Reply To: Did Jews Living In Medieval England Speak And Read And Write In English

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akuperma
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Probably very little. Documents from the time suggest their primary language was (similar to Rashi’s) French which they wrote with Hebrew letters. At the time the upper and middle classes in England used French, and the switch to English came after Jews were expelled. An individual dealing with peasants would have picked up some English, but for the most Jews it was unlikely. Remember that more than a century after the explusion, an English king was able to put down a peasants rebellion by addressing the peasants in English, which so amazed them that they obeyed and went home. As for reading and writing English, during the period Jews were in England, English was not written all that much; before the Norman question there was much writing of English (Old English, Anglo-Saxon) but there wasn’t much written in English again until well after the expulsion (by which time it was “Middle English”). Some Jews probably knew Latin as well, since that was the language of law (meaning contracts, legalese, courts, etc.) and non-Jewish scholarship (serious books at the time were rarely written in the local vernaculars – Christians wrote serious literature in Latin, Jews in Hebrew – vernacular was for things such as romances, poetry, etc.