Tekhines
TEKHINES. Tekhines, a Yiddish word from the Hebrew Teḥinnot, "supplications," are Jewish private devotions and paraliturgical prayers in Yiddish written by both women and men but recited primarily by women. As texts in the vernacular, tekhines are important sources for the history of popular Judaism in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and they are particularly useful in studying the history of women's religion.
Most Jewish men of the period attained basic literacy in Hebrew, and a few elite went on to full mastery of the classic literary tradition. Only a small number of women, however, learned more than the rudiments of Hebrew, and those central and eastern European Jewish women who could read usually were literate only in the vernacular Yiddish. Jewish liturgy and other devotional and scholarly works were written by men and were almost always in Hebrew, making them inaccessible to most women. Furthermore because women were excluded from most areas of public religious leadership and participation (they could not serve as rabbis, cantors, judges, or advanced teachers and did not count in a quorum for public prayer), they left behind a scant literary legacy. Tekhines therefore, as an enormously popular devotional genre, allows scholars a valuable window into women's religious lives.
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