The (Shockingly Low) Literacy Rate of Jews in Eastern Europe

In my last column, I had occasion to mention Ts’enah u-R’enah, a book I called “the most popular . . . of Yiddish Bible translations,” and one having “a large amount of Midrash and rabbinic commentary” woven into it. I also observed that the book was “intended primarily for use by women . . . as indicated by its name, taken from the Song of Songs.”

In response to this, Mosaic reader Leonard Berkowitz has sent me a copy of a recent article by Rabbi Moses Faierstein, the author of an annotated English translation of Ts’enah u-R’enah. Entitled “A Guide to the Ze’enah U-’Re’enah: Correcting Some Misconceptions,” the article discusses a number of commonly held but wrong ideas about the book that my column was guilty of restating. The two major ones are, first, that Ts’enah u-R’enah is a translation-plus-commentary when it is in fact a pure commentary that “does not translate or paraphrase” the biblical text at all; and, second, that it was intended only for women rather than for women and men alike.

I’m happy to stand corrected on both points. Even though my description of Ts’enah u-R’enah as “intended for use by women” was qualified by “primarily,” I had no idea that the book—which, Rabbi Faierstein points out, has gone through an incredible 275 or more printings since it first appearance in 1622—was written with both sexes equally in mind and that its Hebrew title page explicitly says that it is meant for anashim v’nashim, “men and women.”