“The ‘Womanly’ Bible: Sentimentality and the Tsenerene at the Origins of Modern Yiddish Culture” with Miriam Borden (University of Toronto)

Part of Jewish Studies Seminar

• Date: November 13, 2024
• Time: 4:00-6:00 pm
• Location: Leacock 738

The Tsenerene, the enormously popular seventeenth-century Yiddish adaptation of the Hebrew Bible, has long been known as the “women’s Bible.” This doesn’t just refer to the people who read it, however. Early twentieth-century Yiddish intellectuals trying to excavate their own literary lineage, and thus to affirm modern Yiddish writing as truly modern, looked to the Tsenerene as their literary foremother. They described it not only as a woman’s Bible, but as a “womanly” (vaybershe) Bible. They described the text as “feminine,” saying its author assuredly also possessed a “feminine character.” This conjured a mythical audience of women, but—I will argue—also gestured toward a key feature of the work that has been neglected: the literary intimacy of the text. Exploring some of the Tsenerene’s intimate aesthetics, real and imagined, I suggest that the key to understanding how critics defined Yiddish literature is located in what they defined it against: the “womanly,” emotional investment the Tsenerene cultivates in its reader.

Miriam Borden is a PhD candidate in Yiddish Studies at the University of Toronto working on the way folklore in Yiddish and the folklore we create about Yiddish shapes the way we’ve understood Ashkenazi Jewish life before the Holocaust and since. Her most recent publication is “Joshua, King David, and the Flying Nun: Doodles and Reader Annotations in Post-Holocaust Yiddish Primers for Children” (Canadian Jewish Studies / Études Juives Canadiennes 38, 85–112).

Coffee, tea, and pastries will be served.

RSVP required: https://forms.office.com/r/zRAYHAJpDG