Talmid ChachamsandTsedeykeses: Language, Learnedness, and Masculinity Among Orthodox Jews

Abstract

YW ^ Then I asked a group of boys in an ultra-OrthodoxJewish elementary school What's the difference between boys' and girls' education? one boy answered: Boys need to learn how to be ... the talmid chachams [masters ofJewish texts]; girls should learn how to be tsedeykeses [righteous women]. This nine-year-old's response expresses an ideology' common in Orthodox communities: men are expected to be advanced scholars ofJewish law, and women are expected to be righteous. Both men and women must know and observe the laws, but men must also spend time each day studying the reasoning behind them. This gender expectation pervades many areas of Orthodox life, from leisure activities to educational policy to language use. In this article, I discuss how Orthodox boys and men construct their masculinity partly through linguistic performances of religious learnedness. Using methods from linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, I show how young men use two linguistic features about twice as frequently as young women: loanwords from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish;2 and word-final /t/ release (for example, righT,

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