scholar, well-versed in the Talmud" and recounts her Talmudic discussion with another learned lady, Dinah, the wife of Saul Halevi (chief rabbi of The Hague from 1748 to 1785). Although very few Eastern European Jewish women before the nineteenth century have left writings, Leah was the author of the Tkhinne of the Matriarchs, an eight-page, trilingual prayer for the Sabbath before the New Moon. (As is often the case, the place and date of publication are not mentioned in most of the printed editions.) The work contains a Hebrew introduction, a piyyut (a liturgical poem) in Aramaic, and a Yiddish prose paraphrase of the poem. This text, which has historical importance as one of the few extant works written by an eighteenth-century Eastern European Jewish woman, testifies that its author was far more learned than the norm. (Another work, Tkhinne Moyde Ani, has been erroneously attributed to her.) Leah Horowitz was passionately concerned with the religious place and role of Jewish women and she was keenly aware of her own anomalous status as a learned woman. She addressed these issues explicitly in the Hebrew introduction to her tkhinne, and by implication in the Aramaic piyyut and the Yiddish paraphrase. Leah was concerned to establish the legitimacy of her own involvement in "Torah study", that is, in Talmudic and halakhic discussion. Furthermore, this is perhaps the only pre-modern text in which an Ashkenazic woman discusses the significance of women's prayer, the proper way for women to pray and the circumstances under which women should and should not submit to their husbands' authority. However, Leah's arguments were largely lost to her contemporaries. After the first few editions, the Hebrew introduction and the Aramaic piyyut were no longer printed, leaving only the Yiddish portion of the text. Presumably, most women could not read Hebrew or Aramaic, while most men were not interested in reading a tkhinne by a woman, even if a portion of it was in the Holy Tongue. Nonetheless, in her Hebrew introduction Leah argues that women's prayer has the power to bring the messianic redemption if women learn to pray "properly". She states further that because women's prayer can bring the redemption, women should pray in synagogue every day, morning and evening, and she laments the fact that this is not the practice in her day. Leah has a kabbalistic understanding of prayer: true prayer is not for human needs,