can be performed, unless there be ten persons present, but from this number it has carefully excluded the women, determining that—
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Hebrew characters)
"It is necessary that all these ten be free and adult men." (Orach Chaiim, 55.) So that if there should be ten thousand women in the synagogue, they are counted as nobody, and unless there be ten men there can be no service. Hence it is that the daughters of Israel are never suffered to appear as participators in the worship of God, but are compelled to look on from a distance, as if they had neither part nor lot in the matter. Now what reason is there why women should not be regarded as worshippers? Are they not rational beings? are they not creatures of God? are they not heirs of immortality just as well as the men? Will they not join in the praises of the redeemed in Paradise; or is the Mahometan doctrine true, that women have no souls? Certainly, when one looks at the Jewish synagogue, one would think so. Before marriage the women never go there at all, and after marriage how seldom. On the Barbary coast they hardly ever go, and in Poland how common is it, whilst the men are in the synagogue at prayer, to see their wives outside loitering and chatting, as if the public worship of God was no concern of theirs. Even in this country the attendance of females is not at all equal to that of the men. How contrary is this state of things to the command of God in the Psalms, "Both young men and maidens; old men and children; let them praise the name of the Lord." (Psalm cxlviii. 12, 13.) And again, "Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord." (Psalm cl. 6.) How different is the condition of the Jewish females under the oral law, from that described by Moses:—"When Miriam, the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand; and all the women went out after her, with timbrels and with dances. And Miriam answered them, Sing ye to the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously." (Exod. xi. 21.) Then the women were permitted to unite in the noblest work that can engage the soul of human beings, the praises of our God. But now they are shut out, according to the ordinance of the rabbies—they are not reckoned amongst God's worshippers, and if ten thousand of them should go to the synagogue, unless there should also be a sufficient number of men, a disciple of the rabbies would count them as nobody, and not think it worth his while to read prayers for them. A law like this cannot possibly proceed from God, He makes no such difference between male and female.
