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.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Harry Freedman's Jewish Histories to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.