Asenath Barzani[1] (Hebrew: אסנת ברזאני, 1590–1670),[2] was a Kurdish Jewish female rabbinical scholar and poet who lived near Duhok, Kurdistan.
[5] His son and Asenath's father, Shemuel Barzani, a rabbi and mystic, was troubled by the status of the Torah among the Jews of Kurdistan and by the lack of spiritual leaders and halakhic decisors.
He established several yeshivas in Barzan, Akre, Amedi, and Mosul to cultivate wise students who could serve the public as rabbis, hazzans, and shokhets (kosher slaughterers).
From the beginning, the Rabbi [Mizrahi] was busy with his studies and had no time to teach the pupils; but I taught them in his stead, I was a helpmate for him... [Begging for support for] the sake of Father... and the Rabbi... so that their Torah and names should not be brought to naught in these communities; for I remain the teacher of Torah...”[8]The German Jewish ethnologist Erich Bauer, who included Barzani's letter without mentioning her name in his study of the Jews of Iraq in the early 1940s, was not convinced she could have composed such writing on her own.
As neither her father nor her husband had been successful fundraisers, the yeshivah was always in financial difficulties, and Barzani wrote letters requesting funds in which she described her and her children's difficult situation.
[9] Her few extant writings demonstrate a complete mastery of the Hebrew language, Torah, Talmud, Midrash, as well as Kabbalah, and her letters display not only learnedness but also a skill for lyrical prose.
On one such occasion, she went to Amêdî where she convinced the local Jews to celebrate Rosh Hodesh (the new moon festival) outdoors, as had been their custom before they were threatened by hostile gentiles.
And when the smoke cleared, everybody saw that not only none of the Jews had been hurt since the congregation had been outdoors, but that another miracle had taken place: the synagogue had not burned, nor were any of the Torah scrolls touched by the flames.