Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation
Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 10Jews in Early Modern Poland$
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content.
Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 10: Jews in Early Modern Poland

Gershon David Hundert

Print publication date: 1997

Print ISBN-13: 9781874774310

Published to Liverpool Scholarship Online: February 2021

DOI: 10.3828/liverpool/9781874774310.001.0001

Show Summary Details
Page of

PRINTED FROM LIVERPOOL SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.liverpool.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Liverpool University Press, 2022. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in LSO for personal use.date: 06 July 2022

‘For the Human Soul is the Lamp of the Lord’: The Tkhine for ‘Laying Wicks’ by Sarah bas Tovim

‘For the Human Soul is the Lamp of the Lord’: The Tkhine for ‘Laying Wicks’ by Sarah bas Tovim

Chapter:
(p.40) ‘For the Human Soul is the Lamp of the Lord’: The Tkhine for ‘Laying Wicks’ by Sarah bas Tovim
Source:
Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 10
Author(s):

Chava Weissler

Publisher:
Liverpool University Press
DOI:10.3828/liverpool/9781874774310.003.0002

This chapter examines the tkhines, the primarily female genre of Yiddish supplicatory prayers. While it is difficult to reconstruct the religious lives of Jewish women in any pre-modern era, one important window into the piety of Jewish women in eighteenth-century Poland is through the tkhines. The chapter considers the work of one author of tkhines, the most famous of them all, Sarah bas Tovim. It begins by discussing what can be gleaned about Sarah from her two authentic tkhine collections, and then go on to focus on the most beloved portion of one of them, her tkhine for making candles of wicks used to measure graves in the cemetery. The chapter then provides a comparison of this tkhine with other contemporaneous material to elucidate the meaning of the ritual and the tkhine that accompanies it.

Keywords:   tkhines, Yiddish supplicatory prayers, religious life, Jewish women, piety, Poland, Sarah bas Tovim

Liverpool Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.

Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.

To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.