Two objects carry the name of Rashi into the modern world. The first is a person: Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, born in Troyes in Champagne around February 1040 and buried there in July 1105, who wrote the most influential commentary on the Torah that has ever been produced and who gave his name, as a single word, to a school of reading. The second is a script: the characteristically slanting semi-cursive in which his commentary has been printed for five hundred years, a face of type that is so identified with him that it is called Rashi script even though, as we shall see, the typeface itself postdates him by several centuries. Both objects are strange. A commentator who wrote in Hebrew in a French town, for a readership of French rabbis and their students, became the most printed Jewish commentary in history and then, in the sixteenth century, a quarry for Christian polemicists. And a private scribal hand became, by way of a chain of accidents involving printers in Venice and scholars in Basel, one of the most widely used Hebrew typefaces in the world. This essay follows that chain: from the commentary itself, through the manuscripts in which it was copied, into the Rabbinic Bibles of Daniel Bomberg, and out into the Christian Hebraists’ studios where Rashi’s glosses were mined, translated and turned against the people who wrote them. What emerges is a story about transmission that is as much about paper and type as about exegesis, and it is a reminder that the line between a Jewish book and a Christian one is often thinner than the rhetoric of either side suggests.
Troyes: The Making of a Commentary
Shlomo Yitzhaki was born into a family of scribes in Troyes, a commercial city on the Seine in the county of Champagne with a substantial Jewish population whose ancestors had settled there after the expulsions of the eleventh century. The community around him was neither large nor poor, and it was unusually well connected: Troyes had rabbinic teachers whose teachers had studied in the Rhineland, and it produced a dense local scholarship. The young Shlomo was sent to Worms, where he studied under Yaakov ben Yakar and under Isaac ben Eliezer Halevi, both of them pupils of Gershom ben Judah, the man remembered as the Maharal, whose European work on the Talmud and the Bible had already begun to reshape how scripture was read. He returned to Troyes, joined the bet din, answered questions of law, and eventually succeeded Zerach ben Abraham as the head of the court. This is the outline of a European rabbinic career, and it is the framework within which the commentary was made.
What is remarkable about the commentary is the scale of the labour and the strictness of its method. Rashi’s work on the Torah is a running commentary, verse by verse and word by word, on the Pentateuch, and it is generally dated from something like the 1070s to within a decade or two of his death. A substantial part of it is Rashi’s own; the rest is a selection of earlier material that he has judged worth preserving, and he signals the difference between his own explanations and borrowed ones with markers that a careful reader can still use. The famous methodological statement stands at the head of the commentary on Genesis: Rashi distinguishes between the plain and literal sense of the text – the term he uses is peshat – and the midrashic, homiletical expansion of it. Everything after that sentence in the commentary is an attempt to hold a line between the two, and the line is not always held evenly, which his grandson Rashbam was quick to point out, criticising his grandfather for leaning on the rabbinic homilies when the plain sense would have served.
That distinction is worth pausing over, because it is the single most important thing Rashi did for the way scripture has been read since. Before him, the dominant mode of commentary in the Jewish world was the homiletical: the verse is a text to be mined for its associations, and a commentary is a storehouse of those associations. Rashi did not abolish that tradition and is not remembered as an enemy to it. What he did was to insist, in the most ordinary and most stubborn way, that the verse first means what it says. Where the midrash had a good midrash, he often has it too, but he marks it, and he puts the plain sense first. The commentary is, in other words, an argument about method made in the form of a commentary, and it is the reason that “according to Rashi” became, in the centuries that followed, one of the shortest ways of indicating a particular kind of reading. More than three hundred supercommentaries, written by some of the greatest names in rabbinic literature, were produced to analyse Rashi’s choices of language and his citations; the sheer volume is itself a measure of how completely the commentary set the terms on which later readers argued.
The scale of that response deserves a pause, because the supercommentary is a genre that tells us something the commentary alone cannot. A supercommentary is a commentary on a commentary: it takes Rashi’s gloss on a verse, sets out the different ways in which it has been read, the manuscript witnesses in which the wording varies, the later authorities who have disagreed about it, and argues for a preferred resolution. The more than three hundred of them that exist are therefore, taken together, a map of the Jewish reading of the Bible in the form it took after Rashi: not a series of independent commentaries but one great text with a long apparatus of disagreement attached to it. Read as a body, they turn the commentary from an object into a tradition, and they make visible the thing the printed Rabbinic Bible was built to freeze. Rashbam, his grandson, had already begun the argument inside the family; the supercommentaries carried it out for four hundred years.
It is worth situating that method in the world it belonged to. The gloss – the short explanation written beside a text – was by the eleventh century an established European practice, and its two great collections in the Rhineland and in northern France were the Sefer ha-Pardes and the Sefer ha-Ora, anthologies of traditional exegesis compiled and transmitted by teachers whose names are often lost, and Rashi’s own students produced further collections of the kind. Into this world Rashi brought something that was at first startling and is now so familiar that its originality has become invisible: a commentary that treats the biblical verse as a text to be understood before it is a text to be mined. The difference can be seen in a single gesture. Where a homily will carry a verse away to a distant question, Rashi stays with the word in front of him and asks what it can mean in its place, in its sentence, in its context. The technique depends on a philological judgement about context that no earlier commentary had made the organising principle of a running gloss on the Torah.
One more feature of the work deserves mention before we turn to its physical form, and it is the feature that makes Rashi’s commentary peculiar among medieval Jewish books: it is written in Hebrew. Rashi’s other writings, including his legal responsa and his encyclopaedic compendia, are in French, the vernacular of the Jewish communities of his day and the language in which his correspondents and his students worked. The Torah commentary alone is in Hebrew, and it is a Hebrew of unusual clarity and restraint, a Hebrew written for reading aloud in a synagogue or in a study and not for display. The decision to write the commentary in the language of the text it glosses is itself an argument, and it is the reason the commentary could be printed in Hebrew without translation and then read, unchanged, in Jewish and Christian study houses alike.
The Rashi Hand and the Scribe’s Model
Manuscripts of Rashi’s commentary on the Torah were copied in enormous numbers across medieval Europe, and the survival rate is remarkable: the commentary on Genesis alone exists in a substantial body of witnesses, among them the thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Codex Parma 3204, which is treated as the base version in the modern manuscript catalogue maintained by M. G. Keter, and in copies at Leiden and in the National Library of Israel. The reason for the popularity is obvious once one looks at the shape of the book. Rashi’s commentary is not a separate volume with a table of contents and a sequence of chapters. It is a gloss: a narrow column of Hebrew running alongside the biblical text, key by key, so that the reader can see the scripture and the explanation at the same moment, on the same page, without turning a leaf. The commentary is the page. That is why it could be incorporated into a Bible that was already in the reader’s hands, and why it could be printed in the margin.
It is also worth remembering what kind of book this was in the first place. Rashi’s commentary was not a study that sat on a shelf; it was a working instrument, produced in the form in which it was to be used. Its brevity is a working feature. A gloss that runs no longer than the verse it glosses can be read straight through, verse by verse, with the biblical text visible beside it; a commentary that had run to paragraphs would have been a commentary in the modern sense and would have displaced the text rather than accompanied it. The form was chosen for use at a desk, in a study, and later in the synagogue, where the psalms were read and glossed aloud. And the form travelled: copies of the commentary were written into the margins of Bibles that their owners carried with them, so that a reader who could not afford a separate commentary volume could still have Rashi between the lines of his own scripture. The physical object of the commentary was thus not the codex but the page, and the page was designed to be read with the text in front of it.
The physical arrangements were various, and none of them was ever fixed. In some manuscripts the gloss was written in the space between the lines of the biblical text, so that commentary and scripture occupied the same vertical band of the page and the reader’s eye moved down a single column. In others it was pushed out to the inner margin, where the commentary acquired a column of its own and the biblical text was allowed the space it needed. In yet others the glosses were entered later, into a Bible that had been copied first and acquired its commentary over the years as the owner’s reading deepened. That third arrangement was the most economical and in the long run the commonest fate of the object: a working Bible that became a commentary in the margins of its own text. Whatever the arrangement, the effect on the reader was the same, and it is the effect that made the printed Rabbinic Bible possible. The commentary was not a separate work that had to be consulted. It was part of the surface of the scripture, and the whole subsequent history of the object follows from that fact.
The manuscripts also preserved Rashi’s hand, or hands like it. A number of copies of the Tanakh in which Rashi wrote his own glosses between the lines of the text survive, and these have been of interest to palaeographers and to the makers of facsimiles because they give a fixed point for the development of Hebrew book hands in the twelfth century. Rashi’s script is a careful, somewhat angular square hand, and because his own annotated books circulated, his hand became available as a model in a way that a private scribe’s hand rarely is.
None of this should be imagined as a solitary act of authorship, and the distinction matters for how the commentary is transmitted. A work of this kind was produced in a workshop, and the scribe who copied Rashi’s glosses was usually not the man who wrote them. He was a professional who had learned to imitate a recognised hand, and the recognised hand was precisely what made his copies recognisable as Rashi. Once a hand is conventional enough to be imitated, the commentary has stopped being one man’s property and become a standard, and the shop that could supply it was producing a commodity rather than a document. The manuscript catalogues record the point in their own language. The catalogue of Jewish manuscripts maintained by M. G. Keter, which lists the surviving witnesses to Rashi’s commentary, takes the thirteenth- or fourteenth-century Codex Parma 3204 as its base version for the commentary on Genesis, and lists beside it not only later copies of Rashi but early manuscripts of other commentaries, Rashbam’s and Nahmanides’ among them. A base version is what a catalogue calls the witness from which variants are described and against which other readings are measured. It is an editorial decision about which manuscript is to be treated as the standard, made long before anyone thought of type.
Here a distinction needs to be made, because it is the point at which a great deal of loose writing goes wrong. There are two things that are called Rashi script, and they are not the same thing and not the same age. The first is a handwriting tradition associated with Rashi: the Sephardic square script used for writing Torah scrolls, which took Rashi’s own writing, or a hand attributed to him, as its model, and which was accordingly nicknamed after him, so that a Torah scroll written in that style is said to be written in Rashi’s script. This is a scribal convention with a fifteenth- and sixteenth-century history in the Sephardi communities of the Mediterranean and in the Ashkenazi communities that imitated them, and its connection with the man himself is traditional rather than documentary.
The second thing is a typeface. The Rashi script or Sephardic script used for printing is a semi-cursive based on fifteenth-century Sephardic semi-cursive handwriting, and it is named for Rashi because his works came to be customarily printed in that face, although Rashi himself died several hundred years before the script came into use. It was taken as a model by early Hebrew typographers such as Abraham Garton, the Soncino family and Daniel Bomberg in their editions of commented texts, and their reason for doing so was practical and rather beautiful: the commentary needed to look different from the text it surrounded, so they set the biblical text in a square typeface and the rabbinic glosses in the slanting semi-cursive. One of the most consequential decisions in the history of Hebrew printing was, in effect, a typographical decision to make two kinds of writing visibly distinct. Once that convention was established, the face that served for the glosses became known by the name of the gloss, and the name stuck: the Rashi script of the printed page is not Rashi’s writing, but it is the writing that Rashi’s writing was printed in.
The practical consequences of that convention run through the rest of this essay. Because the commentary was a gloss and not a book, it could be set beside the text; because it could be set beside the text, it could be printed with the text; and because it could be printed with the text in a volume large enough to hold both, it became the most reproduced Jewish commentary in the history of the press. The manuscript and the printed page are not two episodes in this story but one continuing story, and the type is the hinge between them.
Printing the Gloss: The Rabbinic Bibles of Venice
Venice in the early sixteenth century was the one place in Europe where everything needed for a great Hebrew printing enterprise could be assembled: Jewish type founders, paper, a large and skilled Jewish and Christian workforce, a university and a printing industry of international scale, and a market that extended across the Mediterranean and beyond. Daniel Bomberg, a Christian printer of Antwerp origin working in the Venetian ghetto, produced between 1516 and 1524 a series of great polyglot and Rabbinic Bibles that were, in the words of one recent survey of the subject, the most ambitious printing projects of the age. The first Rabbinic Bible, the Mikraot Gedolot, appeared in 1516 and 1517, in four volumes, edited by Felix Pratensis, a Jew who had been baptised and who worked as an associate of Bomberg. The second edition, of 1524 and 1525, was edited by the Masoretic scholar Jacob ben Hayyim ibn Adonijah, who revised the biblical text itself and included the Masoretic notes, and it is this second edition, with its new arrangement of text, commentary and Masorah on the page, that became the standard for the next three centuries.
About the first edition there is one further fact worth recording, because it explains why the second edition was not a re-issue but a different book. The 1516 printing, remarkable as it was, came out riddled with thousands of technical errors. It was objected to on two further grounds as well: it had been edited by Felix Pratensis, a Jew who had been baptised, and its Christian printer had thought it necessary to seek an imprimatur from Pope Leo X for a volume that was ultimately to be sold to Jewish readers in the ghetto. The result was not a corrected reprint but a fresh edition under the direction of editors the Jewish readership would accept, and that second edition is the one that served as the textual model for nearly every Rabbinic Bible printed afterwards. It is worth noticing what this means for the history of the object. The page that Bomberg’s second edition fixed was not simply a better version of the first; it was a page that had been through a negotiation between a Christian commercial enterprise, a convert, and a market that would not buy the first version at any price. The format that became the European standard was the product of that negotiation, not of a designer’s plan.
The page design deserves attention, because it is the reason the format was copied everywhere for the next two hundred years. The biblical text occupies the centre, in square type. Rashi’s commentary runs in the inner margin, printed in the semi-cursive that came to be called the Rashi script. The outer margin carries the other classical commentaries, in the same semi-cursive but in a smaller size: the Tosafot on the Torah, then Abraham ibn Ezra, David Kimhi, Nahmanides, Jacob ben Asher and others, and, in the second edition, the Masoretic notes on the text itself. The result is a page in which three layers of reading – scripture, the eleventh-century gloss, and the accumulated medieval commentary – are visible simultaneously, in a typographic hierarchy that makes the relationships between them legible at once. The Masorah, the very material this journal exists to study, was printed into the same frame. It is one of the great ironies of the history of the subject that the most systematic printing of the Masoretic material was achieved as a by-product of a Christian printer’s commercial decision to sell a Bible that included Rashi.
The frame of the second edition is in fact more crowded than the account so far has given, and the crowding is the point. In the centre stands the biblical text with the Masoretic notes printed on it; in the inner margin runs Rashi; in the outer margin run the other commentaries, and in the second edition those included Abraham ibn Ezra, Nahmanides, David Kimhi, Obadiah ben Jacob Sforno and Jacob ben Asher’s Ba’al HaTurim, with Rashbam among them and the Aramaic Targum Onkelos in the volume too; and the haftarot and the Five Megillot were printed alongside. The biblical text itself had been set afresh by Jacob ben Hayyim against the masoretic codices he happened to have to hand. That is the moment at which the Masorah stops being a marginal apparatus and becomes part of the text it annotates. Scholars have argued about what that text actually is: Ginsburg and others held that ben Hayyim’s text is a good representation of the Aaron ben Moses ben Asher tradition, while others doubted that he had access to the best witnesses at all. The argument has never entirely closed, and it runs directly through the later history of the printed Hebrew Bible. Much of what Menahem Lonzano and Jedidiah Norzi spent the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries correcting was the difference between one manuscript tradition and another, transcribed in metal by a compositor working from exemplars the printer himself had never seen.
Three things about the Rabbinic Bibles need saying, because each bears on how we read the printed page today. The first is that the text itself was not simply reproduced. Jacob ben Hayyim’s edition corrected the Hebrew text against the masoretic codices of his own day, and his text, with the Masorah attached, became the received text that the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions of the Hebrew Bible follow. The second is that the commentaries were not printed as separate books with cross-references but as continuous text in the margin, which meant that a reader could read the Torah with Rashi in a single sitting without ever consulting a commentary separately – a reading practice that shaped how the commentary was understood for four hundred years. The third is that the Rabbinic Bible was a commercial product in a competitive market: Bomberg’s first editions were expensive and slow, his second was enormously successful, and the format was copied by Christian printers in Basel and Paris and by Jewish printers in Rome and Constantinople, so that the “Mikraot Gedolot page”, with the text in the middle and the commentaries around it, became the standard European template for the Hebrew Bible with commentary for four hundred years.
It is worth noticing what this did to Rashi. The commentary that had been written in the twelfth century as a gloss in a private book became, in the 1520s, the most visible and most printed commentary in Europe, printed by the hundred and then by the thousand, in a typeface that carried his name, in a format that put his words on the same page as the words of scripture. The “Rashi Bible” – a Hebrew Bible with Rashi and the other classic commentaries, and the Masorah – became a recognisable object with its own title, its own market, and its own competitors. And because it was printed, Rashi’s text was standardised in a way that manuscripts never are: the variations between one copy and another were smoothed out, the commentary acquired a fixed form, and the man who had written a running gloss for the use of a study circle in Troyes became an institution.
That last fact deserves a moment of its own, because it is the point at which the material this journal exists to study enters the story properly. The Masorah, the systematic annotation of the biblical text that records the tradition of its transmission, had for centuries circulated in Jewish manuscripts, copied by Jewish scribes with a care that amounted to a form of preservation. In Bomberg’s second edition it was set in type, in the same frame as Rashi and the Targum, and carried on the strength of a format designed for a Christian printer’s commercial purposes into Basel, Paris, Rome and Constantinople. Within a generation the Masorah was available to Christian Hebraists in a form they could read and cite, and the apparatus that Münster and Simon and Wolf took from the Rabbinic Bible included the Masoretic notes on the text alongside the medieval commentaries. The Masorah was not studied by the Christians as an ancient curiosity. It was used, because it was the critical apparatus already attached to the text they were arguing about, and it had been attached to it in print by a printer who had no interest in it whatever. The irony is complete, and it is the reason the subject belongs in a journal about transmission rather than in a book about either side of the old religious quarrel.
Münster, Simon and the Christian Use of Rashi
The first Rabbinic Bibles appeared in Venice in 1516, and within a decade the Christian Hebraists of northern Europe were producing editions of their own that drew on them. Sebastian Münster, the German Hebraist who became the first to produce a Hebrew Bible in Germany, published his Biblia Hebraica at Basel with a Latin translation and a large number of annotations, in successive editions through the 1520s, 1530s and 1540s, culminating in the 1546 printing whose first volume carries the books from Genesis to 2 Kings in the order of the Masoretic codices and whose second carries the Prophets. The order is the tell. Münster’s Bible is arranged the way the Masorah arranges the Bible, and that arrangement came to him from the Rabbinic Bible, because the Rabbinic Bible was where the Masorah was printed. He was not merely reading Rashi; he was working inside the apparatus that Bomberg had assembled, and taking from it the parts that served his purposes: the corrected Hebrew text, the Masoretic notes, and the medieval commentaries as a store of philological and exegetical material.
That use had a peculiar character, and it is important to describe it accurately. The Christian Hebraists did not read Rashi as a neutral philologist would read a lexicon, and they did not read him as a Jew reading his own tradition. They read him as a witness whose authority was external to themselves and therefore usable in argument. Because Rashi was a rabbi, and the chief rabbi of the Jews of Troyes, his explanations carried a peculiar evidential weight for a Christian Hebraist: they could be quoted as the admitted interpretation of the synagogue, and set against the Christian reading. The phrase has been used of this appropriation with some bluntness, and it is not unfair. The Christian Hebraists mined Rashi’s commentary for readings that supported their own, and they were not above selecting him accordingly. There is a specific and well-documented history of Christian scholarship that begins with this habit, and Rashi is one of its principal exhibits: the same commentary that was written to keep the plain sense of the Hebrew in view became, within a generation, a stock of arguments in a controversy in which Rashi had no interest whatever.
The pattern continued into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Richard Simon, the Oratorian whose Histoire critique du Vieux Testament of 1685 became a founding document of the critical study of the Pentateuch, leaned on Rashi repeatedly in his attempt to establish the date and authorship of the biblical books; the work can be consulted in the digitised copy that records his arguments at length. Johann Christoph Wolf, the Hamburg polyglot, assembled a vast store of Hebrew and rabbinic material for Christian biblical scholarship in his Bibliotheca Hebraea, and Rashi figures prominently in it. The German Hebraist tradition that Münster began did not merely borrow Rashi’s commentary; it made Rashi part of the standard apparatus of Christian Old Testament study, where he remained for centuries as the default Jewish interpreter of the Hebrew text, cited with respect and frequently disagreed with.
What is striking, looking back, is how much of the modern discipline rests on this appropriation. The comparison of the Hebrew text with the versions, the collation of manuscript readings, the insistence on the plain sense of a difficult verse, the practice of citing a named Jewish commentator as an authority and an opponent at once: these are tools that the Christian Hebraists of Basel and Hamburg developed out of the Jewish exegetical tradition, and they developed them in an atmosphere of unremitting hostility to the people whose tradition they were using. Rashi’s commentary entered the printshop of a Christian printer in Venice, was set beside the Masorah in the frame that became standard for European Rabbinic Bibles, was used as an argument by Münster and Simon and Wolf, and was printed in Latin for readers who would never open a Talmud and had no intention of understanding Rashi as anything other than a witness to be quoted. It is a story of transmission with teeth in it, and it is one of the more instructive cases we have of how a text’s meaning is determined less by what its author intended than by the hands it passes through.
Rashi would not have recognised the twentieth-century editions of the Torah that carry his name at the foot of the page, nor the enormous literature of supercommentaries that grew up around his choices of a single word. But the shape of the book he made – text in the middle, explanation in the margin, explanation close enough to the text to be read with it – is the shape in which his commentary still reaches the reader, and the type in which it is printed is still, in a strictly literal sense, his. For a journal devoted to the transmission of scripture, that is a subject of more than antiquarian interest. It is the story of how a commentary written in Hebrew in a French town in the eleventh century became, by way of Venice and Basel, part of the permanent equipment of biblical scholarship in every language in which scripture is now studied.
References
- Rashi — Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation
- Rashi script — Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation
- Mikraot Gedolot — Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation
- Some Notes Regarding the First and Second Rabbinic Bibles — Jordan S. Penkower, The Seforim Blog, 5 March 2008
- Rashi — Jewish History Resource Center, Project of the Dinur Center for Research in Jewish History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
- Jewish Manuscript Catalogue, manuscripts including Codex Parma 3204 — M. G. Keter
- Sebastian Münster — Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation
- Biblia Hebraica, volume 1: Genesis to 2 Kings — Sebastian Münster, Basel, 1546, Google Books
- Histoire critique du Vieux Testament — Richard Simon, 1685
- Rachi de Troyes — Simon Schwarzfuchs, Albin Michel, 2005
- Jacob ben Hayyim ibn Adonijah — Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation
- Felix Pratensis — Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation
- Aaron ben Asher — Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation
- Menahem Lonzano — Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation