Seyder Tkhines: The Forgotten Book of Common Prayer for Jewish Women

Chapter 1. INTRODUCING TKHINES

1 C H A P T E R Introducing Tkhines The Seyder Tkhines,1 which first appeared in print in Amsterdam in 1648,is a landmark in the history of women. It represents an age of religious ,sexual,linguistic,and literary revolution within the Jewish community across Europe, an age when mysticism pervaded mainstream2 Judaism. Yet this exceptional episode,along with its literature,has disappeared from the Jewish collective memory. Jews of this period believed themselves to be on the verge of a Messianic redemption that called for spiritual regeneration, heartfelt prayer, and repentance by the entire community, women as well as men. Each catastrophe experienced by the community, and these were many and cataclysmic, was seen as an affirmation of this belief. The urgency to get the community ’s“house in order”necessitated an unprecedented reform in the religious and cultural participation of women who traditionally had not played an essential role in communal prayer or learning in Orthodox Judaism. A new vernacular prayer literature for, and sometimes by,women was prolifically printed and widely circulated by a dynamic, pan-European Yiddish printing industry. These prayers, and in particular those entitled tkhines, are the subject of this book. Jewish women today who are seeking a precedent for women’s prayer need look no further. 3 WOMEN,LITERACY, ANDTHE LANGUAGE OF PRAYER Tkhines are a phenomenon of Ashkenazic Jewry that arose from the ninth century3 in the German-speaking lands in the basins of the Rhine and the Danube. These Jews formed a community that was autonomous from the major Jewish settlements in the Middle East.They had a common culture that differed from the Christian community around them—even their language was different. Three Jewish languages coexisted within the Ashkenazic community : Yiddish,Hebrew and Aramaic. Each had its own accepted function and status. The only spoken language was Yiddish, the Ashkenazic vernacular. Aramaic, which had been the vernacular in the Middle East from the time of the Babylonian exile in the seventh century B.C., was not spoken in Europe. It was learned only by an elite coterie of scholars for the study of the Talmud, and by yet more elite scholars of the central work of Jewish mysticism—the Kabbalah . The Hebrew language, known popularly in Yiddish as Loshn koydesh (Sacred tongue),was not spoken in Europe,but was the language of the Torah, Bible, and other sacred texts. Hebrew was also the established language of the Jewish prayer book known as the Sider (Modern Hebrew:“Siddur”). Yiddish, known also as Mame loshn (Mother tongue),developed from a fusion of Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic brought from the Middle East,which was then combined with what was the most sizeable constituent of Yiddish, medieval urban German dialects, and then, according to some scholars with the Jewish versions of Old French and Old Italian, known as Laaz. Jewish mass migrations across Europe, particularly in the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries, due to persecutions generated by the Crusades and the Black Death, were responsible for the gradual spread of Yiddish across territories as far afield as what are now Holland,Germany,parts of Denmark, Alsace and Switzerland in Western Europe, Italy in the Southwest, Hungary and the Czech Republic in Central Europe, and Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, Poland, and Rumania in the East. In all these places, the spoken language in the Jewish family and community was almost invariably Yiddish, and although Jews were often proficient in the local language for reasons of trade and other necessary communication, they could usually read only in the Hebrew alphabet. 4 Commentary While the Church conveyed its message visually by means of murals , statuary, stained glass, and altarpieces, Jews regarded any depiction of the human form as a“graven image”and did not permit visual art in synagogues. Their religious knowledge came from books, and unlike their Christian neighbors,the Jewish community was highly literate . Girls were taught the Hebrew alphabet, either at elementary school (kheyder) along with boys,or privately at home. For boys from poor families, communities set up non fee-paying elementary schools (Talmud-Toyre) in preparation for further education. Boys were expected to be able to read Hebrew well enough to enable them to use the Hebrew prayer book. Opportunities existed for the most able boys to extend their education beyond the rudimentary level by attending seminaries (yeshives) where they were able to study up to rabbinic level. Such...