The Paratexts of Para-Liturgy: A Selection of Found Tkhine Poems

Tkhines were devotional Yiddish prayers printed in Early Modern Europe, with the first known tkhines appearing in the late sixteenth century. ^{1 1} Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs (Boston: Beacon Press,1999), ix. While some tkhines were composed for men, and some were to be said in synagogue, most tkhines reflected the concerns of women’s spiritual lives in a variety of contexts. Written in Yiddish, tkhines were accessible for Ashkenazi Jewish women who otherwise often had little to no education in Hebrew or Aramaic. The themes of tkhines ranged widely, addressing such matters as family life, religious rituals, and lifecycle events. ^{2 2} Chava Weissler, “Tkhines,” Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. 20 March 2009. Jewish Women’s Archive. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/tkhines. The two major groups of tkhines were Western European tkhines, published in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in collections of between 35 and 120 prayers, covering a range of occasions. ^{3 3} Weissler, “Tkhines,” Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/tkhines. These would generally appear as “small books, or as appendices to Hebrew prayer books, often prayerbooks with Yiddish translation,” and were most likely composed or collected by men for women. ^{4 4} Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 8. Eastern European tkhines, published from the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries, appeared as cheap, small pamphlets with small type, often under twenty pages, and some were rewritten or reworked by women. ^{5 5} Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, 8. Tkhines served an important role in European Jewish women’s piety in the Early Modern period, and they continued to be printed into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These later printings were at times supplemented by new additions, responding to the needs and challenges of the times. The various incarnations of tkhines in the early twentieth century, as Judy Tydor Baumel-Schwartz has written, are meaningful sources for tracking the changing spiritual frameworks of Jewish women in modernity. ^{6 6} Judy Tydor Baumel-Schwartz, “My Grandmother’s Tkhine: Immigrant Jewish Women’s Lives, Identities and Prayers in Early Twentieth-Century America,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues no. 31 (Spring-Fall 2017): 146–68. https://doi.org/10.2979/nashim.31.1.07. Today, tkhines translated into modern vernaculars continue to be printed in collections such as Aneni, for recitation as personal, petitionary prayers by women in religious communities.

The genre of tkhines was largely overlooked in early- to mid-twentieth-century scholarship besides two brief periods of interest: Yiddish literary historians (Sh. Charney and Max Weinreich among them) in the early twentieth century included tkhines as representatives of earlier Yiddish literary traditions, while some Reform thinkers looked to tkhines as examples of prayer in the vernacular. ^{7 7} Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs, x-xi. The feminist turn in Jewish studies led to a surge of scholarship in the late twentieth century, including Chava Weissler’s groundbreaking study, Voices of the Matriarchs. ^{8 8} Chava Weissler, “Prayers in Yiddish and the Religious World of Ashkenazic Women,” in Judith R. Baskin (ed.), Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (Detroit: Wayne State, 1991),159–181; Weissler, “Traditional Piety of Ashkenazic Women,” in Jewish Spirituality from the Sixteenth Century to the Present, edited by Arthur Green (New York:Crossroads, 1987), pp. 245–275; Agnes Romer Segal, “Yiddish Works on Women’s Commandments in the Sixteenth Century,” in Studies in Yiddish Literature and Folklore (Monograph Series, 7; Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1986); Shulamith Z. Berger, “Tehines: A Brief Summary of Women’s Prayers,” in Daughters of the King: Women and the Synagogue, edited by Susan Grossman and Rivka Haut (Philadelphia: JPS, 1992), pp. 73–83; S. Freehof, “Devotional Literature in the Vernacular,” Central Conference of American Rabbis Yearbook, 33 (1923), pp. 375–423; Jennnifer Breger, “Women’s Devotional Literature: An Essay in Jewish Bibliography,” Jewish Book Annual, 52 (1994–1995), pp. 73–98. Weissler’s book on the topic systematically analyzes tkhines, assessing them in terms of their scope, geography, and printing history, and theorizing their place in women’s piety. While most tkhines were composed by men, Weissler pays particular attention to the potential mystical and theological references in the tkhines of several identifiable woman authors such as Sore bas Toyvim, Seril Rapapport and Leah Horowitz. ^{9 9} In addition to Weissler’s discussion, see also Moshe Rosman, “Leah Horowitz’s Tkhine Imohos: A Proto-Feminist Demand to Increase Jewish Women’s Religious Capital,” Polin Studies in Polish Jewry 33 (2021): 17-50; Leah Sarna, “I Will Not Speak to Dullards,” Jewish Review of Books, Spring 2022. https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-history/12275/i-will-not-speak-to-dullards/#.

In the last few decades, as Weissler writes in her entry for the Jewish Women’s Archive, tkhines have become both a subject of scholarship, and a source for a “usable past” by community leaders, artists and others. ^{10 10} Weissler, “Tkhines.” Dozens of tkhines were translated by Tracy Guren Klirs, et al. in The Merit of Our Mothers: A Bilingual Anthology of Jewish Women’s Prayers (some of which are viewable on the Open Siddur Project). ^{11 11}The Merit of Our Mothers: A Bilingual Anthology of Jewish Women’s Prayers, trans. Tracy Guren Klirs, Ida Cohen Selavan, and Gella Schweid Fishman (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1992). Devra Kay’s book, with its full (and versified) translation of the Seyder Tkhines, a popular seventeenth century collection first printed in Amsterdam, and extensive supplementary essays and materials, is a significant contribution to scholarship on the genre. ^{12 12}Seyder Tkhines, trans. Devra Kay (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2004). Annabel Cohen’s Pulling at Threads documents the texts and practices of Jewish women who played ritual roles in Eastern Europe, including klogerins (professional mourners), feldmesterins (cemetery measurers) and zogerkes (preachers), and Cohen has also led rituals involving tkhines. Noam Lerman’s Der Tkhines Proyekt hosts ritual workshops, provides a wealth of resources for engaging with tkhines as spontaneous vernacular prayer, and sets old and new tkhines to music (with a number of beautiful new releases several months ago). The last few years have also seen non-fiction narratives (such as Jacob Romm’s blog piece in this publication) and academic research on tkhines as a literary genre (recent examples include Kathryn Hellerstein’s chapter in A Question of Tradition, ^{13 13} Kathryn Hellerstein, “Old Poems in a Modern Anthology,” in A Question of Tradition (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), 43-102. and Hannah Black Wickham’s talks at Farbindungen ‘23 and ‘24).

The project below participates and is inspired by this recent revival—both creative and scholarly—around tkhines. ^{14 14} Sarah Biskowitz, “The Past and Future of Yiddish Spirituality,” Gashmius 2 (August 2023).https://www.gashmiusmagazine.c.... As Kay wrote in her introduction, tkhine literature “speaks out to a modern readership from the remoteness of a past that often proves to be startlingly unexpected.” ^{15 15} Kay, 10. My own research in this area began several years ago, spurred by two courses, one on the Hebrew Book with Professor David Stern, and another on Old Yiddish with Professor Marion Aptroot. As I tracked the reception of zogerkes—often depicted in the act of saying tkhines—in the American Yiddish press, my attention was caught by the associations with so-called “tkhine-loshn,” or tkhine-language. The female reciters were depicted as highly emotional, babbling and lachrymose; the literary quality of these texts, in turn, was presented as largely repetitive, unsophisticated, one-note. Little documentation is available about the experiences of Jewish women reciting tkhines before the nineteenth century by the women themselves. Kay, in her essays on Seyder Tkhines, characterizes the qualities of “woman of the tkhines” narrated within the text; I wondered about the actual experiences of the women reciting tkhines in the Early Modern period, how they might have interacted with tkhines as voices and as bodies; how these generations of anonymous, lost readers might have prayed aloud. ^{16 16} Kay, 60-67. On Jewish women’s reading habits more generally, see: Jean Baumgarten, “Listening, reading and understanding: how Jewish women read the Yiddish ethical literature (seventeenth to eighteenth century),” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 16(2), 2017, 255–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/147258... Regarding melody in Old Yiddish literary genres, see for example Oren Cohen Roman’s “The Catalog of Thirty-One Kings” in this same issue, as well as his “Be-nign Shmuel-bukh: On the Melody or Melodies Mentioned in Old-Yiddish Epics,” Aschkenas: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der Juden 25, no. 1 (2015): 145–60.

I was curious to explore this gap through translation and creative writing, and in the spring of 2023, I had the privilege of participating in the Mus|ar|t Residency to engage with these questions. The residency invited artists to work with musar, moralistic Jewish texts from the early modern period. Within the framework of this project, I turned to paratexts and marginalia as entry points for thinking about tkhines as objects and artifacts that were searched in, treasured, paged through, and held by their readers. The writings of Shlomo Berger z”l were immensely helpful to this end. ^{17 17} Shlomo Berger, “An Invitation to Buy and Read: Paratexts of Yiddish Books in Amsterdam, 1650-1800.” Book History, vol. 7, 2004, 31–61; “Functioning Within a Diasporic Third Space: The Case of Early Modern Yiddish,” Jewish Studies Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 1, 2008, 68–86; “Books for the Masses: The Amsterdam Yiddish Book Industry, 1650–1800,” European Judaism, 42(2), 2009, 24-33; “Reading Yiddish and Lernen: Being a Pious Ashkenazi in Amsterdam, 1650–1800,” in The Religious Cultures of Dutch Jewry, edited by Yosef Kaplan and Dan Michman (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2017), 124-140. A slim, remarkable volume named Producing Redemption in Amsterdam: Early Modern Yiddish Books in Paratextual Perspective, became an indispensable guide to classifying, analyzing and contextualizing early modern Yiddish paratexts. I found myself asking: what happened when—instead of looking only at the text, which may indeed repeat, from one edition to the next—every single edition would be regarded as its own singular event, from publication to sale, to actual use and final afterlives (in the archive, or in a genizah)? ^{18 18} Shlomo Berger, Producing Redemption in Amsterdam: Early Modern Yiddish Books in Paratextual Perspective (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2013). https://doi-org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/10.1163/9789004248069. This book also contains a short discussion of tkhines, pp.48-50. Thank you to Silke Schaeper for suggesting this book. Scrolling through hundreds of digitized tkhines on the National Library of Israel website, I found that attending to the paratextual details—the many varieties of type, the different publisher names, the spirited prefaces—enlivened these otherwise seemingly similar texts. On a whirlwind visit to the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, I handled hefty seyder tkhines editions, looking closely at the wear and tear on each specimen, delighting at notes—oftentimes, names of family members or owner attributions—in the inside covers. Marveling at these marks of hands and pens, I widened my search parameters in the hopes of finding manuscripts as well. This search proved rewarding, yielding manuscripts of tkhines that ranged from a women’s chevra kadisha to a richly colored, illuminated and evidently upper-class tkhine collection. ^{19 19} While this project was focused on printed tkhines, I hope to study these manuscript tkhines in greater length too, as singular cases that raise questions about class and literacy in the study of tkhines.

The artistic work that evolved from this research was deeply inspired by creative encounters with archives. Peter Cole’s Things on Which I’ve Stumbled, a collection drawn from Cole’s experiences with literature from the Cairo Genizah, has long been an influence. ^{20 20} Peter Cole, Things on Which I’ve Stumbled. (New York: New Directions, 2008). In wishing to enliven tkhine-loshn and the archive of tkhines from within, much of my work took the form of found poetry. This type of poetry uses words from other original sources, recombining, rearranging and collaging them in order to create new pieces. With Charles Reznikoff’s use of documentary materials in Testimony: The United States (1885–1915) in mind, I wrote a found poem using lines from Herbert Zafren’s scholarly articles on Yiddish type. ^{21 21} Herbert C. Zafren, “Variety in the Typography of Yiddish: 1535-1635,” Hebrew Union College Annual 53 (1982): 137–63; Herbert C. Zafren, “Three Pseudo-Lublin Yiddish Books from 1624,” Hebrew Union College Annual 70/71 (1999-2000): 385-403. Another poem was composed solely of multiple handwritten signatures, as Royze, the owner of a tkhine collection, tried out different variations of her title, some playful, some professional. In trying to translate some of the vim and vigor of publisher’s invitations for readers to buy tkhines, I created “tradaptations” (to use a borrowed term) of sorts, privileging rhyme and style over precision. ^{22 22} Marianne Windsperger, “Between Translation and Tradaptation: An Interview with Daniel Kahn, Berlin, January 2017,” In geveb (December 2019). https://ingeveb.org/blog/betwe.... ^{23 23} The function of the title pages’ “appeal to buy” is discussed in Berger, 29-36. A selection of the poems and translations that evolved from these observations—on typography, publishers’ introductions, signatures—as well as further details on my process, can be found on the Musart project website.