The Prayer of Kalonymus is a Hebrew prayer-poem composed by Kalonymus ben Kalonymus, a Provençal scholar and prolific translator of Arabic texts into Hebrew. The poem serves as a lament in which Kalonymus expresses deep personal anguish over being born male and his yearning to be made a woman. Throughout the text the author decries the heavy burden of meeting the masculine ideals of Jewish scholarship and success, contrasting them with a romanticized vision of the simplicity and joy of Jewish life as a woman.
The poem is excerpted from Kalonymus's 1322 Sefer Even Boḥan, a self-critical satirical work. The traditional reading treats it as satire, though recent scholarship has complicated that view. If read sincerely, the satirical frame would have concealed its subversive nature, the poem's heartfelt content passing as mere humor for centuries. Modern audiences, particularly within LGBT communities, have embraced the text, resonating with it as a late-medieval portrait of what today might be called gender dysphoria.
Translation by the Open Siddur Project, 2018, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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