Taking the Tsenerene Personally: A Reflection on “The ‘Womanly’ Bible”

Last Wednesday, after two hours of writing, five and a half hours of classes, little breakfast, and no lunch, I climbed seven stories of Leacock and sat down for a 90-minute lecture. After it finished, I was surprised to find myself sticking around—standing awkwardly with a friend, waiting for an opening to ask the speaker a question. I couldn’t help it. Maybe I took the Tsenerene a little too personally. Maybe it’s hard not to. 

The speaker, Miriam Borden, is a PhD candidate in Yiddish Studies at the University of Toronto, and her talk was entitled: “The ‘Womanly’ Bible: Sentimentality and the Tsenerene at the Origins of Modern Yiddish Culture.” The “womanly” Bible in question was the Tsenerene, a sixteenth-century Yiddish adaptation of the Hebrew Bible that integrated Rabbinic commentaries and other texts into the narrative. Yiddish was what made the Tsenerene “womanly.” It was a Bible that was accessible to those without Hebrew training: historically, women (although not all men knew Hebrew, either). Until Yiddish became a literary language, it connoted womanhood. Even the book’s typeface was called Vaybertaytsh: literally “woman” or “wife” Yiddish.

Still, there are other ways in which this is a woman’s Bible. Part of what I found so touching about the Tsenerene was how it subtly twists commentaries towards a woman’s perspective. Borden showed how the book, for example, acknowledges that menstrual and labour pains are a punishment for Eve’s sin. And then it pushes back, directly quoting a tkhine (woman’s Yiddish-language prayer), translated here by Borden: “Had I been there [in Eden], I would not have derived any benefit from [the apple], just as now I did not make the etrog ritually unfit all seven days [of Sukkot] so as not to overturn a mitzvah [...] so would I have had little benefit from the tree that you forbade.” Borden summarized it thus: I am not Eve, and I would not have eaten from the tree, so why punish me?

But above all, I found the Tsenerene touching because it was a book for women, discussed among women. I imagined my mom and myself, dressed up in the clothes of Fiddler on the Roof, talking about the Tsenerene just as we used to go over what we’d read in the digital chumash after shul each week. 

It was written in Yiddish before it became “literary” Yiddish, prior to men adopting the language and granting it prestige. Dripping with sentiment and nostalgia, 19th-and 20th-century male Yiddishists wrote of their mames (mothers) reading the Tsenerene, of their bobes (grandmothers) teaching from the Tsenerene. Hebraicists cast Hebrew as strong and masculine, but in the Tsenerene—its orality, its folk-ishness, its humble origins—Yiddishists saw the rustic femininity of Yiddish. Borden described how the Tsenerene symbolized the forebears of the Yiddishists: the female custodians of the written language prior to its uptake by male scholars. 

But there’s a problem: Borden could find almost no examples of female Yiddishists discussing the Tsenerene. The study of Yiddish, like most academic fields, was extremely male-dominated. 

I can’t help but feel touched by the Tsenerene—this old, “womanly” Bible. And neither could the Yiddishists, who—for good or ill—represent my own forebears, as I study Yiddish today. I (and all of us) must learn from their mistakes. Early Yiddishists imagined the womanly Bible as something in the past tense. And so did I. But Borden explained that the Tsenerene is not some item of the past, some book to be read by our grandmothers and great-grandmothers. As she mentioned, the Tsenerene lives still: many frum women still read and discuss it today.

We need to cast three-dimensional women into a past that has flattened them. We need to see the readers of the Tsenerene as more than just the mothers and grandmothers of the “great men” who made Yiddish “literary.” We need to imagine a womanly Yiddish.

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