after the Hospital Sisters of Montreal, but such rigors has-
tened her own end. Her death enhanced local stories about
her exemplary conduct, and Indian as well as French neigh-
bors made a shrine of her gravesite. Many were inspired by
her extraordinary life, and in 1932 she was nominated for
sainthood. On October 22, 1980, John Paul II pronounced
her blessed, thus acknowledging her as an example of Catho-
lic piety in colonial New France.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Buehrle, Marie E. Kateri of the Mohawks. Milwaukee, 1954.
Fisher, Lillian M. Kateri Tekakwitha: The Lily of the Mohawks.
Boston, 1996.
Lecompte, Edouard. An Iroquois Virgin: Catherine Tekakwitha.
New York, 1932.
Lecompte, Edouard. Glory of the Mohawks: The Life of the Venera-
ble Catharine Tekakwith. Milwaukee, 1944.
HENRY WARNER BOWDEN (1987 AND 2005)
TEKHINES. Tekhines, a Yiddish word from the Hebrew
Teh:innot, “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 vernacu-
lar, tekhines are important sources for the history of popular
Judaism in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth cen-
turies, 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 clas-
sic literary tradition. Only a small number of women, how-
ever, 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 writ-
ten 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 reli-
gious lives.
In books of tekhines each individual prayer begins with
a heading that describes when and sometimes how it should
be recited: “A pretty tekhine to say on the Sabbath with great
devotion”; “A tekhine that the woman should pray for herself
and her husband and children”; “A confession to say with
devotion, not too quickly; it is good for the soul”; “When
she comes out of the ritual bath”; “What one says on the Eve
of Yom Kippur in the cemetery”; “When the shofar is blown
on Rosh Hashanah, say this.” Scholars are divided as to
whether these prayers were meant for women as a substitute
for the Hebrew liturgy or as a supplement, recited as occa-
sional and voluntary prayers. Although some tekhines were
intended to be recited in the synagogue and a few were writ-
ten for male worshippers (“A lovely prayer for good liveli-
hood to be said every day by a business man”), the majority
were associated with women’s spiritual lives in the home:
prayers to be recited privately on each day of the week and
on Sabbaths, festivals, fasts, and new moons; for the three
so-called “women’s commandments” (namely lighting Sab-
bath candles, removing a small portion of bread dough with
a prayer recalling the priestly tithes in the ancient Temple
in Jerusalem, and observing menstrual avoidances and purifi-
cation); for pregnancy and childbirth; for visiting the ceme-
tery; for private grief such as childlessness and widowhood;
for recovery from illness; for sustenance and livelihood; and
for confession of sins. Tekhines framed women’s domestic
lives and roles as sacred, and they also connected them with
the grander themes of Jewish thought, especially the hope for
the messianic redemption and the end of exile.
BACKGROUND. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries new rituals and genres of religious literature emerged
whose audience was a sort of intellectual middle class. This
development parallels the emergence of similar literature in
Christian Europe, enabled in part by the rise of publishing
after the invention of the printing press. Guides to the ethical
life, books of pious practices, and new liturgies and rituals,
often in abridged and simplified form, were published both
in Hebrew, for an audience of men with a basic education
in classical Jewish texts, and in Yiddish, the vernacular, for
women and nonscholarly men. Many of these new publica-
tions (including the Hebrew teh:innot, or supplemental
prayers for men) developed out of and popularized a mystical
pietism that had originated among the sixteenth-century
qabbalists of Safed in Palestine. Tekhines allowed women to
participate in this pietistic revival and its popular literature.
By contrast, however, tekhines published in the eighteenth
and nineteenth century show little evidence of influence
from Hasidism, the great eastern European Jewish religious
revival movement that originated in the mid–eighteenth
century.
HISTORY OF THE GENRE. Although there are some hand-
written tekhines, most of them were professionally printed.
The earliest versions—a few small, anonymous collections—
appeared in the late sixteenth century in Prague. Two main
groups of tekhines exist, however: those that were printed in
western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
which, although published anonymously, were probably
written or compiled by men for women, and those that ap-
peared in eastern Europe in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and
early nineteenth centuries, often with named authors, some
of which were written or compiled by women.Most western European tekhines were published in col-
lections addressing many topics, either in small books or as
appendices to Hebrew prayer books. The first major collec-
tion (containing thirty-six prayers), titled simply Tekhines,9036 TEKHINES