from an official perspective, Latin and Anglo-Norman had formal documentary and textual functions to perform: administrative, religious, and governmental.^[76]

The evidence we have, and the invisible archive we can imagine, does not rule out the same situation for Anglo-Jews, and Anglo-Jewish women’s situation in particular (in as much as it provides a window into domestic life) certainly suggests that English would have been a »home language«. While English need not supplant French in our thinking about medieval English Jews, we must allow for the possibility of a variety of spoken, pronounced, and understood languages for Anglo-Jews – including Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-French, Judeo-English, English, French, and perhaps more. Fundamentally, I agree with Treharne that we must discard »our false categorizations of secular versus religious, French versus English, educated versus uneducated, written versus oral, central versus marginal … if we are to understand [this] complex era of strategic literacy, generic fluidity, and linguistic competencies beyond our own«.^[77] Paying attention to mothers’ tongues, women’s spaces, regional and urban contexts, and even the written and oral transmission of literature, will make a truer story visible and open up the potential for a more thorough-going assessment of Jewish-Christian interaction.