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. Due to the religious requirement to separate men and women during prayer services, women sat in a designated section that was often physically separate from the men and were not permitted to take an active role in the service. 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. The rationale for this difference is that men are obligated to fulfill time-bound commandments such as praying at certain times whereas women are exempt from time-bound commandments in general. However, the biggest disparity between men's and women's religious roles under Jewish law was unequal access to education. Girls were often educated at home, while boys went to school. Nevertheless, there was a high level of literacy within the Jewish community for millennia. Girls learned the basic Hebrew reading but were often more fluent in Yiddish than in 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. 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. Tkhines are supplicatory prayers, written in Yiddish, that illuminate the lives of Jewish women and reflect what they might have been thinking as they performed religious duties and household tasks. There are two main categories of tkhines: those found in Western Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, and those found in Easter Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Tkhines found in Western Europe were written by men for women, while those from Eastern Europe were mostly reworked by women.
The Seyder Tkhines The earliest known and most widespread collection of
tkhines are the
Seyder Tkhines (
Sequence of Supplications), 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 ("nusach sefard") 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; Jonas Ennery and Rabbi Arnaud Aron, Strasbourg: 1848), Prayers and Meditations for Every Situation and Occasion of Life
(English translation by Hester Rothschild, 1855), and Stunden der Andacht'' (
Fanny Neuda, 1855). 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 ==