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Tehinnot clearly written in a fine hand in a mixture of square and cursive letters. The text is comprised of initial phrases in Hebrew followed by text in Yiddish. The opening leaf has the heading Shabbat Tehinnah. The Hebrew is in square letters of varying sizes. In some instances the letters are vocalized, in others blocked and vocalized. The Yiddish text is in a legible cursive hand. These are moving and personal prayers. The final page of the tehinnot are dated Friday, Elul 560 (1800). There is a doodle (?) of a wood pecker at the bottom of the page. On the verso of the last leaf and a small fragment of a seventh leaf is a ledger (diary) with brief entries in German in a cursive script and the dates March through October. The text contains references to dates between 1772 to 1773.
The general category of Tehinnah (Tehinnot) are a form of piyyutin which originated in the tahanun prayer for the fasts of Monday and Thursday. The term was also transferred to piyyutim for the selihot days, and indeed both the construction and subject of the tehinnah are similar to selihot. The tehinnah is usually said quietly, its subject being the relationship between God and the people of Israel. It is sometimes constructed in rhymed verses, sometimes in rhymed rhetoric, or even unrhymed, in the style of a bakkashah. In addition to Hebrew tehinnot, there were Yiddish-German ones for women published in small brochures from the beginning of the 18th century in Bohemia (Prague), Switzerland (Basle), Germany (Sulzbach, Fuerth, Roedelheim), and many towns of Russia and Poland. Occasionally tehinnot were added as appendixes to editions of the prayer book.
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