The Mystical Autobiography of a Sephardic Woman from Salonika

Reina ha-Kohen

1908

One afternoon a friend from class asked me a religious question. After I answered her, she remarked that it was curious that our teacher had not been able to answer the same question. “Don’t be so surprised,” I said. “These Protestants only know what is written in the Bible.” No sooner had I finished talking than the teacher came in from the [other…

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This excerpt comes from the Ladino autobiography that ha-Kohen sent in 1908 to Moses Gaster, the rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese Bevis Marks congregation in London, shortly after she composed it. In this excerpt, she discusses her mystical awakening as a result of her unpleasant experiences during her time studying among Protestant missionaries.

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As a generation of Jewish novelists, poets, and dramatists came of age, modern Jewish secular texts and journalism flourished in Jewish and European languages. 

Creator Bio

Reina ha-Kohen

19th Century–Early 20th Century

Little is known about the upbringing or family life of the Salonikan author Reina bat Menaḥem ha-Kohen (Reyna Hakohén) beyond the few clues she gives in her autobiographical writings. From these texts we learn that she had seven siblings and that her father sent her to a Protestant missionary school for financial reasons. In other works, she implored fellow Ottoman Jews not to be too zealous in their attempts to “modernize,” a process she believed too often drove people toward materialism and a lapse in morals and religious observance; her 1898 article “Las muchachas modernas” (The Modern Girls) was challenged in the Ladino press for dissenting from modernizing calls for the full incorporation of Sephardic women into Jewish public life. In 1901, she published a commentary on the Book of Daniel (Comentario a Daniel, Salónica: Ets Hayim, 1901).

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