The Tsenerene and the Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln: Excerpt from Adam Kirsch's New 'The People and the Books'
The Zohar built its theology on the idea that God was feminine as well as masculine. Yet its own readership—like that of most classic Jewish texts—remained strictly limited to men. Indeed, only married men past the age of forty were supposed to be initiated into the Zohar’s mysteries, since they would presumably be pious and settled enough not to be shocked into heresy by its secrets. In any case, to read the Zohar or to study the Talmud—the text at the heart of traditional Jewish education—required a knowledge of Aramaic, which only some men and almost no women possessed. Even Hebrew, the language of the Bible, was not part of a Jewish woman’s education. Women played a central role in the practice of Judaism, since they were responsible for observing all the laws of the home, from keeping the sabbath to cooking kosher food to obeying the rules of niddah, sexual purity related to the menstrual cycle. But how could they participate in Judaism’s textual heritage, which did so much to define men’s experience of their religion?
For Jewish women living in Germany and eastern Europe, the answer had to involve Yiddish. Yiddish emerged along with the earliest Jewish settlement in western Germany and eastern France, around the tenth century CE, fusing German with Hebrew to create a new, distinctively Jewish language. As Ashkenazi Jews—whose name comes from the traditional Hebrew name for Germany, Ashkenaz—migrated to eastern Europe, they took Yiddish with them. Hebrew remained the Jews’ holy tongue, which boys learned at school so they could read the Bible, and it remained the language of international scholarly discourse. But Yiddish was the mama-loshn, the mother tongue, which all Jews learned growing up and in which the business of ordinary life was conducted. This meant that if a text was to reach women—and a large proportion of men, too, who were not educated enough to read Hebrew on their own—it had to be written in Yiddish.