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 eight eenth-century Poland is through the tkhines, the primarily female genre of Yiddish supplicatory prayers. This essay will discuss the work of one author of tkhines, the most famous of them all, Sarah bas Tovim. I will begin with a discussion of 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. A comparison of this tkhine with other contemporaneous material will elucidate the meaning of the ritual and the tkhine that accompanies it.

THE AUTHOR AND HER WORKS

Sarah, daughter of Mordecai (or sometimes daughter of Isaac or Jacob) of Satanov, great-granddaughter of Mordecai of Brisk (Brześć), known as Sarah bas Tovim, became the emblematic tkhine author, and one of her two works, Shloyshe sheorim (The Three Gates), perhaps the most beloved of all tkhines. As literary evidence attests, Sarah bas Tovim's tkhines eventually became part of the standard knowledge of pious women, and her influence eventually extended much further than her native Podolia. Sarah is an elusive figure: in the course of time, she took on legendary proportions, and some have insisted that she never existed at all. She even became the subject of a short story by Y. L. Peretz, in which she appears as a sort of fairy godmother. The fact that the name of her father (although not her great-grandfather) changes from edition to edition of her work, and the unusual circumstance that no edition mentions a husband,6 make finding documentation about her quite difficult.

The scepticism about Sarah's existence is rooted in the older scholarly view that no female authors of tkhines existed, that all were maskilic fabrications. Yet so many of them have been historically authenticated that there now seems no real reason to doubt that there was a woman, probably known as Sarah bas Tovim, who composed most or all of the two texts entitled Tkhine sha'ar hayiḥed al olomos (Tkhine of the Gate of Unity concerning the Aeons) and Tkhine shloyshe she'orim (Tkhine of Three Gates).