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

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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.