was published in Amsterdam in 1648; reprints, expansions,
and additional collections followed. In the mid–eighteenth
century a comprehensive collection containing 123 prayers
emerged, titled Seyder tkhines u-vakoshes (Order of supplica-
tions and petitions, 1762), although there may be one or two
earlier editions. This tekhine was reprinted many times, with
alterations, over the next 150 years, first in western and later
in eastern Europe. The western European texts not only de-
pict the holiness to be found in the domestic and mundane
activities of a wife and mother, but they also describe for
women the angels, the patriarchs, the heroes of Jewish histo-
ry, and the ancient Temple that stood in Jerusalem.
The earliest eastern European tekhines were published
in Prague. Eyn Gor Sheyne Tkhine (A very beautiful tekhine,
c. 1600) is one of the first to claim female authorship: it is
attributed to “a group of pious women.” Two other Prague
imprints, one from the beginning of the eighteenth century
and the other from 1705, are also attributed to women: Ra-
chel, daughter of Mordecai Sofer of Pinczow, and Beila,
daughter of Ber Horowitz. Like many other eastern Europe-
an texts, all three of these Prague tekhines were quite short,
and each of them dealt with a single subject, such as a tekhine
“to be recited with devotion every day.” One notable work,
however, Seyder Tkhines (Prague, 1718), was written by a
man—Matthias ben Meir, the former rabbi of Sobota, Slova-
kia—explicitly for a female audience. “My dear women,” he
writes, “... I have made this tekhine for you in Yiddish,
in order to honor God and... to honor all the pious
women. For there are many women who would gladly awak-
en their hearts by saying many tkhines.” This work contains
thirty-five prayers addressing a variety of topics.
Except for the Prague imprints, the eastern European
tekhines were usually small pamphlets printed on bad paper
with crabbed type, often with no imprint, making their bibli-
ographic history difficult to trace. Books of tekhines originat-
ing in eighteenth-century eastern Europe, especially in Gali-
cia, Volhynia, and Podolia (now parts of Poland, Belarus,
and the Ukraine), tended to deal with a smaller number of
subjects (such as the high holidays and the penitential sea-
son), were often written by a single author, and were usually
fewer than twenty pages. Because a significant number of
these authors were women, these texts capture women’s
voices directly. Important examples include: Tkhine imohes
(Tekhine of the [biblical] matriarchs), for the Sabbath before
the new moon, by Leah Horowitz (eighteenth century),
which argues for the power of women’s prayer and quotes
from rabbinic and qabbalistic sources; Tkhine imohes fun rosh
khoydesh elul (Tekhine of the matriarchs for the new moon
of Elul [and the entire penitential season], n.d.) by Serl,
daughter of Jacob ben Wolf Kranz (the famed Preacher of
Dubno, 1741–1804), which calls on the four biblical matri-
archs (Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah) to come to the aid
of the worshipper and plead her case before the heavenly
court; and Shloyshe sheorim (The three gates), attributed to
the legendary Sarah bas Tovim (who probably lived in Podo-
lia in the eighteenth century), which contains three sections:
one for the three “women’s commandments,” one for the
high holidays, and one for the Sabbath before the new moon.
In contrast to the western European texts, some eastern Eu-
ropean tekhines suggest that women should take part—in
some fashion—in such traditionally male activities as syna-
gogue prayer and Torah study.By the mid–nineteenth century the genre had under-
gone significant changes. Jews in central and western Europe
had largely abandoned Yiddish; books comparable to tek-
hines were published first in Germanized Yiddish, then in
German in Yiddish characters, and finally in German. These
texts expressed an entirely new sensibility, however, influ-
enced by the rising ideal of the bourgeois family, with its
stress on sentiment and emotional family ties and its new
definition of gender roles. Similarly in eastern Europe the
ideal of the bourgeois family came into play but in a rather
different fashion. Maskilim, “enlighteners,” or men who
wished to reform eastern European Jewish life, wrote tek-
hines to reach the “benighted” traditional women with their
reform program. Unlike earlier tekhine authors, female or
male, they scorned their audience and the genre. Often be-
cause they thought they could sell more books, they attribut-
ed their works to female authors, either those who had actu-
ally written tekhines a century earlier or to creations of their
own imagination. (Because the maskilic practice of using fe-
male pseudonyms was well known, earlier scholars were
skeptical of any attributions to female authorship. Many sev-
enteenth- and eighteenth-century women authors have been
authenticated, however.) In addition to these newer maskilic
tekhines, older texts and collections—both those that were
originally published in western Europe and those printed in
eastern Europe—continued to be reprinted in eastern Eu-
rope in numerous editions, although they are often revised
or garbled by the printers.
SIGNIFICANCE. The tekhines reveal a whole world of
women’s religious lives, concerns, customs, and settings for
prayer. These texts are deeply spiritual, no less than the com-
plex and esoteric works produced by qabbalists and Hasidic
masters. The women (and men) who composed these prayers
for women addressed the spiritual issues of their day, whether
on the level of domestic piety or national redemption. The
tekhines themselves are at home in the literature produced
for the intellectual middle class of this period; they fit well
among the guides to the upright life, books of customs, con-
densed guides to pious practices, and digests of mystical
teachings that were read by householders and artisans. In-
deed the tekhines show how much women belonged to this
intellectual and spiritual world. Finally, the tekhines provide
worshipers with a direct experience of passionately emotional
individual prayer that is mostly absent from the more collec-
tive and formalized male worship experience.
MODERN DEVELOPMENTS. As the use of Yiddish declined
among emigrants from eastern Europe in the late nineteenth
century and the twentieth century and the Yiddish-speakingTEKHINES 9037