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The Jews of Castile used three languages on a regular basis during some periods of the Middle Ages: Hebrew for religious purposes, Arabic for science and education, and Castilian for interactions with Christians. Although the study of the Jews in medieval Spain has long been of interest to scholars, an accurate description of the language situation of the medieval Spanish Jews is still far from complete. In my dissertation I address this problem by employing an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon studies of the history, politics, society, and languages of medieval Spain, in order to give a context-based description of the Jews' use of Hebrew, Arabic, and Castilian across several domains of use and chronological periods.
The first chapters of the dissertation discuss the functions of Spanish, Hebrew, and Arabic among the Jewish communities of Muslim Spain (c. 950-1250) and Christian Spain (c. 1250-1492). I examine Jewish language choice under the framework of diglossia and I describe the Jews' language use in four domains: education (secular and religious), science (including the process of translation), literary language (in both secular and religious poetry), and non-fictional prose (including exegesis and religious ritual).
The last chapter of the dissertation presents a linguistic analysis of a set of taqqanot, Jewish communal ordinances, written in Valladolid in 1432. In particular, the Jews' use of Hebrew and of code-switching between Hebrew and Spanish are studied. The variety of lexical borrowings and syntactic patterns in the text suggests that the writers had full mastery of both Hebrew and Spanish. This analysis also addresses the question of whether the Jews spoke a dialect of Spanish which was identical to that of the co-territorial non-Jews, or whether their dialect was distinct and may be considered "Judeo-Spanish." While numerous scholars have pointed out non-standard features of medieval Jewish texts, many remain reluctant to consider Judeo-Spanish as a distinct dialect in pre-expulsion Spain. I conclude that, due to their unique religious and cultural background as well as their range of linguistic skills, by the fifteenth century the Spanish Jews had created a separate linguistic identity which manifested itself in a distinguishable dialect of Spanish, characterized primarily by code switching between Hebrew and Spanish.