4 - Commentary on the Torah

Summary

UNIVERSALLY REGAEDED AS one of the most creative figures in medieval Jewish society, Rashi produced an oeuvre encompassing nearly every literary genre used by Jewish sages in Germany and France at the time. He wrote commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud, responsa, liturgical poetry, and, perhaps, legal documents related to community affairs. His students wrote, in his name, collections of halakhic rulings and commentaries on the liturgical poems. Few indeed are the literary works that influenced Jewish national culture as much as Rashi's commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud. For hundreds of years in parts of the Jewish world, knowledge of the Pentateuchwith Rashi's commentary was regarded as the basic obligation of every Jewish boy, and from the time the Talmud was first printed Rashi's commentary has been printed alongside it, becoming in effect an inseparable part of talmudic study. It is, moreover, more than just a commentary, for it preserves much valuable information about Rashi's world and on occasion about his personality. It is unlikely that any other work—with the exceptions of the Bible and Talmud themselves and the midrashim—had as great an effect on the intellectual heritage of the Jewish people as did Rashi's commentaries. In our own time, when the poet Samson Meltzer wanted to convey his distress over the alienation of a sizable portion of the Jewish nation fromits traditional cultural heritage, he referred to ignorance of Rashi's commentary on the Torah as one of the clear indicators of that alienation.

Rashi gained his enduring reputation by dint of his commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud, and those commentaries have been examined broadly and in great detail. Leading scholars have dealt with these vast works, and I will not examine them in detail here. Instead, I will address myself to the principal issues in each area.

Writing a commentary on the Talmud was not a revolutionary step, for the precedent had been set by Rabbenu Gershomand his students. But writing biblical commentary in the Ashkenazi periphery of the Jewish world was a new departure: no one before Rashi had done so in Christian Europe.