Historical sources and linguistic evidence combine to tell us about the existence in the Late Middle Ages of two groups of Ashkenazic Jews. On the one hand, they were distinguished by their religious customs, following the so-called Western and Eastern rites, respectively. On the other hand, there were also major differences in their systems of the pronunciation of Hebrew. The most discussed feature concerns the phonetic value of the letter ח ḥet. In the West (the Rhineland, Alsace, Swabia, Switzerland, Franconia, and a large part of Bavaria), it was glottal [h], o…