The Women’s Prayers of 18th-Century Jewry, and the Women Who Wrote Them

In the 16th century, collections of extracanonical prayers—sometimes in Hebrew, but more often in Yiddish—began to appear in print and rapidly gained popularity among European Jews. Some of these tkhines (from Hebrew, t’ḥinot, supplications) served as supplements to the standard liturgy; others were made to accompany various rituals and calendar dates. Overwhelmingly, most of these were specifically intended to be said by women. While male rabbis wrote t’khines for women, women themselves composed a large number of them. Leah Sarna describes the work of the 18th-century writer Leah Horovitz, the most distinguished and learned of these authors—who, Sarna discovered, was also a distant relation: