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Chapter 6. A RARE MANUSCRIPT LOST AND FOUND: BOOK OF TKHINES FOR A PREGNANT WOMAN
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87 6 C H A P T E R A Rare Manuscript Lost and Found: Book of Tkhines for a Pregnant Woman The absence of extant manuscripts of the Seyder Tkhines suggests they were a phenomenon of the age of print and did not, like many early printed works of literature, originate from earlier handwritten versions. There is,however,a manuscript of a single,anonymous collection of tkhines stored away in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.1 It has never appeared in print and has been virtually unknown until now. A translation of this rare manuscript appears in Part 2 of this book. It is listed in Neubauer’s catalogue of Hebrew manuscripts in the Bodleian Library as“Occasional prayers (tkhines) in Hebrew-German cursive characters [incomplete].”2 In the unpublished revision to Neubauer, the manuscript is referred to as “Ashkenaz, early 17th century.” The content is unique, and because it is mainly concerned with pregnancy and childbirth,it appears to have been intended for a pregnant woman who was presumably rich enough to have had the book written especially for her. The manuscript is an exciting addition to the corpus of women’s prayers from the seventeenth century. CONTENTS The manuscript,like the Seyder Tkhines,is a sequence of prayers for a female reader composed in the voice of a female persona, yet its content is quite different. It consists of a number of daily tkhines, a tkhine asking for financial security, a tkhine in eight parts for a pregnant woman, and a tkhine to be said on fast days. At certain points in the text,there are rubrics instructing the reader to recite particular psalms, although only the numbers of the psalms are provided and not the psalms themselves. None of the tkhines in the manuscript can be found in the Seyder Tkhines, or anywhere else in tkhine literature, although they contain unmistakable similarities in style that reflect a shared literary form. The manuscript also prescribes far fewer occasions on which the tkhines should be recited. Most of the manuscript is in Yiddish and written in cursive Hebrew characters. At certain points in the text, short passages in Hebrew are interspersed with the Yiddish. These Hebrew lines, written in square characters, consist of short phrases cobbled together from various sources proclaiming the oneness and truth of God, with much repetition of God’s name. They derive mainly from the psalms, but also include the second line of the Shema, which women are usually exempt from saying. This line is significant to kabbalists because of its association with the eternal name of God. In the Hebrew text, the names of God are adorned with scribal flourishes. The repetition of God’s name and the decorated form in which it is written conveys a preoccupation with the name of God that belongs to the kabbalistic tradition. There are no similar Hebrew passages in the Seyder Tkhines, which apart from one brief Hebrew blessing, is entirely in Yiddish. The level of knowledge that would have been required in order to read the Hebrew text and understand the significance of its derivation, seems to indicate that the manuscript was intended for a highly educated woman with an interest in mysticism. ORDERING THE MANUSCRIPT At first glance,the manuscript appears to be incomplete,as Neubauer indicates. It is bound inside a modern hard cover and the last page ends abruptly in mid-sentence. On closer inspection, however, it is 88 Commentary [44.212.26.248] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:22 GMT) evident that all the pages are there and can be rearranged to form a complete book. My rearrangement of the pages in my translation of the manuscript is guided by the order of the Seyder Tkhines. As the text was presented to me, the first tkhine had no rubric or introduction. The second tkhine was for fast days, unlike the Seyder Tkhines, where the tkhines for fast days appear toward the end of the book. Daily tkhines followed those for fast days,but these were not consecutive. They were,instead,interspersed with tkhines concerning pregnancy. The final tkhine was another for daily recitation,which had a long introductory title. Though the variety of occasions on which tkhines are to be recited is considerably smaller in the manuscript than in the Seyder Tkhines, I have rearranged the text so that it now corresponds to the sequence of the Seyder Tkhines, beginning with daily tkhines,continuing with those for pregnancy,and ending...