For my undergraduate senior thesis in Book Studies, I took a multidisciplinary deep dive into a well-known but under-researched genre of Yiddish-language women’s prayers known as tkhines. In a two-part project that involved scholarly work based on archival research and a creative letterpress project in response, I aimed to recenter materiality as the primary lens through which to view these important texts in Jewish women’s history. My work argues that the tangible, physical artifacts of the tkhine pamphlets offer just as much as the texts they contain.
Tkhines date to at least the sixteenth century and have been written almost continuously ever since. They represent an organic, even folksy realm of women’s spirituality, and have often faced derision from authors, publishers, and readers. Their language, subject matter, and format all contribute to their perception as distinctly feminine prayers and objects. Tkhines are primarily a Yiddish-language genre, which separates them from the Hebrew-language rituals of educated Jewish men and is part of what cements them as books specifically intended for women. Additionally, unlike the prayer books intended to be used by men in synagogue, tkhines were almost always printed cheaply and in small formats, to be easily used in the home and carried in daily life. Their texts are often meant to be recited on intimate occasions like childbirth, during pre-existing rituals meant specifically for women, or during ritual meals and cleanings.
My research rests at the intersection of book history, feminist bibliography, and studies of Jewish book culture — intertwined fields with their own unique histories and methodologies. The work of feminist bibliographer Sarah Werner was particularly important to structuring my research; rather than simply trying to fit women readers into preconceived notions of Jewish book history, I wanted to entirely reconceptualize what bibliographic work looks like and does. As Werner puts it, I wanted to “ask feminist questions about what we choose to study and the systems that get books from their origins to our hands today” (Werner, “Notes on Feminist Bibliography – Wynken de Worde,” n.p.).
This feminist approach to book history naturally centers long-term processes and instances of marginalization. Tkhines are a perfect example of the “less visible book[s] that gain meaning through social circulation,” which Werner invites us to focus on (Werner, “Working towards a Feminist Printing History,” 5). Low-cost, ephemeral, and often anonymously written, their value in Jewish life comes not from beautiful decoration, famous authors, or institutional support, but from repeated use, from the invocation of emotional prayer by women all over Europe and, indeed, the world. Studying tkhines is not feminist practice just because they were used by women or even because I, myself, am a woman but because studying tkhines means tracking common, everyday moves in the printed world and thus radically reenvisions what it has historically meant to be a bibliographer.
Using this approach, I conducted an in-depth examination of two particular copies of one text: Tkhine Shloshe She’arim or “Tkhine of the Three Gates,” written by a Ukrainian Jewish woman named Sarah Bas Tovim in the late eighteenth century. The two editions I examined were undated but likely from the early to mid-nineteenth century and are currently held in the Special Collections at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. In many ways, these pamphlets are representative of all tkhines published in this period and shortly thereafter: they engage specifically and exclusively with “women’s rituals,” their texts are highly varied even though they clearly come from the same source, and they are printed in a hand-sized octavo format on low-quality paper, with cramped and smudged type.
What I was able to learn through hands-on archival research would have been impossible with any other methodology. Feeling the paper between my fingers and letting the spine open in my hands brought me as close as I will ever be to the women who first prayed from these books and gave me an unparalleled insight into the text’s ability to impact the reader. Indeed, it was exactly that hands-on experience that became the driving force behind my responsive letterpress project, which aimed to bring Sarah’s tkhine into the 21st century, focusing on the interactions between womanhood and Judaism within the context of contemporary artists’ books. That letterpress project is the subject of my next blog post.
Nora Cornell is a recent graduate of Wellesley College, where she created the Book Studies major. Her poems can be seen in The Blue Nib, Furrow Magazine, and Prairie Home Magazine, and her artist books are held by Wellesley College, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Yiddish Book Center, and elsewhere.
