Judeo-Provençal

Judeo-Provençal, Judæo-Occitan or Judæo-Comtadin, are the names given to the varieties of Occitan or Provençal languages historically spoken and/or written by Jews in the South of France, and more specifically in the Comtat Venaissin area.

[citation needed] Religious texts contained a significantly higher incidence of loanwords from Hebrew and reflected an overall more "educated" style, with many words also from Old French, Provençal, Greek, Aramaic and Latin.

The texts include a fragment of a 14th-century poem lauding Queen Esther, and a woman's prayer book containing an uncommon blessing, found in few other locations (including medieval Lithuania), thanking God, in the morning blessings, not for making her "according to His will" (שעשני כרצונו she'asani kirṣono) but for making her as a woman.

The extant texts comprising the collections of popular prose used far fewer borrowings and were essentially Occitan written with the Hebrew script.

However, the Comtat Venaissin was then under the direct control of the Pope until 1790, and a small Jewish community continued to live there in relative isolation.