Tkhine


Tkhines or teḥinot may refer to Yiddish prayers and devotions, usually personal and from a female viewpoint, or collections of such prayers. They were written for Ashkenazi Jewish women who, unlike the men of the time, typically could not read Hebrew, the language of the established synagogue prayer book. They were most popular from the 1600s to the early 1800s, with the first major collection of tkhines, the Seyder Tkhines, being printed in 1648. Unlike Hebrew prayers, tkhines dealt with issues specific to women. Despite being for women, it is thought that many tkhines were written by men and the authorship of most tkhines is often difficult to establish, due to multiple publications of the same tkhine and the use of pseudonyms.

History

Women were excluded from much of Jewish religious life and were not required to perform the commandments Jewish law requires of men. Women were not obligated to attend synagogue services and their presence did not count towards the minyan required for public prayer, thus Jewish prayer, being of a communal nature, excluded women. During the service, women had to sit in a designated section that was often physically separate from the men and were not permitted to take an active role in the service at all. Where men are required to pray three times a day during specific times, women are required solely to pray once a day, with no further specifications.
However, the biggest disparity between men's and women's religious roles under Jewish law was unequal access to education. Most girls learned only the basics of the Hebrew alphabet, allowing them to read Yiddish but not to understand Hebrew, the language of Jewish prayer and traditional Jewish texts. Boys, on the other hand, were ideally expected to read and understand Hebrew fluently, although many of them did not. Additionally, only men were able to attend higher level institutions called yeshivas that allowed them to study Jewish religious literature in a scholarly setting. Women had access to this formal education only if they were born into wealthy or scholarly families. Most women therefore only spoke the Jewish vernacular of Yiddish and were not able to access much of religious literature nor understand those prayers that were available to them. Thus, women would often recite a prayer without understanding it. This lack of kavone, or spiritual depth and sincerity, concerned some rabbis in the sixteenth century, who then took it upon themselves to translate some Hebrew prayers and the Bible into Yiddish for the benefit of women and "uneducated men." The first of these Yiddish prayers was printed in 1590 in Prague as a small pamphlet containing five prayers that were also printed in Hebrew. From this expansion of religious literature into the Yiddish language, other Yiddish prayers began to be published in collections, and both the prayers themselves and the collections which contained them came to be called tkhines.

The ''Seyder Tkhines''

The earliest known and most widespread collection of tkhines are the Seyder Tkhines, which first appeared in print in Amsterdam in 1648. This collection, printed in Yiddish, provided women with a standard book of prayer that they could actually read and was prolifically printed and widely circulated across Europe. Based on the traditional Jewish prayer book, the Seyder Tkhines was composed in the voice of a female worshiper and contained prayers for daily and festival observances and women's religious obligations that were not provided by the standard synagogue prayer book. These prayers were divided into five sections of tkhines. The daily prayers existed as a way for women to fulfil their religious obligation to pray once a day and as an alternative to the weekly synagogue service. Two tkhines were to be said every day, one that was to be repeated each day of the week and another that was specific to each day of the week. During the 18th century, an expanded and revised version of the Seyder Tkhines was printed, entitled Seyder Tkhines u-bakoshes. This version added tkhines for domestic chores and personal subjects, such as asking for the safe return of a husband from a journey.

Modern History

By the middle of the 19th century, tkhines began to be integrated into Hasidic prayer books. Collections of tkhines also began to be published by central and western European Jewish communities in French, German, and English language editions: Prières D'un Cœur Israélite, Prayers and Meditations for Every Situation and Occasion of Life, and Stunden der Andacht. By the end of the 19th century, Reform movement prayer books in Germany and the United States began integrating these supplemental prayers and meditations into their prayer books for egalitarian use.
The rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the concurrent dwindling use of Yiddish by Jewry in the United States led to a decline in the publication of tkhines and their popularity, as the Nazi party murdered their authors and readers in Europe and the demand for Yiddish literature declined in America with the assimilation of Yiddish-speaking immigrants. However, tkhines continue to be published in America and are still popular within Hasidic sects, many of whom still retain Yiddish as their vernacular, and the Orthodox movement in America as a whole, although the latter use bilingual collections, as most are not fluent in Yiddish and must read in English.

Content

In contrast to Hebrew prayers and devotions, tkhines were written specifically for women. Tkhines are also distinct because they were personal and meant to be an individual experience, as opposed to the communal experience of Hebrew prayer. They often addressed women's home life, issues related to marriage and childbirth, and her religious responsibilities, including a woman's mitzvot, which pertain to the preparation of challah, niddah, and hadlakah.
Being written in the vernacular as opposed to the holy language of Hebrew, authors were more open to talking freely, and often spoke directly to God as a friend using the familiar form of 'you', something unheard of in the official and impersonal Hebrew liturgy. Authors also referenced Hebrew scripture and Aramaic texts, often naming Biblical characters, usually the matriarchs, and including stories from the Talmud or Midrash.

Example: A Pregnant Woman's Prayer

Authors

Although tkhines were almost always from a woman's point of view, many were written by men. Male authors would often write under a female pseudonym or the name of another popular female tkhine author, mainly for commercial benefit, making the true authorship of many tkhines unknown. In addition to this, many authors chose to sign off anonymously, using phrases such as "isha tsnue" or "groyse tsdeykes", and most tkhines didn't include an author's name at all. However, women were not only writers, but were also involved in both the creative and practical processes of publishing, working as printers, translators, editors, adaptors of existing literary works, copyists and even typesetters.
Due to a lack of rules and regulations as far as whose name was included on the final work, the author of the original tkhine may be left off in favor of the editor, printer, copyist, or typesetter, who would instead attach their own name to the work. Additionally, during the height of tkhine popularity, tkhines were reprinted multiple times to be included into different collections. Many times, the original name attached to the tkhine was either left off or reattributed to either the adaptor or the compiler of the collection, or someone else entirely. Thus, many tkhines are attributed to different authors depending on the collection.
Some authors indicated ownership through the tkhine itself by including an acrostic, where the first letter of each line or verse would spell out the author's name.
Many female tkhine authors were daughters of rabbis, as they were often the only women who had access to religious education, including the most well-known tkhine author, Sarah Bas Tovim, and two other known authors, Leah Horowitz and Leah Dreyzl.

List of Books of Translated Tkhines