Asenath Barzani

Origins and early life

Asenath Barzani was born in 1590 in Kurdistan, the daughter of Rabbi Samuel ben Nethanel ha-Levi Barzani, the scholar who founded a network of yeshivot across the Jewish communities of the Kurdish mountains.

Work and career

Having no sons, her father trained her himself, to the highest level, in Torah, Talmud, Midrash, Kabbalah and Hebrew — and, she wrote, never asked her to do housework, so that she might study. She married his student Rabbi Jacob Mizrahi, who succeeded her father at the head of the yeshiva of Mosul, on the condition, set by her father, that she be free to keep studying; when her husband died, she took over the yeshiva herself, training rabbis and sending them out across Kurdistan, and raising her son to continue the line — despite the chronic poverty her surviving letters describe, appeals for support written in a superb rabbinic Hebrew.

Her community gave her the title tanna'it, the feminine of the sages of the Mishnah, and she is widely regarded as the first known woman to have headed a yeshiva in Jewish history; legends of her miracles grew around her name. She died in 1670, and her grave at Amadiya remained a place of pilgrimage for the Jews of Kurdistan.