The Tsene-Rene, the Yiddish Women’s Bible

The Tsene-rene is a Yiddish work on the Pentateuch, the weekly readings from the Prophets and the Five Scrolls, composed in the late sixteenth century by Yankev ben Yitskhok Ashkenazi of Janów, a town in the kingdom of Poland. Its title is taken from a phrase in the Song of Songs, “Go forth and behold, O daughters of Zion”, and the book came to be known, with some justice and some exaggeration, as the women’s Bible. For more than three centuries it was read on Sabbath afternoons in Jewish homes from Amsterdam to the Ukraine, it was reprinted in more than two hundred editions, and it shaped the knowledge of the Bible held by generations of Ashkenazi Jews who did not read Hebrew with ease. It was not a translation in the strict sense but an adaptation, in which selected verses were rendered and then explained by means of midrash, rabbinic commentary and moral teaching. This article describes the background from which the work emerged, its author and its method, the history of its printing and its readership, and the place it occupies in the history of the Bible among the Jews of Europe.¹²

Background

Hebrew, Yiddish and the Ashkenazi Household

The Jews of medieval Germany and, later, of Poland and Lithuania lived with two languages of different standing. Hebrew, together with the Aramaic of the Talmud and the Targum, was the language of scripture, prayer, law and learned writing. Yiddish, which developed from the German dialects spoken by Jews in the Rhineland and elsewhere, with a substantial component of Hebrew and Aramaic and, in the east, of Slavonic, was the language of daily life. Scholars have described the relationship between them as one of internal bilingualism, in which each language had its own domain and in which the boundary between the domains was clearly felt by speakers.³⁴

The boundary did not coincide exactly with the boundary between men and women, but it followed it to a considerable degree. Boys were sent to the elementary school, the kheyder, where they learned to read the Hebrew of the prayer book and the Pentateuch, and the more able among them went on to study the Talmud. Girls did not normally receive the same instruction. Many learned to read the Hebrew alphabet and to recite the prayers, and some acquired more, but the ability to follow a Hebrew text with understanding was much less common among women than among men. The same was true of men who left school early to work. A large part of the Jewish population could therefore pronounce the words of scripture without understanding them, and needed a vernacular aid if the Bible was to be more to them than a sacred sound.⁵⁶

The Oral Tradition of Translation

The answer to this need was, in the first place, oral. In the schools, the teacher rendered the Hebrew of the Pentateuch into Yiddish word by word, following the order of the Hebrew and using a stock of fixed equivalents that was passed from one generation of teachers to the next. The method is the Ashkenazi counterpart of the Spanish tradition of word-for-word translation from which the Ferrara Bible of 1553 later emerged, and it produced a distinctive form of the language, sometimes called the language of the taytsh, which was preserved in the schoolroom long after its forms had disappeared from ordinary speech.⁷⁸

The word taytsh, which originally meant German, came in Yiddish to mean a translation or explanation. To “taytsh” a verse was to expound it in the vernacular, and the glossaries and translations that recorded the schoolroom equivalents were known by names built from this word. These glossaries, some of which survive in manuscript from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, are among the earliest substantial records of the Yiddish language. They show that the oral tradition was already well established in the Middle Ages, and that it was transmitted with considerable consistency over a wide area.⁹¹⁰

The First Printed Yiddish Bible Books

The introduction of printing changed the scale on which such material could be circulated. In 1534 a Hebrew–Yiddish concordance and glossary to the Bible, known as Mirkeves ha-mishne and attributed to a certain Asher Anshel, was printed at Kraków. It was intended to help readers find the Yiddish equivalent of a Hebrew word in scripture, and it reflects the vocabulary of the schoolroom tradition. In the following decade a number of biblical works in Yiddish were printed in southern Germany and in Italy. At Augsburg there appeared the Melokhim-bukh, a verse paraphrase of the books of Kings, and the Shmuel-bukh, a verse epic on the books of Samuel, composed in a stanza form related to that of German heroic poetry and intended to be sung. At Konstanz a Yiddish translation of the Pentateuch was printed in 1544.¹¹¹²¹³

The Yiddish literature of the sixteenth century was not confined to scripture. It included romances of chivalry, of which the best known is the Bovo-bukh of Elye Bokher, the grammarian known in Hebrew scholarship as Elias Levita, as well as books of customs, moral instruction, prayer and medicine. The readers of these works were drawn from the same population as the readers of biblical paraphrases, and the publishers who served them were well aware that books in Yiddish were addressed in particular, though never exclusively, to women. Title pages frequently describe a book as intended for “women and girls” or for “men and women who are like women”, that is, for men without learning.¹⁴¹⁵¹⁶

Complete printed translations of the Bible into Yiddish appeared only later. In 1678 and 1679 two rival versions were printed at Amsterdam, one by Jekuthiel Blitz and the other by Josel Witzenhausen. Both were the subject of controversy and neither achieved lasting popularity. The book that did become the principal means by which the Bible reached the Yiddish-speaking public was not a translation at all, but the Tsene-rene.¹⁷¹⁸

The Author

Yankev ben Yitskhok Ashkenazi of Janów

Very little is known about the author. He was Yankev ben Yitskhok Ashkenazi, of Janów, a small town in the region of Lublin, and he was active as a preacher and writer in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He belonged to the class of itinerant or communal preachers who addressed general congregations in Yiddish, and his writings reflect the methods of the sermon rather than those of the academy. He seems not to have held a rabbinical office of any importance, and no letters or documents of his own survive apart from his published works.¹⁹

In addition to the Tsene-rene, he composed several other books in Yiddish. Among them is a work of sermons on the weekly readings, published under the title Meylits yosher, and a Yiddish paraphrase of the Former and Latter Prophets and the Hagiographa, known as Sefer ha-magid, which was intended to complement the Tsene-rene by covering the books of the Bible that it did not treat. A prayer book with Yiddish instructions is also associated with his name. The Sefer ha-magid was reprinted several times but never reached the popularity of the work on the Pentateuch, a difference that reflects the fact that the Pentateuch, together with the haftarot and the Scrolls, formed the part of scripture that every Jew heard read in the synagogue in the course of the year.²⁰²¹

The Title and Its Meaning

The full title of the work, as it appears on the earliest surviving edition, describes it as the Pentateuch in the language of Ashkenaz, with the Five Scrolls and the haftarot. The phrase from which it takes its popular name follows: tse’enah u-re’enah benot Tsiyon, “Go forth and behold, O daughters of Zion”, from the third chapter of the Song of Songs. The phrase was well chosen. It contained an invitation to the daughters of Zion, and so pointed to an audience of women, and it was itself a verse of scripture, as befitted a book on the Bible. In Yiddish pronunciation the two Hebrew words became Tsene-rene, and the book has been known by this name ever since.²²

The description on the title page has given rise to a misunderstanding that persists in popular accounts. Because it speaks of the Pentateuch in the language of Ashkenaz, readers have often supposed that the Tsene-rene is a translation of the Pentateuch into Yiddish. It is not. As Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky have emphasised, it is an adaptation, whose character varies from one section of the book to another, and in which translation forms only one element among several.²³

Method and Sources

The Pentateuch

The part of the work devoted to the Pentateuch is arranged according to the weekly readings of the synagogue. For each reading the author selects a number of verses, quotes them in Hebrew, renders them into Yiddish and then explains them. He does not translate every verse, and in the legal portions of Leviticus and Numbers in particular he passes over long stretches of text with a brief summary or none at all. The explanations generally seek to convey the plain meaning of the verse, but they often develop into homiletic discussion, in which the author draws out the moral or religious lesson of a passage and illustrates it with a story or a parable.²⁴²⁵

The method can be seen in the treatment of the opening of Genesis. The first verse is quoted and rendered, and the author then asks, following an old midrashic question, why the Torah begins with the account of creation rather than with the first commandment given to Israel. The answer, taken from Rashi, is that the account of creation establishes that the whole earth belongs to God, who may give it to whom he wishes. The discussion then turns to the order of creation, the light of the first day and the separation of the waters, each explained with the help of midrashic material. The reader is led through the narrative and at the same time introduced to the way in which the rabbis had read it.²⁶²⁷

The Sources

The sources on which the author drew are numerous and can for the most part be identified. Among the midrashim, his principal source was Midrash Rabbah, which he used together with a commentary on it by Yisakhar Ber Katz. He also drew on the Talmud. Among the medieval commentators, the one he cited most often was Rashi, together with the super-commentaries on Rashi that were current in Ashkenaz. He also used Abraham ibn Ezra, Nahmanides, the Ba’al ha-Turim of Jacob ben Asher, the Hizkuni of Hezekiah ben Manoah and the Tseror ha-mor of Abraham Saba. Above all, however, he relied on the commentary on the Pentateuch of Bahya ben Asher, the thirteenth-century exegete of Saragossa, whose work combined literal, homiletic, philosophical and kabbalistic interpretation.²⁸²⁹

The author’s use of Bahya is selective. He generally omits the philosophical and kabbalistic interpretations that are a prominent feature of Bahya’s commentary, and retains the homiletic and moral material. In this choice he was guided by his audience. The readers of the Tsene-rene were not expected to follow arguments about the nature of the soul or the structure of the divine emanations, but they were expected to learn from the patriarchs and matriarchs, from the sins of the generation of the wilderness and from the virtues of the righteous. The only contemporary commentator whom the author mentions by name is Ephraim of Łęczyca, a Polish preacher and exegete whose works were well known in the author’s lifetime.³⁰³¹

The Five Scrolls and the Haftarot

The treatment of the Five Scrolls, which are read in the synagogue on festivals and fasts, follows a similar method of selection and explanation, but with a stronger tendency towards narrative expansion. The stories of Ruth and of Esther in particular are retold at length, with the addition of material from the midrashim and the Targum that fills out the biblical account. In the section on the haftarot, the method is different again. Here the commentary is essentially a continuous translation of the prophetic reading, with Hebrew verses or fragments of verses interwoven, rather than a discussion of selected verses.³²

These differences reflect the different place of the three groups of texts in the life of the community. The Pentateuch was the subject of continuous instruction in the school and the synagogue, and its narrative was familiar in outline; what the reader needed was an explanation of its meaning and a lesson drawn from it. The Scrolls were stories, read on particular occasions, and they invited retelling. The haftarot were prophetic texts, often difficult, that were heard once a year, and a reader who did not know Hebrew needed above all to know what they said.³³

Language and Style

The language of the Tsene-rene is the literary Yiddish of the late sixteenth century, a written standard based in large part on the western dialects and used by printers in Germany, Italy, Bohemia and Poland alike. The book was printed in the semi-cursive Hebrew typeface that was customarily used for Yiddish and for rabbinic commentary, which was known in Yiddish as vaybertaytsh, “women’s taytsh”, because of its association with Yiddish books for women. The Hebrew quotations were set in the square type of scripture, so that the reader could see at a glance where the biblical text ended and the explanation began.³⁴³⁵

The style is simple and direct. The author addresses the reader, asks questions and answers them, and moves easily between the verse, the midrash and the moral. He frequently introduces a lesson with a formula indicating that the reader should take note, and he closes a discussion with a moral that applies the text to the conduct of daily life. The book has often been compared to a sermon written down, and the comparison is apt. It reproduces the manner of the Yiddish preacher, with his mixture of instruction, storytelling and exhortation, in a form that a reader could take into the home and read at leisure.³⁶³⁷

Printing and Editions

The Lost First Editions

It is not known when the Tsene-rene was written or when it was first printed. The earliest surviving edition is dated 1622. Its title page states that it was printed at Basel, but bibliographers have concluded that it was in fact produced at Hanau, near Frankfurt, which was an important centre of Hebrew and Yiddish printing at the time. The same title page refers to three earlier editions, one printed at Lublin and two at Kraków, of which no copy is known to survive. The first edition must therefore have appeared some years before 1622, and the work was probably composed towards the end of the sixteenth century.³⁸³⁹

The loss of the first editions is not surprising. Yiddish books were printed in large numbers and cheaply, and they were read until they fell apart. Unlike Hebrew books of scholarship, they were not as a rule preserved in the libraries of rabbis and communities, and many early Yiddish books are known only from a single copy, often found in a Christian library whose collectors acquired them as curiosities or as material for the study of Jewish customs. That the earliest surviving edition of the most widely read Yiddish book of the period is already a fourth edition is a reminder of how much of this literature has been lost.⁴⁰⁴¹

An Expanding Readership

The 1622 edition was published in two volumes, the first containing the Pentateuch and the second the haftarot and the Five Scrolls. Most later editions combined the material in a single volume, and some arranged it so that each weekly reading was followed by its haftarah, in the order in which the texts were read in the synagogue. The format varied from one printer to another, and the text was gradually supplemented with additional material, including Yiddish versions of the second Targum on Esther and selections from other works of homiletics and ethics.⁴²

Bibliographers have counted more than two hundred and ten editions. For the first century and a half the book was printed chiefly in western and central Europe, at Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Fürth, Sulzbach, Prague and elsewhere, by printers who served both the western communities and the export trade to Poland. At the end of the eighteenth century the centre of publication moved to eastern Europe, where printers in Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine produced edition after edition for a readership that had by then come to number in the millions.⁴³⁴⁴

Changes in the Text

With the move to the east, the language of the book began to change. Printers modernised the spelling and grammar, replaced western words with eastern ones and adapted the text to the spoken Yiddish of their readers. Chone Shmeruk, who studied the eastern European editions of the period between 1786 and 1850, showed how the text was revised in successive editions, and other scholars have described the book as a kind of laboratory of the Yiddish language, in which the development of the written language can be followed over a long period through the changes made to a single work.⁴⁵⁴⁶⁴⁷

The text was also adapted to the religious and intellectual currents of the time. Some eastern European editions reflect the outlook of Hasidism, others that of the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah. In the nineteenth century, versions of the work were produced in western Europe with quite different aims, including the replacement of Yiddish by standard German, the modernisation of the content and the rearrangement of the material. The name Tsene-rene came to be used for other books of a similar character, and it even appeared on the title page of some copies of an edition of Moses Mendelssohn’s German translation of the Pentateuch, printed at Basel in 1822, presumably in the hope of attracting the readers of the older work.⁴⁸

The Women's Bible

Readers and Reading

The title page of the earliest surviving edition describes the book as intended for men and women, who would find peace of mind in understanding the words of the living God. In the course of time, however, the Tsene-rene became above all a book for women, and specifically a book to be read on the Sabbath and on festivals. The image of a woman reading aloud from the Tsene-rene to other women and children on a Sabbath afternoon became one of the familiar scenes of eastern European Jewish life, and it was described in memoirs and in the fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁴⁹⁵⁰

The reading was often linked to the cycle of the synagogue. During the week a woman might read the portion that would be read in the synagogue on the following Sabbath, and on the Sabbath itself she might read it again, so that she knew the narrative and its explanation when the men returned from the service. Women who could read well sometimes read to others who could not, and in the women’s section of the synagogue a woman known as the firzogerin, the “foresayer”, led other women in prayer and could also guide them through the readings. The book thus served not only individual reading but a form of collective instruction carried on by women for women.⁵¹⁵²

Learned Approval

The popularity of the Tsene-rene among the unlearned did not make it suspect in the eyes of the learned. On the contrary, its reading was recommended by rabbinic authorities. David ben Samuel ha-Levi, known by the title of his commentary as the Taz, wrote in his gloss on the Shulhan Arukh that whoever was not learned ought to read commentary on the Torah in the language of Ashkenaz, such as the Tsene-rene, so that he could understand the weekly portion. The recommendation was addressed to men, and it shows that the book was regarded as a legitimate means of fulfilling the obligation to study the weekly reading.⁵³

This approval was important. Yiddish books for the unlearned were sometimes regarded with suspicion by rabbinic authorities, who feared that they might spread inaccurate teaching or distract readers from the study of the sacred texts themselves. The Tsene-rene escaped this suspicion because its material was drawn from accepted sources, because it was arranged according to the weekly readings and because its moral teaching was entirely traditional. It was a book that brought its readers closer to the synagogue rather than drawing them away from it.⁵⁴⁵⁵

The Content of a Woman's Bible

Modern scholars have asked whether the Tsene-rene was, in its content, a book for women, or whether it became one only through its readership. The answer is not simple. The author drew on sources that were written by men for men, and much of his material has nothing to do with women in particular. At the same time, the book gives considerable attention to the matriarchs and to other women of the Bible, and it frequently addresses its moral teaching to the conduct of the household, the raising of children and the relations between husband and wife. Its explanation of the commandments emphasises those that were incumbent on women, such as the lighting of the Sabbath candles.⁵⁶⁵⁷

Chava Weissler, in her study of the Yiddish supplicatory prayers for women known as tkhines, has shown how the figures of the matriarchs and the stories of biblical women were used in this literature to give women a religious identity of their own, within the framework of traditional Judaism. The Tsene-rene contributed to this process. It made the stories of Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah, of Miriam, Hannah, Ruth and Esther, part of the common knowledge of women who could not read them in Hebrew, and it presented them as models of conduct and piety.⁵⁸

The Bible as Known to Its Readers

Scripture through Midrash

For those who read it, the Tsene-rene was the Bible, or at least the Pentateuch and the portions of the other books that were read in the synagogue. Yet the Bible they knew from it was not the bare text of scripture but the text as interpreted by the rabbis. The stories were filled out with midrashic detail, the characters were given motives and speeches that the Bible does not record, and the narrative was interrupted at every turn by explanations and lessons. A reader of the Tsene-rene knew that Abraham smashed his father’s idols, that the angels who visited him pretended to eat, and that the infant Moses was tested by Pharaoh with a choice between gold and a burning coal, although none of these things is found in the biblical text.⁵⁹⁶⁰

This was not a distortion of the tradition but its natural form. For Jews of the period, the Bible was always read with its interpretation, and the line between the text and its commentary was less sharply drawn in practice than it was in theory. The learned reader studied the Pentateuch with Rashi, and Rashi incorporated a great deal of midrash. The reader of the Tsene-rene received the same tradition in a simpler and more extensive form. What distinguishes the work from a translation in the modern sense is precisely what made it valuable to its readers: it did not leave them alone with a difficult text, but placed that text within the body of interpretation that gave it its meaning.⁶¹⁶²

Comparison with Other Vernacular Bibles

The Tsene-rene appeared in the period in which vernacular Bibles were being printed throughout Europe. Luther’s German Bible was completed in 1534, the Ferrara Bible in Spanish in 1553, and translations into Czech, English, Polish and other languages followed in the second half of the century. In the Protestant countries the vernacular Bible was the foundation of a new religious culture in which the individual believer was expected to read scripture directly, without the mediation of the church.⁶³

The Tsene-rene belongs to a different tradition. It was not intended to replace the Hebrew text, which remained the text of the synagogue and the school, nor was it intended to free its readers from the authority of rabbinic interpretation. Its purpose was to give those who could not read Hebrew access to the content of scripture as the tradition understood it. The complete Yiddish translations of Amsterdam, which were closer in conception to the Protestant vernacular Bibles, did not succeed in displacing it, and the reason lies partly in this difference of purpose. The Jewish reader of the period did not want the text alone; he or she wanted the text with its meaning.⁶⁴⁶⁵

Later History

The Enlightenment and the Decline of Old Yiddish

In the second half of the eighteenth century the leaders of the Jewish Enlightenment in Germany, and above all Moses Mendelssohn, regarded Yiddish with disfavour. They saw it as a corrupt form of German that kept Jews apart from the society around them, and they sought to replace it, among German Jews, with standard German. Mendelssohn’s translation of the Pentateuch into German, printed in Hebrew characters and accompanied by a Hebrew commentary, was intended among other things to provide an alternative to the traditional Yiddish versions. In Germany, Yiddish declined in the course of the following century, and with it the readership of the Tsene-rene.⁶⁶⁶⁷

In eastern Europe the situation was different. Yiddish remained the language of the great majority of Jews until the twentieth century, and the Tsene-rene remained in use. The book was printed throughout the nineteenth century, often in cheap editions, and it was found in the majority of traditional homes. It followed its readers to America and later to Palestine and Israel, where new editions continued to be published for traditional communities.⁶⁸⁶⁹

Translations and Modern Editions

The Tsene-rene has been translated several times. A section of the first portion of Genesis was translated into Latin in the seventeenth century, by a Christian scholar interested in Jewish literature. In the twentieth century the work was translated into Hebrew and into English. The English translation by Miriam Stark Zakon, published in three volumes in 1983 and 1984, made the book available to readers in the English-speaking Orthodox world, for whom it served a function similar to that it had served for its original readers. A critical English translation of the earliest surviving edition, with an introduction and annotation identifying the sources, was published by Morris M. Faierstein in 2017.⁷⁰⁷¹⁷²

Modern scholarship on the Tsene-rene has concentrated on its sources, its language and its readership. The studies of Chone Shmeruk on its eastern European editions, of Chava Turniansky on its translations and adaptations, and of Simon Neuberg on the pragmatic aspects of its language have established the history of the text in considerable detail. The book has also attracted the interest of historians of women and of reading, for whom it is a rare example of a work whose readership can be followed over a long period and across a wide geographical area.⁷³⁷⁴⁷⁵

Significance

A Book of the People

The importance of the Tsene-rene lies first in its reach. For three centuries it was among the most widely read books in the Jewish world, and its readers included many who read little else. Through it, the stories of the Bible and the teaching of the rabbis reached a population that had no other access to them in written form, and the knowledge of scripture that it conveyed formed part of the common culture of Ashkenazi Jewry. Its influence on the Yiddish language was also considerable, since its expressions and turns of phrase entered the spoken language and were familiar to speakers who had never read it.⁷⁶⁷⁷

A Place in the History of the Bible

For the history of the Bible, the Tsene-rene illustrates a mode of transmission that differs from those traced elsewhere on this site. The Masoretes preserved the consonants, vowels and accents of the Hebrew text with extraordinary care, and the scribes of Ashkenaz copied it in great codices and Torah scrolls. The translators of the ancient and medieval versions carried the text into Greek, Aramaic, Syriac and Latin. The Tsene-rene did something else. It carried the content of the Bible, and the tradition of its interpretation, into the homes of those who could not read the original, and it did so in a form that was shaped by the needs and the experience of its readers. The Hebrew text remained authoritative; the Tsene-rene made it understood.⁷⁸⁷⁹

The book’s reputation as the women’s Bible has sometimes led to its being treated with condescension, as a work of popular piety without intellectual interest. Modern scholarship has corrected this view. The Tsene-rene was a skilfully constructed anthology of the exegetical tradition, adapted with care to the capacities and interests of its readers, and its long life is evidence of how well it served them. In the history of the Bible among the Jews of Europe, few books have done more to make scripture part of the lives of ordinary people.⁸⁰⁸¹

Notes

1. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
2. Morris M. Faierstein, Ze’enah U-Re’enah: A Critical Translation into English, 2 vols (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017). ↩
3. Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, ed. Paul Glasser, trans. Shlomo Noble and Joshua A. Fishman, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). ↩
4. Grokipedia, “Yiddish”. ↩
5. Grokipedia, “Ashkenazi Jews”. ↩
6. Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). ↩
7. Chava Turniansky, “Bible Translations: Translations into Yiddish”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
8. See also “The Ferrara Bible of 1553” on this site. ↩
9. Chava Turniansky, “Yiddish Literature before 1800”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
10. Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, ed. Paul Glasser, trans. Shlomo Noble and Joshua A. Fishman, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). ↩
11. Chava Turniansky, “Yiddish Literature before 1800”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
12. Jean Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, ed. and trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). ↩
13. Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. 7: Old Yiddish Literature from Its Origins to the Haskalah Period, trans. Bernard Martin (Cincinnati and New York: Hebrew Union College Press and Ktav, 1975). ↩
14. See also “Elias Levita and the Masoret ha-Masoret of 1538” on this site. ↩
15. Jean Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, ed. and trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). ↩
16. Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). ↩
17. Chava Turniansky, “Bible Translations: Translations into Yiddish”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
18. Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. 7: Old Yiddish Literature from Its Origins to the Haskalah Period, trans. Bernard Martin (Cincinnati and New York: Hebrew Union College Press and Ktav, 1975). ↩
19. Chava Turniansky, “Ashkenazi, Ya‘akov ben Yitsḥak”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
20. Chava Turniansky, “Ashkenazi, Ya‘akov ben Yitsḥak”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
21. Chava Turniansky, “Yiddish Literature before 1800”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
22. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
23. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
24. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
25. Morris M. Faierstein, Ze’enah U-Re’enah: A Critical Translation into English, 2 vols (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017). ↩
26. Morris M. Faierstein, Ze’enah U-Re’enah: A Critical Translation into English, 2 vols (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017). ↩
27. Yaakov ben Yitzchak Ashkenazi, Tz’enah Ur’enah: The Classic Anthology of Torah Lore and Midrashic Comment, trans. Miriam Stark Zakon, 3 vols (New York: Mesorah Publications, 1983–1984). ↩
28. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
29. Morris M. Faierstein, Ze’enah U-Re’enah: A Critical Translation into English, 2 vols (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017). ↩
30. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
31. Chava Turniansky, “Ashkenazi, Ya‘akov ben Yitsḥak”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
32. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
33. Morris M. Faierstein, Ze’enah U-Re’enah: A Critical Translation into English, 2 vols (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017). ↩
34. Chava Turniansky, “Yiddish Literature before 1800”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
35. Simon Neuberg, Pragmatische Aspekte der jiddischen Sprachgeschichte am Beispiel der Zenerene (Hamburg: Buske, 1999). ↩
36. Morris M. Faierstein, Ze’enah U-Re’enah: A Critical Translation into English, 2 vols (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017). ↩
37. Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. 7: Old Yiddish Literature from Its Origins to the Haskalah Period, trans. Bernard Martin (Cincinnati and New York: Hebrew Union College Press and Ktav, 1975). ↩
38. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
39. Morris M. Faierstein, Ze’enah U-Re’enah: A Critical Translation into English, 2 vols (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017). ↩
40. Jean Baumgarten, Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, ed. and trans. Jerold C. Frakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). ↩
41. Chone Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish be-Polin: Meḥkarim ve-‘iyunim historiyim (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1981). ↩
42. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
43. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
44. Chone Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish be-Polin: Meḥkarim ve-‘iyunim historiyim (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1981). ↩
45. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
46. Chone Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish be-Polin: Meḥkarim ve-‘iyunim historiyim (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1981). ↩
47. Simon Neuberg, Pragmatische Aspekte der jiddischen Sprachgeschichte am Beispiel der Zenerene (Hamburg: Buske, 1999). ↩
48. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
49. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
50. Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). ↩
51. Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). ↩
52. Grokipedia, “Ashkenazi Jews”. ↩
53. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
54. Chava Turniansky, “Yiddish Literature before 1800”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
55. Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. 7: Old Yiddish Literature from Its Origins to the Haskalah Period, trans. Bernard Martin (Cincinnati and New York: Hebrew Union College Press and Ktav, 1975). ↩
56. Morris M. Faierstein, Ze’enah U-Re’enah: A Critical Translation into English, 2 vols (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017). ↩
57. Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). ↩
58. Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). ↩
59. Morris M. Faierstein, Ze’enah U-Re’enah: A Critical Translation into English, 2 vols (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017). ↩
60. Yaakov ben Yitzchak Ashkenazi, Tz’enah Ur’enah: The Classic Anthology of Torah Lore and Midrashic Comment, trans. Miriam Stark Zakon, 3 vols (New York: Mesorah Publications, 1983–1984). ↩
61. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
62. Morris M. Faierstein, Ze’enah U-Re’enah: A Critical Translation into English, 2 vols (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017). ↩
63. See also “The Ferrara Bible of 1553” on this site. ↩
64. Chava Turniansky, “Bible Translations: Translations into Yiddish”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
65. Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, vol. 7: Old Yiddish Literature from Its Origins to the Haskalah Period, trans. Bernard Martin (Cincinnati and New York: Hebrew Union College Press and Ktav, 1975). ↩
66. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
67. Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, ed. Paul Glasser, trans. Shlomo Noble and Joshua A. Fishman, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). ↩
68. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
69. See also “Yiddish” on this site. ↩
70. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
71. Morris M. Faierstein, Ze’enah U-Re’enah: A Critical Translation into English, 2 vols (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017). ↩
72. Yaakov ben Yitzchak Ashkenazi, Tz’enah Ur’enah: The Classic Anthology of Torah Lore and Midrashic Comment, trans. Miriam Stark Zakon, 3 vols (New York: Mesorah Publications, 1983–1984). ↩
73. Chone Shmeruk, Sifrut yidish be-Polin: Meḥkarim ve-‘iyunim historiyim (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1981). ↩
74. Simon Neuberg, Pragmatische Aspekte der jiddischen Sprachgeschichte am Beispiel der Zenerene (Hamburg: Buske, 1999). ↩
75. Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998). ↩
76. Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩
77. Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, ed. Paul Glasser, trans. Shlomo Noble and Joshua A. Fishman, 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). ↩
78. See also “The Erfurt Hebrew Bibles and the Ashkenazi Scribal Tradition” on this site. ↩
79. Grokipedia, “Torah”. ↩
80. Morris M. Faierstein, Ze’enah U-Re’enah: A Critical Translation into English, 2 vols (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017). ↩
81. Chava Turniansky, “Yiddish Literature before 1800”, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. ↩