Rashi of Troyes
Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki — known to a thousand years of Jewish readers as Rashi — was born in Troyes in northern Champagne in 1040 and died there in 1105. He studied as a young man at the great Rhineland yeshivot of…
Biblical Narrative
Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki — known to a thousand years of Jewish readers as Rashi — was born in Troyes in northern Champagne in 1040 and died there in 1105. He studied as a young man at the great Rhineland yeshivot of Worms and Mainz, sitting under disciples of Rabbenu Gershom Me'or ha-Golah, then returned home to Troyes, where he made his living as a vintner and wrote, in the margins of his working life, the two commentaries that would shape Judaism for the next nine centuries: a running commentary on the Hebrew Bible and a running commentary on almost the entire Babylonian Talmud.
Rashi's method was deceptively simple. On the Bible he sought peshat — the plain sense of the verse — but he wove into it the choicest midrashim of the rabbis whenever the language of the verse seemed to demand them. He explained Hebrew grammar; he translated difficult words into the Old French of his neighbors (his le'azim, of which more than three thousand are preserved, are a primary source for the historical study of Old French itself); he summarized in a few words what entire midrashic passages had said in dozens. On the Talmud he did something even more extraordinary: he wrote, in a quick and lucid Hebrew of his own, the running explanation that made the dense, allusive Aramaic dialectic of the Babylonian academies accessible to any student with the patience to follow.
Rashi lived through the First Crusade. In 1096 the bands that gathered at the call of Pope Urban II turned aside on their way to Jerusalem to massacre the Jews of Worms, Mainz, and Speyer — the very communities in which Rashi had studied. He composed selichot (penitential poems) lamenting the martyrs of the Rhineland; his tone in these is not academic but heartbroken. The same hand wrote the careful philological gloss on Genesis 1:1 and the bitter elegy for the murdered yeshiva of Mainz.
Rashi had no sons but three remarkable daughters — Yocheved, Miriam, and Rachel — whose own sons (the Tosafists Rabbenu Tam, Rashbam, and Rivam) would carry his school forward. The story that the daughters laid tefillin themselves rests on uncertain late tradition; what is certain is that Rashi's household was a center of Torah scholarship in which women were active participants, copyists, and questioners. His grandsons would dominate the next century of Talmudic learning.
אין המקרא יוצא מידי פשוטורש״י על בראשית ג׳, ח׳
Archaeology · History · Genetics
Rashi's textual influence is almost without parallel in the history of religious literature. The Mikraot Gedolot — the Rabbinic Bible, first printed by Daniel Bomberg in Venice in 1517 — placed Rashi's commentary on the inner column beside the biblical text, where it has remained on every printed Hebrew Bible since. The Vilna edition of the Babylonian Talmud, the standard text used in yeshivot worldwide since the Romm press first issued it in 1880–86, places Rashi on the inner margin of every folio. To open a printed Talmud is to open a book whose typographic geometry was shaped by Rashi's commentary five hundred years before printing existed.
Avraham Grossman, in his The Early Sages of France (1995) and his English-language Rashi (2012), has reconstructed the social world that produced the commentaries. Eleventh-century Champagne was a frontier of Jewish settlement, recently invited by the counts of Champagne to settle Troyes for its annual fairs; the Jewish community there was small (perhaps 100–200 souls) but well-connected to the older Rhineland centers. Rashi's working language at home was almost certainly Old French; his Hebrew prose retains French syntactic patterns that historical linguists have used to date and localize his text.
The le'azim — Old French glosses scattered through Rashi's commentaries — were collected and analyzed by Arsène Darmesteter and David Simon Blondheim in the early twentieth century (Les Gloses françaises de Raschi, 1929). They preserve the vernacular vocabulary of northern French villages a full century before the earliest substantial Old French literary texts. Words for crops, tools, animals, weaving, viticulture, and household objects appear in Rashi that appear nowhere else in the medieval French record. Romance philologists treat Rashi as a source on equal footing with the Chanson de Roland.
The Worms yeshiva tradition holds that a small synagogue chamber adjoining the medieval synagogue is the room in which Rashi studied. The original chamber was destroyed on Kristallnacht in November 1938 along with the rest of the Worms synagogue complex; the present 'Rashi Chapel' is a careful 1961 reconstruction. The continuity of the memory — that this is where Rashi sat — has been documented in Jewish travelogues from the sixteenth century forward, an unbroken chain of pilgrimage to a man who left no tomb and no portrait.
Without Rashi's commentary, the Babylonian Talmud would have remained a closed book to all but a handful of specialists.Ephraim E. Urbach, The Tosaphists (Hebrew, 1955)