Yentl in the 17th century
The Exemplary Life of Asenat Barzani
In 1984 the musical drama Yentl won a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture. The film’s star, Barbra Streisand, earned the award for Best Director. The film is about a young woman called Yentl in early 20th century Poland, who wanted to study the Talmud in a yeshiva, a rabbinic seminary. In those days (and indeed, in some communities still today) the Talmud was not taught to women and they were excluded from any sort of rabbinic training. Yentl therefore decided to dress as a man to take up a place in the yeshiva. Predictably, she fell in love with one of the other students and the tale of their relationship takes up the rest of the movie.
The film is based on a story by the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. It is not an unusual literary theme, Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Twelfth Night, Georgette Heyer’s The Masqueraders and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando all incorporate people who pretend to be a different gender. Yentl, however, became a talking point in the Jewish world because the idea of a woman entering the exclusively male preserve of the yeshiva seemed so incongruous. It was as absurd a thought as a man becoming a nun or a woman being a monk.
And yet, it was not absurd at all. Over 300 years before Barbra Streisand decided she wanted to make her film about Yentl, there was a real young woman who studied in a yeshiva. She did not just study, she became the acclaimed head of the seminary and she never tried to pretend that she was a man. Her name was Asenat Barzani.
Asenat Barzani was born around 1590, in the Kurdish city of Mosul, a name we all became familiar with during the Iraq War. Mosul is built on the ruins of Nineveh, the Assyrian town that the biblical Jonah was trying to avoid when he was swallowed by a giant fish. There had been a Jewish community in the city since at least the 7th century CE and Mosul would remain a centre of Jewish life until the early 1950s when Jews fled Iraq en masse.
Asenat’s father, Shmuel Barzani, was a deeply learned, rabbinic scholar in Mosul. He founded a yeshiva in the town, set up schools and placed himself at their head, all with the intention of raising the level of religious knowledge of the young Jewish men in Mosul.
Traditionally, a rabbi would make sure that his sons had the benefit of an excellent religious education so that when he grew old they would take over the mantle of communal leadership. If he didn’t have any sons he would make sure that his daughters married a scholar who could step into his shoes. Shmuel Barzani had no sons. But rather than waiting for someone he considered suitable for his daughter Asenat to marry, he decided that she deserved the same education that a boy would have had. He brought her up in an environment of intense religious learning, teaching her no skills other than that of how to study. When she did eventually marry, he told her husband that she was never to do any housework; scholarship was to be her life. In one of her poems (of which, more later) she described her childhood and her father’s instructions to her husband:
I grew up between the knees of the wise,
My father taught me no work or trade,
Other than the work of Heaven. . .
He made my husband swear
Not to make me do any work
And so he did, as he had been instructed.
As it turned out Asenat did marry an acclaimed scholar, Jacob Mizrahi, and when her father died her husband took his place as the head of the Mosul yeshiva. Asenath, meanwhile, continued to study, to write poetry and to teach in the yeshiva. When her husband also died, she succeeded him as its head.
It was not easy for her to take over the running of the yeshiva. She had lived a sheltered life, with little experience of the outside world. She must have been left in considerable debt after her husband died because she wrote letters to potential donors, asking for financial assistance. She complained to them that the “Romans”, by whom she probably meant the Syrian ecclesiastical authorities, had seized her house, taken the keys, sold all the books and clothes belonging to her and her children and demanded a huge amount of money from her. All she could cling to, she wrote, was the hope of heavenly mercy, and the mercy of the person she was writing to. She stressed that she was not concerned about her own position, she needed the money to keep the yeshiva going.
It wasn’t unknown in the Talmudic world for women to spend their lives studying rather than running a household, but it was extremely rare. There were probably no more than a dozen women, if that, who are known to have lived such a life. However Asenat’s reputation was so eminent that it won her wide admiration and respect, even among the rabbis themselves, the very people who might have been expected to object to her lifestyle. Pinhas Hariri, a prominent rabbi in Baghdad, responded to her appeal in an effusive letter, promising to help. He described her as his mistress, his perfect dove, his truth and faith, flower and glory, his mother and his teacher. Even old-fashioned, Middle Eastern courtesies were rarely more unctuous than that.
It has been speculated that Kurdistan at that time had a more liberal attitude towards women than elsewhere; that it would have been unthinkable for a woman to be a recognised scholar, an acknowledged poet and the head of a yeshiva in any other Jewish community. But it was unthinkable in Kurdistan too, until Asenat and her father came along. And Asenat Barzani is now something of a feminist icon in Kurdistan. Shortly after her time, another Kurdish woman, Xanzad, became a military leader and the governor of two provinces. In the 19th century a Kurdish woman, Mestûre Erdelan, who like Asenat, had been educated by her father, was renowned as a poet and philosopher. The reputed site of Asenat’s grave in Amadiyah has now become a place of pilgrimage. The Israeli scholar Ofra Bengio suggests that, although Kurdish society was dominated by men, and that discrimination against women was as severe as anywhere else, nevertheless men did accept being led by strong and intelligent women.[1]
Asenath’s importance, both in the cultural history of Kurdistan and among Kurdish Jews, can be measured by the number of legends and fables that are told about her. She is said to have mystically stopped an attacker in his tracks, freezing him on the spot. She saved the synagogue in Amadiya from fire by reciting kabbalistic names, causing a band of angels to descend who beat out the flames with their wings.
Yet, Asenat Barzani’s reputation does not rely exclusively on her Talmudic learning or her leadership of the Mosul yeshiva. She is also acknowledged as an outstanding poet, writing in Hebrew while using a traditional Arabic rhyming structure. Some of her poems have been published in compilations of Hebrew or feminist poetry, one has entered the religious liturgy. The excerpt below comes from a rhymed letter that she wrote to the nearby Jewish community of Amadiya after her husband died, when she was succeeding him as head of the yeshiva. She told them that she was struggling to keep the yeshiva going, that her son was too young to succeed his father and asked for their support in her new role. It appears, from a letter her son wrote sometime later that, unlike the reply she received from Rabbi Pinhas Harari, the Amadiya community declined to help:
Listen, sages, to my words
and wise ones hear me out,
I'll tell you of my misfortunes
and perhaps my strength will return;
I'll speak for the Torah and moan
for its vanishing from my land,
for the brilliant spark in a cloud of heaven
has been hidden from my people;
the seekers of my husband's word have vanished,
and wisdom from the valleys of my scholars,
the gates of understanding have been closed,
my byways and paths are unknown;
this bleak generation knows no guide
and I weep for my days in the world.[2]
[1] Ofra Bengio, Game Changers: Kurdish Women in Peace and War, Middle East Journal Vol. 70, No. 1 (Winter 2016), pp. 30-46
[2] Asenath’s Petition, translated by Peter Cole in Hebrew Feminist Poems, from Antiquity to the Present, Shirley Kaufmann, Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1999.