Rashi (1040-1105)

Rashi at a glance

Troyes, a small Jewish community in feudal France

In the mid-11th century, Troyes was already a thriving city of Champagne, whose trade fairs would soon draw merchants from all over Europe. Its Jewish community, settled there since at least the beginning of the century, lived from crafts, trade and viticulture — an economic activity then open to Jews in this wine-producing region^[17]. It was in this milieu that Shlomo, son of Yitzhak — himself described by tradition as a pious man who earned his living from the wine trade — was born around 1040^[18].

According to a tradition reported by several biographers, Rashi was born in the same year as the death of Rabbenu Gershom ben Yehuda, known as Meor haGola ("the Light of the Exile", c. 960-1040), the great Rhineland codifier whose authority then structured the whole of nascent Ashkenazi Judaism. This chronological coincidence nourished a traditional saying — "one sun rises as the other sets" — which should be received as an edifying legend rather than an established fact, since the exact dating of Rashi's own birth remains uncertain among the sources^[19].

Training at Worms and Mainz

Still young, Rashi left Champagne for the Rhine valley, then the great centre of Ashkenazi Talmudic learning. He studied at Worms under Rabbi Yaakov ben Yakar, head of the local yeshiva, then completed his training under Rabbi Isaac ben Eliezer HaLevi — both direct disciples of Rabbenu Gershom, whose teaching and halakhic decisions they transmitted^[20]. He also spent time at Mainz, another scholarly hub of the region, before returning to Champagne^[21].

This Rhineland training was decisive: it linked Rashi to the tradition of Rabbenu Gershom, known for his decrees protecting the dignity of women in marriage and for having been the first to systematize part of Ashkenazi Talmudic jurisprudence. From him Rashi inherited a method founded on minute study of the text, pedagogical clarity and the concern to transmit — not to innovate for innovation's sake.

Return to Troyes and the winegrower's trade

Rashi returned to Troyes around 1065. He joined the local rabbinical court (beth din), where he began answering questions of religious law, then became one of its authorities after the death of Zerah ben Abraham, according to the tradition reported by the Jewish Virtual Library — a point conveyed by that notice alone and given here with that reservation^[22]. Like his father, he earned his living from viticulture and the wine trade — a fact attested by several sources, which earned Rashi, in French tradition, the nickname "Rashi the winegrower"^[23]. This manual activity, far from an anecdotal detail, places Rashi in the long rabbinic tradition that refuses to make the teaching of the Torah a paid profession in itself: the master must, like the Fathers of the Mishnah before him, support himself by secular work.

Around 1070, at about thirty years of age, Rashi opened in Troyes his own Talmudic school (yeshiva), according to the Jewish Virtual Library^[24]. Disciples quickly flocked there, from all over northern France and sometimes from further afield. It was within this oral teaching, week after week, that Rashi developed what would become his written commentary — tradition holds that the bulk of his exegetical work was born of the lessons given to his students before being written down and revised over the years^[25].

The peshat method in the face of midrash

Rashi is the first Jewish exegete to distinguish clearly and systematically between peshat (the plain, literal, contextual sense of the text) and derash (the homiletic or midrashic sense, often allegorical)^[26]. His method does not, however, consist in rejecting midrash: he integrates it extensively, but only when the literal sense of the verse seems to him insufficient or ambiguous — midrash then coming to "adjust" (meyashevet) the words to their rightful place^[27]. Rashi himself formulated this methodological principle in his commentary on Genesis 3:8:

"I have come only for the plain sense of Scripture (peshuto shel miqra), and for the aggadah that explains the words of Scripture in a manner that fits in with them." — Rashi, commentary on Genesis 3:8^[28]

This sentence, one of the most quoted in the whole history of medieval Jewish exegesis, marks a methodological break: before Rashi, Jewish biblical commentaries proceeded almost exclusively by midrashic accumulation, with no constant concern to distinguish that level from the immediate contextual sense of the text^[29]. Benjamin J. Gelles nonetheless qualifies the scope of this break: Rashi's commentary remains, in its overall economy, largely nourished by midrashic materials, chosen and tightened around the thread of the text rather than abandoned^[30].

A famous example illustrates this method from the very first verse of Genesis. To the question of why the Torah begins with the account of creation rather than with the first commandment given to Israel (the fixing of the calendar, in Exodus 12:2), Rashi answers by taking up a tradition attributed to Rabbi Yitzhak:

"If the nations of the world said to Israel: 'You are thieves, for you conquered by force the lands of the seven nations [of Canaan],' Israel could answer them: 'The whole earth belongs to the Holy One, blessed be He; it is He who created it and gave it to whom He pleased. It is by His will that He gave it to them, and it is by His will that He took it back from them to give it to us.'" — Rashi, commentary on Genesis 1:1^[31]

This commentary, one of the most famous in the whole corpus of Rashi's commentaries, shows well the ambition of his exegesis: it never stops at mere linguistic gloss, but systematically seeks the theological and existential significance of the text for its reader.

The commentary on the Torah: the first Hebrew book printed with a certain date

Rashi's commentary on the five books of the Torah became, from the Middle Ages onward, the obligatory companion text of all Jewish biblical study. Its editorial fortune is unique: in February 1475, the printer Abraham ben Garton completed at Reggio di Calabria, in southern Italy, the printing of Rashi's commentary on the Pentateuch (colophon dated 10 Adar 5235) — the first book in Hebrew characters bearing a certain date in the history of printing^[32]. For this edition, Garton created a semi-cursive typeface, inspired by Sephardic manuscript handwriting, intended to distinguish the commentary visually from the sacred biblical text printed in square characters^[33]. This typeface, generalized thereafter by Italian printers (notably the Soncino family), remained known as "Rashi script" — although it has, in reality, no connection with Rashi's own handwriting, Rashi having died nearly four centuries before its creation^[34].

Rashi commented on nearly all the books of the Tanakh, with the exception of the books of Chronicles (I and II) and Ezra-Nehemiah; his commentary on Job, left unfinished, stops at chapter 40, verse 25^[35]. The commentaries that have come down under his name on these missing books are the work of disciples of his school, who incorporated materials from the Troyes yeshiva^[36]. His pupils Rabbi Shemaya and Rabbi Yossef also revised and completed the final text of the commentary on the Torah, adding some of their own notes^[37].

The commentary on the Talmud: the major work

Even more than his biblical commentary, it is his commentary on the Babylonian Talmud that secures Rashi an unrivalled authority in the history of rabbinic Judaism. Covering nearly all the Talmudic tractates, it pursues a precise pedagogical goal: to make accessible, sentence by sentence, a text of extreme argumentative density, written in a technical Aramaic studded with elliptical references. Since the first complete printed edition of the Babylonian Talmud, produced by Daniel Bomberg in Venice between 1520 and 1523, Rashi's commentary has invariably appeared in the inner margin of every printed page of the Talmud — a typographic convention taken up without exception by all later editions down to today^[38].

This editorial omnipresence has a direct consequence for Jewish pedagogy: for nearly five centuries, learning to read a page of the Talmud has meant, concretely, learning to read the text and Rashi's framing commentary simultaneously. No other commentator in the history of rabbinic Judaism has occupied a comparable editorial position.

The Old French glosses: a window onto the medieval language

A singular feature of Rashi's commentary draws the attention of linguists and medievalists well beyond the circle of Jewish studies: the systematic use of la'azim, glosses in Old French transcribed in Hebrew characters, intended to render a difficult Hebrew or Aramaic word by its vernacular equivalent^[39]. Rashi's corpus contains more than 3,000 occurrences, making it one of the most precious sources for the study of 11th-century French — a language otherwise very sparsely attested in writing at that time, since French was not yet a common language of learned writing^[40]. When a pupil of the Troyes yeshiva stumbled over a technical term, Rashi answered him in the vernacular language they both shared — a pedagogical practice of which the written text thus preserves the fossil trace^[41].

The Rhineland massacres

In the spring and summer of 1096, as the First Crusade called by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont was getting under way, bands of popular crusaders, poorly supervised and animated by an anti-Jewish fury that the official preaching had not foreseen, attacked the Jewish communities of the Rhine valley. Between May and July 1096, the communities of Speyer, Worms, Mainz and Cologne — precisely the cities where Rashi had studied a few decades earlier — were ravaged; hundreds of Jews were massacred there or took their own lives rather than accept forced conversion^[42]. These events, known as the Rhineland massacres, left a lasting imprint on Ashkenazi Jewish memory and liturgy.

An important historical distinction must be made here, attested by the episcopal acts of the time and by the pontifical legislation that followed: this violence was in no way an act of the Church as such, nor was it approved by her hierarchy. It was the deed of unruly popular bands — the "crusade of paupers" led notably by Peter the Hermit and Count Emicho of Flonheim — acting outside the framework set by Urban II and condemned by the local episcopal authority, which sought in several places (Speyer, Mainz) to protect the Jewish communities, without always succeeding against the mob^[43]. A quarter of a century later, the bull Sicut Judaeis of Callixtus II (around 1120), a bull of protection for the Jews subsequently reaffirmed by many popes, forbade Christians, under pain of excommunication, from forcing the Jews to baptism, from wounding them or pillaging their goods^[44]. Recognizing the reality and gravity of these massacres therefore in no way implies attributing them to Catholic doctrine itself.

The echo in Rashi's work

Troyes, in Champagne, was not directly struck by the violence of 1096 as the Rhineland cities were. But Rashi, who had lived and studied there and kept ties with the region's scholars, did not remain a stranger to this collective trauma. Specialists of his work note echoes of the persecution both in some of his biblical commentaries and in the penitential liturgical poetry (the selihot) composed in the decades following the massacres^[45]. The disaster of 1096 lastingly marked Ashkenazi liturgical memory: the Ashkenazi rite still preserves today several qinot (funeral lamentations) composed in direct echo of these events, recited during the fast of the 9th of Av, which commemorates the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem^[46].

A more open rabbinic tradition before Rashi

One of the points where Rashi's exegesis most directly engages the Christian reading concerns chapter 53 of the book of Isaiah, where the prophet describes a "Servant" who suffers, is despised, "pierced for our transgressions" — a text Christians have read from the beginning as a prophecy of Christ's Passion. Rashi, in his commentary on Isaiah, identifies this suffering Servant not as an individual figure, but as the people of Israel as a whole, humiliated among the nations before knowing a future glorification^[47].

This collective reading, which Rashi powerfully helped to establish as the dominant position in medieval and modern Jewish exegesis, is not however the oldest attested. Encyclopedic honesty requires recalling this precisely, relying on sources internal to the rabbinic tradition itself — not on a Christian authority Rashi would have no reason to recognize.

The Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, the Aramaic paraphrase of the book of Isaiah used in synagogue liturgy, whose composition — although it incorporates later layers — goes back in essence to the first centuries of our era, opens its commentary on chapter 53 with these words, explicitly identifying the Servant with the Messiah while distributing the sufferings described in the chapter between the nation and the Messiah's final victory:

"Behold, my servant the Messiah shall prosper." — Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, on Isaiah 52:13^[48]

Similarly, the Babylonian Talmud, in the treatise Sanhedrin (98b), reports, among the names given to the Messiah by various masters, that of "the leper of the school of the Rabbi," relying explicitly on a verse from Isaiah 53:

"Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted." — Babylonian Talmud, treatise Sanhedrin, 98b, quoting Isaiah 53:4^[49]

Comparable messianic passages are found in the midrash Ruth Rabbah and in the Tanhuma, two collections whose final redaction is late but which preserve older traditions^[50].

Rashi's collective reading and its polemical context

Rashi's collective reading takes on meaning in the context of the Judeo-Christian controversies of his time: since Christians made Isaiah 53 one of their major arguments for the messiahship of Jesus, part of Jewish exegesis found itself led to reformulate the Servant's identification in a way that deprived this argument of its force, while offering a Jewish people put to the test — notably by the persecutions of 1096 — a consoling reading of its own collective sufferings as expiatory redemption for the nations^[51]. This reading, a minority one before Rashi, became clearly dominant after him: David Kimhi (Radak, c. 1160-1235) adopted it in his commentary on Isaiah^[52]. The case of Abraham ibn Ezra (1089-c. 1164), almost a contemporary of Rashi, is more complex: his commentary on Isaiah 53, which opens on the "great difficulty" of the passage, discusses several competing opinions — including a messianic reading that Ibn Ezra himself attributes to "many" interpreters — and cannot be ranked without nuance among the mere continuators of Rashi^[53].

Sanhedrin 98b: the messianic application is that of the Talmud

The Babylonian Talmud itself, as seen above, explicitly links Isaiah 53:4 to one of the names of the Messiah — the "leper of Rabbi's school"^[54]. As for Rashi's gloss at that precise point, it merely explains the Talmudic epithet — "leper of Rabbi's school" — without itself citing or applying any verse^[55]. There is therefore, on this point, no inner tension in Rashi's work: his collective reading of the Servant in his commentary on Isaiah remains his established position, and the messianic application of Isaiah 53:4 in Sanhedrin 98b is the deed of the Talmud itself, not a messianic gloss by Rashi.

A Christian who reads Rashi therefore has no need to oppose to his exegesis an authority Rashi does not recognize — quoting Saint Paul or the Gospel to a Talmudic master in order to convince him would be an argument without purchase, since it is precisely the authority of those texts that is the object of disagreement. Intellectual honesty consists rather in showing, from the very sources Rashi holds authoritative — the Targum, the Talmud, the ancient midrashim — that the individual messianic reading of Isaiah 53 was neither foreign nor marginal in the rabbinic tradition before controversy with Christianity shifted its centre of gravity toward a collective reading. It is a disputed case, of which Catholic tradition has always held the Christological reading to be the true and fully accomplished key to the text — without this obliging anyone to disqualify the rigour or good faith of the exegete of Troyes, whose first objective remained pastoral: to console and enlighten his own community.

Three daughters, no sons

Rashi had no sons, but three daughters — Yocheved, Miriam and Rachel — all married to renowned Talmudic scholars^[56]. This absence of direct male descendants in no way prevented the formation of a genuine scholarly dynasty: nearly all the later great Ashkenazi rabbinic lineages trace back, by documented filiation, to one or another of his three daughters^[57].

Rashbam and Rabbenu Tam: the grandsons who argued with their grandfather

Two of his grandsons occupy a place of the very first rank in the history of medieval rabbinic exegesis and law. Samuel ben Meir, known as Rashbam (c. 1085-c. 1158), himself wrote a biblical commentary that pushes the peshat principle further even than his grandfather's, at times explicitly departing from his interpretation when the contextual sense of the text required it^[58]. His younger brother Jacob ben Meir, known as Rabbenu Tam (c. 1100-1171), became one of the highest halakhic authorities of his century and the initiator, with his own pupils, of the movement of the Tosafists — those commentators who, in the outer margins of the Talmudic page, facing Rashi's commentary placed in the inner margin, discuss, complete and sometimes contradict their ancestor's interpretation^[59]. This typographic layout, preserved down to the most recent printed editions of the Talmud, thus materializes, page after page, an intergenerational dialogue between Rashi and his own grandsons — a situation without equivalent in the history of Western religious commentaries.

The school of Saint-Victor and the rediscovery of the hebraica veritas

Christian interest in contemporary rabbinic exegesis, and in Rashi in particular, is neither an isolated nor a late phenomenon. From the 12th century onward, the Parisian abbey of Saint-Victor became a centre for the rediscovery of the hebraica veritas — attention to the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament, in the methodological line already traced by Saint Jerome in the 4th century. The Victorine canon Andrew of Saint-Victor (d. 1175) developed biblical commentaries nourished by systematic recourse to the Jewish interpretations of his time, an approach documented and studied in detail by the British historian Beryl Smalley in her classic work on the study of the Bible in the Middle Ages^[60]. Shortly after, Herbert of Bosham (d. after 1189), secretary to Saint Thomas Becket, pushed the approach further still: he learned Hebrew and directly consulted Jewish masters in order to read the Hebrew Psalter accompanied by Rashi's commentary^[61]. This channel of learned exchange between Latin clerics and Jewish masters, documented notably by the French historian Gilbert Dahan, a recognized specialist of Christian-Jewish intellectual relations in the Middle Ages, formed the soil in which the far broader enterprise of Nicholas of Lyra would take root a century later^[62].

Nicholas of Lyra: a Postilla nourished by Rashi

The Franciscan Nicholas of Lyra (c. 1270-1349), master of theology at the University of Paris, wrote between 1322 and 1331 his Literal Postilla on the whole Bible (Postilla litteralis super totam Bibliam), the most widely disseminated and copied biblical commentary of the late Middle Ages. For the Old Testament part, Lyra relied systematically on medieval Jewish commentaries, principally Rashi's, which he knew in depth thanks to his mastery of Hebrew — a rare case among Christian theologians of his time. Specialists of his work note that, in many passages, Lyra "transcribes almost word for word" Rashi's glosses, while firmly defending, in continuation of those same analyses, the Church's traditional Christological readings^[63]. His approach was thus in no way an abandonment of the Catholic faith in favour of rabbinic exegesis: it illustrates, on the contrary, the conviction — already present in Saint Jerome — that rigorous knowledge of the Hebrew text and of its contemporary Jewish readers serves, rather than weakens, the Christian understanding of Scripture.

From Lyra to Luther

The influence of Nicholas of Lyra's Postilla crossed the two following centuries and reached Martin Luther, who consulted it assiduously in his own Bible translation work. Luther's esteem for Lyra is attested: in his exposition of 2 Samuel 23 he praises his knowledge of Hebrew, and against the allegorical falsifications of Genesis 2 he declares that he values Lyra and ranks him among the best^[64]. A frequently repeated formula sums up this judgement by presenting Lyra as a good Hebraist and a true Christian; its exact place in Luther being unverified, it is given here as a reported formula, with no claim of authenticity^[65]. A famous Latin saying wittily sums up this chain of transmission by playing on Lyra's name, making Luther the dancer for whom Lyra is said to have played the music: tradition attributes it sometimes to the humanist Julius von Pflug (1499-1564), sometimes to a Peter of Pflug, with no attribution secured; it is therefore given here as a reported saying^[66].

Through this scholastic and Franciscan channel, it is indeed a share of Rashi's Hebrew learning — Rashi who died two centuries before Lyra's birth — that is found, indirectly but really, in the background of the Protestant Reformation and its German translation of the Bible.

This fact, solidly established by the history of exegesis, deserves to be pondered for what it is: not proof that the Hebrew text "belongs" more to one tradition than another, but a remarkable example of how the medieval Catholic Church, in its best representatives, always sought to deepen its knowledge of the sacred text in its state closest to the original — including by dialoguing, with critical discernment, with contemporary Jewish masters.

The synagogue and the Maison Rachi

In Troyes, Rashi's memory remains alive well beyond the circle of specialists. The Rashi synagogue, on rue Brunneval, houses the Maison Rachi, a museum space devoted to his life and work, along with a library — laid out in buildings restored during the 2010s (2,000 m² building restored in 2016; restored synagogue inaugurated in December 2019)^[67]. Just opposite, the Institut universitaire européen Rachi, a secular higher-education establishment partnered with the University of Reims-Champagne-Ardenne, was inaugurated in 1989 by the writer Elie Wiesel and Chief Rabbi Samuel Sirat; it is devoted to Jewish and Semitic studies and to research on the monotheisms, independently of any synagogal oversight^[68].

Nine hundred years later

The year 2005, the nine-hundredth anniversary of Rashi's death, saw major commemorations in Troyes around the monument dedicated to his memory^[69]. These celebrations recall, nearly nine centuries after his death, the singular place occupied by this winegrower turned master: a reference commentator for generations of Jewish students, a discreet but real source of medieval Christian exegesis, and a witness — through his work as through his life — to an 11th-century France where the patient study of the biblical text could still, despite the tensions and violence of the time, cross centuries and confessions.

• The Council of Trent (1545-1563) — on the Catholic doctrine of the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture, which Rashi and medieval Christians each approached from within their own tradition.
• Martin Luther (1483-1546) — on the German translator of the Bible who inherited, via Nicholas of Lyra, a share of Rashi's Hebrew learning.
• John Wycliffe (c. 1328-1384) — on another great milestone in the history of Bible translation in the medieval West.