This is the first time that a woman is publishing a book….she’s trailblazing… groundbreaking, like she’s doing this thing, she’s very well-educated, but her ethical guidance is like very piety-focused and very much focused on a woman’s role in the home. Would we label her progressive or feminist or conservative and upholding of the status quo? Both of those are anachronistic terms to use.
From Unpacked, this is Jewish History Nerds, the podcast where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I’m Jonathan Schwab.
Yael: I’m Yael Steiner and for the second time this season I have the distinct pleasure of being taught a new topic in Jewish history by Dr. Jonathan Schwab and maybe I shouldn’t admit this to our listeners but I didn’t even look at the schedule so I have zero idea what we’re talking about today.
Schwab: Even if you had looked at the title or the person we’re talking about, don’t think that this is someone you would know or be familiar with. It’s a woman by the name of Rivka Tiktiner, Rivka Batmayer.
Yael: Don’t know her.
Yeah, this will come as a great shock to you, and I’m sure many of our listeners who follow closely, but I am once again going to be talking about a woman who challenges or stereotypes and was a trailblazer in her time and place in Jewish history.
Yael: Jonathan Schwab is the the champion of strong Jewish women in history. Hadassah should give you a plaque.
Schwab: There have been a couple of recently released books. There’s one called Chutzpah Girls. There’s one called Bedtime Stories for Strong Jewish Girls or something like that. And they’re, they’re meant as stories for young girls, which I happen to have two of that are highlighting, maybe glossed over female figures in Jewish history. And Rivka Tikhtiner is one of the characters in the bedtime stories for strong Jewish girls. we don’t know an awful lot about her other than a book that she wrote and we’ll talk about that book and why it’s important.
Yael: Nice.
Schwab: So Rivka, Bottmeyer or Rivka Tick, Tinner, again, we’re talking about the late 16th, like the late 1500s, very early 1600s. So people don’t generally have last names. Her family kind of uses this term tiktiner, which just means that her family was from the the Polish town of tiktin or tik a chin
Yael: I thought that maybe it was like they were Tinsmiths or something.
Schwab: Yeah, right? Like it sounds that but it’s just no. They’re from this town originally. But again, Tika Chin might you might have heard of it.
Yael: Take a chint. I think I’ve been there. Was there a very large pogrom there?
Schwab: Yes, there’s a commemorated mass grave outside the town of Tickochin. Yeah. Isn’t it so nice when we mention random towns in Poland and we’re like, I think I’ve been there because there’s a mass grave.
It’s in Poland, right?
Yael: I’ve been to that mass grave. I was, yeah, I was thinking about that recently.
Schwab: Yeah, we’re not gonna talk that much about trauma. This is much more of,like books and scholarship type of story. it’s unclear if she even grew up in Tikitin. She’s associated with Prague, where she spent most of her life.
I think generally just because it’s easy to as Rivka Tik-Tinner, but she refers to herself and she’s referred to in other places as Rivka Bat-Meir, Rivka the daughter of Meir. And her father, we don’t know who he is, but from what we know about her, he’s referred to as a rabbi of some prominence.
Anyway, the main thing that Rivka Tik-Tinner does that we want to talk about is she publishes a book or a book is published after she dies called Meneket Rivka, which is sort of an ethical guide to life specifically for women.
It’s published in 1609 and it is the earliest full length published work by a female Jewish author. This is the oldest Jewish woman’s book that we have.
Yael: Wow. Mayneket, is that a nursemaid? I was like, I know that word.
Schwab: It is a nurse. Very good. Showing off your biblical Hebrew. Yes. May Nechet is the nursemaid of Rivka, Rebecca, the foremother mentioned, and her nursemaid in this sort of very strange aside in the narrative of the Bible. Like her nursemaid dies along the road and everybody stops to sort of mourn her. And it’s really unclear why it is that Rivka Tiktiner chose to use that. But it is a kind of common trope at the time where an author of the book would find some phrase or term from the Bible that has their name in it and then sort of just like that’s the title you know that they that they use.
Yael: So what is this book about?
Schwab: So this book is, like I said, it’s sort of just like an ethical guide specifically for Jewish women. It’s incredibly well written. like it is clear that she is, erudite doesn’t even begin to describe it. She’s extremely well educated, extremely well versed. And she’s writing it in Yiddish for women, but is also doing a lot of educating it’s a lot of sources from biblical literature, from rabbinic literature, that she’s doing a ton of work translating and making accessible for women.
Yael: Do we have a sense of how she herself was educated or we just know because she wrote this book she obviously must have been educated?
Schwab: Okay, so, basically the latter. One of the things that’s fascinating and sort of sad about this topic is we have the book. It was published in 1609. It was published a second time a few years later, which tells us that it was somewhat popular. We have copies of both publishings. Other than this book, though, we have next to nothing else about who she is or her life.
The only other sources that we have is she also wrote this poem, we’ll get to that a little bit later, that’s published alongside the book in one of the versions, her gravestone in the cemetery in Prague and an entry in what’s called the Memerbuch, which is a Yiddish term, like the memory book, which like if you’ve been in a synagogue as you have, you know that like on the walls, there’s very often plaques off synagogue members who have died.
So we have this full length book that she wrote, which we can kind of get a sense of who she is as the author. And then just what’s written on her gravestone and what’s written in this memory book and absolutely nothing else about who she was. She was married, it seems like, based on the gravestone and based on the entry. We don’t know anything about her husband. We know that she’s described as the daughter of, I think it’s Morenu Harav, like our master and teacher, Rebbe Mayer, but we don’t know who her father, like, so he was a rabbi of some prominence, And we don’t have any other contemporaneous descriptions of her.
Yael: Why do we think that this Rivka Batmeier in Prague is the Rivka Batmeier that wrote this book?
Schwab: Oh, it’s very clear that she’s from Prague. we know she dies in 1605. The book is published in 1609 and and she’s described exactly the same way in the book as she is on the gravestone. Like, yes, it’s published posthumously. Yeah. Yeah. This small publishing house and there is a brief preface from the publisher.
Yael: Okay. Got it. So this is postumously published. Okay, so who puts it out?
Schwab: She thanks the publisher like everybody involved knows this important part of this is the first time that a woman is publishing a book. You know, so like the publisher has what to say about that. She’s, like very, very grateful to the publisher.
Schwab: It’s not like there were hundreds of books being published by women and we just lost all the other ones. And it’s not like everyone involved didn’t realize some of the importance of this.
Yael: so what is her ethical guidance for Jewish girls?
Schwab: yeah. This is the main thing we’ll talk about that’s sort of interesting and surprising because she’s trailblazing, like we were just saying, groundbreaking, like she’s doing this thing, she’s very well-educated, but her ethical guidance is like very piety-focused and very much focused on a woman’s role in the home. The book, she has a preface and sort of, and then
Yael: Okay.
Schwab: divides the book into seven chapters, which she refers to as relating to the menorah, an object that we’ve spoken about a number of times. So there are seven areas in which a woman can express her piety and should live a life of wisdom and good deeds. First, just like the central ideas like general wisdom of the self and behaving in one’s own life in ethical ways. And then the rest of them are the six types of relationships that women can have, like with her husband, with her parents, with her in-laws. I don’t know that I would have ranked that number three, but okay. Then children, they come after in-laws. I don’t know that it’s in order of importance, but it is an interesting choice.
Yael: Mm-hmm.
Schwab: Daughters-in-law who are distinct from children, but no mention of sons-in-law. And then finally, non-family residents of the home or non-family participants in the home. So guests, boarders, staff in the home, that sort of thing. And just what are the various ways that a woman should relate to these people and how should she behave in connection with them?
Yael: So no indication that she should ever have a relationship with or interact with anyone outside the home.
Schwab: Right, I mean, there’s no mention of like, and here’s how to relate to your friends, other women who are outside your room. It’s very focused.
Yael: your rabbi or your butcher or your teacher. Got it. Okay.
Schwab: Yeah. Your teacher, what are you talking about? Are you talking about the teachers of your presumably male children? Yeah, and she draws, yeah that’s thought about through the perspective of the children, of like, here’s your responsibility to your dad.
Yael: Or the Tsar or the constable or I’m just trying to think of who all the other people were in Anatefka.
Schwab: Right, it’s very focused on a woman’s place is in her home. These are the people that she would interact, you know, through that place, which again is fascinating because like you brought up your relationship with your teacher. She was clearly taught and she was clearly also a teacher. Like she didn’t just write this book. She’s described in the book and on her gravestone as a darshanit.
Yael: Okay.
Yael: Right.
Schwab: V’rabanit, yeah, which a lot to unpack about those two terms. So darshanit, darshan is like, it’s a feminine version, right? It’s a female Hebrew word. That’s like expounder maybe
Yael: Very modern. Okay.
Schwab: Yeah, you’re right that like that is exactly the sort of term that I think like, elucidate, ooh, I like that. Ooh, yeah. It’s very hard to translate into English. And rub a.
Yael: An elucidator or an exegizer, something like that. I don’t know if that’s a word. Yeah. You know, they talk about it like with Shakespeare, like they talk about how people are Shakespeare interpreters feel like a Darshani is a Torah interpreter.
Schwab: Yeah. And then Rabbanit, which is also a little bit of a confusing term because it could be indicating female rabbi, but it could also be indicating wife of a rabbi. like it may not have the connotations that such a term would have today.
Yael: Right, historically mostly wife of a rabbi.
Schwab: And this is the central Jewish cemetery in Prague. We’re not talking about some like backwater rural area Prague is a major center of Jewish life in the 16th century. She’s contemporaneous with the Maharal, who’s a very Judah, low, Lao, who’s a very, very famous.
Schwab: Very important rabbi, did not, there is a legend that he created a golem, that definitely didn’t happen, but they don’t tell legends like that about, so you know it’s true.
Yael: Right, right.
I mean, it is in an episode of the X-Files.
honestly, that’s the first time in my life I ever learned about a golem, by the way. But no, she she’s living in a cosmopolitan Jewish community.. And it’s interesting to me that you’re saying the words Darshani and Rabani appear on her tombstone because.
Schwab: Right, Cosmopolitan, yes, yes, yeah.
Yael: That is even several years before this book is published. So it’s clear through her work in the community outside of the publication of this book that she is teaching people.
Schwab: And there’s some idea maybe that the book came out as one of those things where she was teaching lessons and then maybe somebody said to her, hey, you should really put this all into a bookBut yeah, pretty clear that she was spending some of her time teaching to women, possibly traveling and teaching to, to faithful women in a number of cities.
Yael: She said she did a pre-book tour.
Yael: You mentioned something at the beginning about her book containing sources, presumably Torah, maybe Talmudic or other Halakhic sources.
Schwab: All of the above, yeah. She often would say like, you’re meant to guide your husband so that he always behaves ethically. And that’s what is meant by the verse where it says a woman should be, you know, a helpmate to her husband. And then she’ll say, and in Yiddish what that means is, because she’s not assuming always that her audience understands Hebrew or biblical Hebrew the same way that she does, so she’ll.
Yael: Got it.
Schwab: Translate into Yiddish, she quotes a lot of rabbinic sources. So she will quote biblical verses, but clear that she is very well versed in previous interpretations of these. And there are also times where she seems to have her own novel or creative interpretations. Again, nothing shocking or controversial, but it’s clear that she was confident enough in her own skills. It’s so clear that she was referring to a vast amount of knowledge.
Yael: So you mentioned that there are seven chapters of different people and how you interact with them. Are any of the chapters about the internal self, about like who you are supposed to be?
Schwab: Chapters. The first one is about the wisdom of the soul. I think that the first idea is sort of like the self, right, like your relationship to yourself.
Yael: That’s the self-help chapter.
Schwab: And then the second chapter is a woman’s relationship to her husband. But I would say I think that’s sort of the first one of how you’re supposed to understand yourself and how you conduct your own life, not necessarily.
Yael: And in any of that, is there an indication that she believes that women learning, as she herself has obviously done, is a value?
Schwab: Okay, here’s where we get to, I think the biggest question here, which I think you’re getting to like, what did she believe? Like she clearly had access to something maybe through her father, maybe like that most women at the time did not have. She knows that because she’s teaching women who don’t have the same level of education that she does. She’s not explicitly ever saying, and I think that everybody else should have the same opportunities I want to expand it to everybody else. She’s not saying that, but it’s really hard to tell. And that’s where I want to get a little bit into like some of the other people we’ve talked about before and how they compare. But yeah, she does not really ever directly discuss what level of education and access women should have.
Again, that’s not the thrust of the book is for an individual woman reader and how she can behave on her own ethically in her life. She’s not saying, here’s my prescriptions for the community. We need to have better educational opportunities for women. We really don’t know. And this is also where I think we can get into a historical understanding of things. Like, do we? Would we label her progressive or feminist or conservative and upholding of the status quo? Both of those are anachronistic terms to use, like she is writing.
Yael: Well, I wonder what the assumption was hers or communally as to whether or not women could even read this because literacy, I’m assuming, was not a given for men or women, particularly for women.
Schwab: Yeah, this was written in Yiddish, but I think we can assume that women’s proficiency in reading in Yiddish might be a lot higher than we expect.
Yael: I always thought women prayed. And I always thought that that meant that women were able to read a prayer book.
Schwab: To read. Yeah.
Yael: But that’s not necessarily true and a lot of that was passed down orally from mother to daughter. So this doesn’t necessarily turn that on its head, but it is interesting that a publishing house would say, yes, I’m going to publish a piece of writing in Yiddish for women, by women, and presumably someone’s going to buy it because they can read it.
Schwab: Yes. And I will say, this is the first work that we have written by a woman. There are a number of other works, like what you’re describing as guidebooks for women that were written by men. But that’s an existing genre that a number of books are published like that. So there has to have been somewhat of a base of a women reading audience.
Yael: Right.
Yael: Are there any good tidbits from the book that you find interesting? Like, is she the woman who, you know, tells other women not to wear red?
Schwab: She seems like she doesn’t get as much into that as some of the male authored books at the time. There’s one contemporary book at the time, that discusses at much greater length how women should wear and actually is suggesting that women cover everything but their eyes. Which, yeah, which, which then also some people are saying like, okay, we have to understand this in the context of like,
Yael: huh.
Yael: Okay, sure.
Schwab: The difference between what is being prescribed and what is being practiced. But she does not seem as interested in that area of discourse of like, here’s how you should dress modestly, but very, very interested in how people behave relative to each other. One tidbit I think that’s interesting, she tells this story in sort of a horrified tone about how a lot of things are sort of orally transmitted and how women practice things that they don’t think critically about. And the story she tells is about a woman who had a Christian servant in her home.
And on Yom Kippur, like on the holiest day of the year, this non-Jewish servant in the home was preparing food in the afternoon to be eaten after the fast which Rivka Tikhtiner is like, that’s totally not allowed. like it’s the same rules as Shabbat. Like you cannot be cooking during the day for after the fast ends. And this woman’s response is like, this is how I’ve seen it done and practiced or like what I like was done in my mother’s home or something. And she uses that as an example of how you don’t just only do what’s been handed down to you as tradition. Like you need to, I think that’s like the closest she gets to an exhortation of women of like, you need to educate yourself and like know what the laws are, not just say, this is what I saw in my mother’s home and this is what I’m gonna do.
Yael: Does she assume some sort of level of basic biblical knowledge?
Schwab: Yeah, I think she assumes that the readers are familiar with the story of the bible . So there’s another element of this book, I think, that gets to this question that we mentioned before of just like what does she really believe what is she trying to accomplish the books written in yiddish there’s this very brief preface from her in Hebrew that’s sort of just like what what i’m going for in this book and it’s not just written in hebrew it’s written in a hebrew style that’s called melitsait’s one of these like, very layered and referential types of Hebrew where every single word or phrase is taken from something previously. Like it’s structured almost like a poem and every part of it is like referring to something or using a word that’s used in biblical or rabbinic literature. Like clearly a lot of intention behind it.
Schwab: Yeah. So in this preface, she uses a bunch of different metaphors or images. So one of them is like honey from a crag is the way it’s translated in English. e Honey that you can find in a mountain cave .And she’s like, I’ve drunk of this like sweetness. And now I want to share it with others. The other, I think, very evocative image is that she is in her learning of Torah, has drank from the well, and now she wants to roll the rock off of the well for others to drink as well.
Yael: Like Rivka.
Schwab: Right, and I was like, that’s a very specific reference to a story of a rock being rolled off a well in the story of Yitzhak and Rivka meeting, right?
Yael: Yes, Eliezer, but also she knows how to talk to servants, so it works.
Schwab: Yeah. But it’s a really interesting image sort of just for Torah learning as, you know, as like drinking water from a well. But I think that’s where there’s at least one sort of creative interpretation of the preface that this preface is sort of a coded message where she’s saying, you know, in a slightly more hidden way, like, here’s what I really think.
And I have had the opportunity to learn perhaps almost on the same level or in the same way that most men do. And I want that opportunity to be open to women. Like rolling the rock off the well, maybe she means I want to share what I’ve learned, but maybe she means we need to expand opportunities for women.
Yael: is why I think the title is so interesting because Mayneket Rivka as you said refers to a nursemaid that who was a nursemaid of Rivkas but it seems here like Rivka is really the nursemaid of Jewish women she’s providing them sustenance she’s providing them food nutrition lifeblood to
Schwab: Mm-hmm. Right.
Schwab: Yeah, interesting. I’m embarrassed to say that I did not think of it until this moment, but obviously the image of a nursemaid as a woman who helps other women is one that, yeah, yeah.
Yael: Right, a sustainer. It’s okay. It’s not your fault that you’ve been run down by the hegemony of male-dominated academic resources.
Schwab: The Daughters in Law chapter is worth reading.
Does she say just keep your mouth shut or is she a more vocal mother-in-law?
Schwab: The Daughters-in-Law chapter is preceded by how you should treat your parents-in-law. We don’t know whether she had children of her own. So, again it’s one of the, know so little about her actual life.
Yael: That’s also really interesting because a nursemaid is someone who nourishes someone else’s children, not their own. So she’s got the whole metaphor wrapped up there.
Schwab: Yeah. I feel like I can’t emphasize this enough. Like her knowledge and her writing is very, very advanced.it’s clear that.
that she was very, very, very well educated in basically the corpus of Jewish texts. Yeah.
Yael:Do we get a sense from reading the book that she was educated secularly in some way?
Schwab:She does not tell us how it is that she came by her Jewish education. The assumption is her father, right, she writes a preface in Hebrew, she writes this book in Yiddish, but we don’t know whence she got any of this knowledge.
Yael: Any of this knowledge, right? And the fact that she can write in Hebrew.
Yael: And we have nothing else written by her anywhere. Okay. So where is the poem? Where did we?
Schwab: So the poem is published in the same book, but it’s definitely a different sort of thing. It’s kind of a song, kind of a prayer. It’s called Simcha’s Taira Laid. Simcha’s Taira is the Yiddish pronunciation of Simcha Torah, the holiday for the celebration of the Torah. And it’s a poem or prayer that she wrote with the intention that it is sung or recited, presumably by women, on the holiday of Simchat Torah. And again, like very well written, very poetic, like referential to a lot of different things. But it’s, part of it is a vision of a meal God is hosting.
Like in the end of days in messianic times and all the people who are invited to it and shared in it. But this is something that, again, we assume women are are meant to recite together, maybe on on Simchat Torah, which then leads, I think, down down like a really interesting side path of of what did Simchat Torah look like in Prague in the 16th century, which I was very interested in the more the more I learned about it, especially because again, is she a feminist figure? Is she progressive? Is she for expanding women’s opportunities? Like the role of women in the community in Jewish practice is pretty central question of modern Jewish identity.
I think it’s fair to say and Simcha Torah is one of those I think that had that has like become a big question of like
Yael: Right.
Schwab: Women’s rich and certainly in more progressive orthodox communities, in communities outside of orthodoxy for sure, like how do women participate in what has generally been a very male-dominated holiday, like this one specifically. backing up for a second, like a very common practice on Simchat Torah is all of the Torah scrolls are taken out of the ark and people dance with them around the synagogue. And until recently, people meant men. And now, like in some synagogues, that means men and women, not necessarily together, but separately, how separate is the question?
It takes us in all sorts of really interesting directions. I did not realize this in looking into this and like what did this look like in Prague in the 16th century.
But dancing with the actual Torah is actually a much more modern practice than we might think. Because like that just seems a little risky.
Yael: For both men, for even men, okay.
Schwab: You know, to like dance with the Torah. The Torah is very precious, very holy.
Yael: It does seem a bit cavalier.
Yeah, especially when people hold it like just by the bottom two wooden things and they don’t, like, hug it. I get a little nervous.
Schwab: Like, yeah, and dropping it is a big deal.
Schwab: So like in Prague in the late 1500s, early 1600s. They would take all the Torahs out and they’d be placed on a central table and then people would dance around that. They weren’t picking up the torah scrolls and dancing with them. Yeah, which makes sense. In preparation for that, this is the part that’s so interesting to me. I’m like, I don’t know, maybe we should go back to doing this.
Yael: That makes sense.
Schwab: , a lot of the Torah scrolls were not kept in the Ark with all of their adornments, right? Like there’s like silver plating, crowns, things like that.So they all needed to be dressed up in…
Yael: Like silver plating and adornments.
Schwab: The Torahs would be dressed in all of their finery for them all to be taken out simultaneously. And that is something that would be done on the afternoon preceding Simchat Torah by the women. Before you’re like, wow, what an amazing creative way to include them. Because the women were the ones who made those things in the first place.
Right, like before…
Yael: Wow.
Yael: Right. The women were doing setup.
Yael: It is really beautiful that the women, that we have this thing that is so holy. It is the epicenter of our religion. And the women are the ones who are tasked with preparing to get the Torah ready for public consumption because they are the lifeblood of the community.
Schwab: Yeah.
Schwab: Yes, right, and like, and are central to the celebration and to the reverence, even if, like we’ve been talking about, they may not have the textual accessibility, right? Like imagining a group of women in Prague in 1600 who were taking the Torah out and dressing it up and preparing it for the holiday.
Knowing that that same group of women might not be able to unroll the Torah scroll and read from it or understand what they’re reading, but that is an important role that they have of setting this up for how central this is. And to connect this back to what we were talking about, not just like a random side thing. The theory is that that’s what this prayer was for, that this is something that women might recite or sing together.
While they were doing that, while they were getting all of the Torahs ready on the afternoon preceding Simchat Torah. Yeah, isn’t it?
Yael: That’s really beautiful. I want to be part of getting the Torahs ready for some Torah.
Schwab: Yeah. Yeah. Right? I feel like we should bring that back.
It’s funny because that now is something that’s like generally done by men
Yael: And it gets me thinking about the fact that even in more lower case C conservative circles, where women on a public level have less engagement and less of a role. There are certain fundamental functions of the Jewish community that cannot happen without women’s involvement and without women’s learned involvement. Like you need women to ensure that a mikvah, dunking in the mikvah is kosher. That is a role that is placed upon a Jewish woman, very much behind the scenes, but without that guardrail, you don’t have a kosher and halachic way for a Jewish home to function. You need women to be part of the local burial society, which prepares a Jewish body for the funeral,And for women, that role is, for dead female bodies, that role is performed by women. And that is one of the greatest mitzvot that can be performed by any human for anotherThe responsibility for that is on learned women in the community, very much also behind the scenes. So there has always been this idea that there have to be women underpinning this entire structure and that they have had to have some level of Jewish learning in order to accomplish it. But I guess this is the first proclamation of that in Jewish history just by virtue of being the first publication for women by women of how to live a virtuous Jewish life.
Schwab: Yeah, yeah, just because you mentioned it, like, you know, you know who definitely believes that women should be knowledgeable, knowledgeable of the law and pious in their conduct about menstrual purity? Rivka Tiktiner.
Yael: Is that a part of the book?
Schwab: Soof like dog-eared for myself of, like, these are really good ones that it’s worth mentioning. This is from the first chapter and I’m reading the English translation obviously.
And so it says that a woman requires great wisdom in relation to her body. This is not the case for a man who does not need to, the way a woman must, observe one time after the other. I do not need to write much more about this subject because every woman knows well enough herself how she should conduct herself. Which is interesting because what she’s saying in that last part is like, women already know this very well. Like she is saying women are well versed in this halacha and like that’s not what I’m writing about extensively here.
Yael: But what’s interesting because this is a tradition that is taught one generation to the next. And in that realm, you can listen to your mother, but in the realm of having someone cook your meal on Yom Kippur afternoon, maybe do your own research.
Schwab: Yes.
Schwab: But this is one of those things I think where you can dive into every single word and try to dissect it and try, especially because she is so enigmatic of like, who was she and what did she actually think? Who are you? Like, what do you mean this is not the case for a man who does not need to? Like, she might be saying,
Yael: Who are you, Rifka?
Schwab: Men don’t have menstrual cycles, but she might also be saying something much more than that, and it’s really hard to tell.
Yael: I mean I do like that she is indicating that there is something fundamental in the way a Jewish woman lives her life that indicates that she has Jewish knowledge.
Schwab: That takes to another quote, so she quotes a verse and this refers to a respectable woman whose thoughts are occupied only with good. Such a woman should associate only with pious people and should accustom herself to read Yiddish books. If she cannot read, then she should listen to others read or listen to sermons, as we find with with Devora the prophetess who said, my heart is with Israel’s leaders. That means my heart is attached to the scholars of Israel.
Yael: Wow. So she wanted women to learn.
Schwab: She wanted them to be pious and learning is a part of piety. Yeah.
Yael: This is really interesting. it’s disappointing to me that we know nothing else about her because this, something of this magnitude does not come from nowhere
Schwab: Yeah, like where did she learn? Like there are two things that I wish that we could do. Like we had a time machine of one, be at one of her sermons. I’m so curious. Like, was she a powerful orator? Were people like hanging from the edge of their seats, listening to the way, did she talk like they like, was she just with no notes, just like knew from memory all of these things?
And before that, what did it look like growing up? I referenced this at the very beginning, the like bedtime stories for Jewish girls. It’sa fictionalized version, you know, of her life, but that presents it as she learned sort of like, as a young girl from her father and like had a father who,
Yael: Mm-hmm.
Schwab: I don’t know, maybe he had no sons, but for whatever reason, her father, a very learned man, taught her this, and then she was like, Papa, shouldn’t everyone have this opportunity?Yael: Like, is she Yentl? Was she just a young child who was soaking up so much information at her father’s knee where it became obvious that she was going to do something special? Or was she a run of the mill person that we remember because her book survived? Interesting.
Schwab: Right, we don’t know. Like we joked about at the beginning, we have found ourselves in this situation where I’m talking about very fascinating Jewish women in history on a number of occasions. But I think two that come to mind that are worthy of comparison, just that we’ve covered before, is one, the maiden of Ludmir, Chana Rachel Webermacher, who basically functioned as a Hasidic Rebbe.
Again, go back and listen to it if you’ve never heard it before. that’s a very interesting, like contrasting figure because Hannah Rachel Webermacher also was conservative, lowercase C sort of in her outlook. Like this is, she was doing things that very few other women were doing. And at the same time, very much reinforcing a status quo of the place of women in the community while she was groundbreaking and trailblazing. Their legacies are almost opposite each other because the maiden of Ludmir, Hanrachal Webermacher, we have basically almost none of her surviving texts or teachings, but all sorts of myths and legends about her life and all these biographical details.
And then the other even more recent person I think that’s fascinating to compare to is Sarah Schneer, who was a proponent of women’s education, but also was very conservative or pragmatic in what she was willing to do. And in that episode, which also recommend people go back and listen to, we sort of leave with this question of like, did Schneer believe in a greater progressivism, like this is how far women’s education rather than, you know, we talked last week about Trotsky, rather than like living for your ideals and not getting anything accomplished. And I think we can ask the same sort of question of Rivka Tiktiner. She’s deeply aware that her book is being published. Like were there things she wanted to say that she couldn’t say in the book because she wanted the book to get published and get out there? Or is this, like, this is what she thought and believed? And I don’t know, sometimes reading into her like a feminism or seeing her as a progressive figure, like those terms didn’t exist, those movements didn’t exist, like it’s nice to think about, but she might not jive with modern progressive Jewish women.
Yael: I read an interesting article yesterday and we won’t get into the weeds of it here because even for the two of us in the silo of modern orthodoxy that we may find ourselves in occasionally, it’s really complicated. But the article basically talked about how
Schwab: Mm-hmm.
Yael: Modern orthodoxy or centrist modern orthodoxy opens itself up to the concept of women learning Talmud a long time ago. And now that it has happened, it is struggling with the outcome of that learning. Is women’s Talmud learning in and of itself the end goal?
Schwab: Hmm.
Yael: Or is the end goal of any learning to become an authority? You know, when men learn a certain amount of Gemara in the Orthodox world, the logical next step is you become a rabbi. But when women learn a certain amount of Gemara here, is the learning the end? And if the learning is not the end, what does that have to change about our theology?
But it goes again, with Rivka Tikhtiner. It is solely possible that everything she believed was wrapped up into this one publication.
Yael: And that we don’t have to ascribe to her some other modern motive of women’s leadership or women’s learning that’s not there. Because sometimes the learning is the end. Sometimes the medium is the message.
Schwab: putting this into personal practice, , She clearly has a love for learning Torah.
Yael: But is it? Is it though? not everyone who loves to read has to become an English professor. Sometimes you can just read to
Schwab:. Go back in time and tell me that in college.
Yael: And like sometimes you can just read for the love of reading. But she sounds fascinating, and I am obviously really glad to have learned about her, but I am very disappointed.
Schwab: Right, fascinating.
Yael: That we have no more information about her. Like it is very sad.
Schwab: That we have so little, right? And there’s no hope that we’re gonna, I don’t know, find something else that sheds more light on this.
Like the entry in the Memory book is very recently sort of discovered. So maybe there is something else out there that will tell us more about who she is because she’s so interesting and enigmatic.
Yael: And that in and of itself is a reason to never stop learning, because we might find out something else about her.
Schwab: Thanks for listening to Jewish History Nerds brought to you by Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand.
Yael: If you like this show, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and please give us a rating and review.
Schwab: Check out unpacked.media for everything unpacked related and subscribe to our other podcasts and our YouTube channel. Most importantly, be in touch. Write to us at nerds@unpacked.media. This episode was hosted by me, Jonathan Schwab.
Yael: and by me, Yael Steiner. Our education lead is Dr. Henry Abramson. Our editors are Rob Pera and Ari Schlacht. We’re produced by Jenny Falcon and Rivky Stern. Thanks for listening. See you next week.