12 - Rashi's Choice: The Pentateuch Commentary as Rewritten Midrash

Summary

ALTHOUGH many have written supercommentaries, essays, and even books about Rashi as a biblical or talmudic exegete, until recently few have looked at him as an original medieval Jewish thinker, let alone as a historical source reflective of northern European Jewish mentalité. And yet, no medieval Jew shaped the collective identity of Ashkenazi and even Sephardi Jewry more than this remarkable figure, whose genealogy is obscure but who is often compared and contrasted to his Sephardi analogue, Maimonides, whose genealogy was long and distinguished. Could Rashi have been so widely accepted as ‘the’ interpreter of biblical-talmudic Judaism for all times had he himself not been a person of his own time as well as a refashioner of it?

The master exegete Rashi of Troyes (c.1040–1105) proposed Jewish core values to his readers, especially in his Pentateuch (Humash) commentary. He did not write a treatise but wrote biblical commentaries in the form of a selective editing of rabbinic lore. Even when he did not interpret narrative biblical irregularities, he wrote what I would call ‘rewritten Midrash’.

Readers have been divided over what Rashi did as a commentator. Religious educators saw him as a master teacher who sought to inculcate specific Jewish values. Although some anthologized his comments according to their own lights, others like Eliezer Lipschuetz and the renowned Bible teacher Nehama Leibowitz taught that Rashi's values were always answers to textual difficulties and not freely offered words of his own wisdom.

Academic Bible scholars shifted the focus to Rashi as a literal or literary exegete who should be studied as a transitional figure leading to the later northern French exegetes, such as his grandson, Rabbi Samuel ben Meir (Rashbam, c.1085–c.1158), Rabbi Eliezer of Beaugency (twelfth century), Rabbi Joseph Kara (c.1065–c.1135), and Rabbi Joseph Bekhor Shor (twelfth century), and as being more traditional and less grammatically up to date than the Sephardi commentator, Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra (1089–1164). Since the nineteenth century, modern scholars have been biased in favour of appreciating a strict philological style of biblical interpretation in medieval Spain and northern France, under the lure of ‘the Sephardi mystique’. Consequently, they have seen Rashi as a transitional figure between ancient Midrash and literal or so-called plain-style commentaries.