“Ridiculousness and Risibility”

The religiocultural setting that looms largest in tracing critical receptions of the Commentary is the veritable Babel of Jewish intellectual and literary expression in the eastern Mediterranean. Something unprecedented occurs in the writings of scholars with certain or highly probable eastern Mediterranean (Byzantine) affiliations: the Commentary is subjected to intense and at times systematic criticism from a position of frank superiority. The critics focus on two things: misguided exegesis, especially as expressed in the Commentary’s surfeit of midrash, and thse scandalously unscientific understanding of the Torah that Rashi is charged with promoting. The main focus in this chapter falls on Revealer of Secrets (Ṣafenat pa‘neaḥ), a Torah commentary by the fourteenth-century Eleazar Ashkenazi, who stands as the earliest datable figure to adopt a stance of arrant scorn toward Rashi. Study of his work provides a window into a world of rhetorically intense resistance to Rashi elaborated more fully by other scholars.

Rationalism versus the Rashi/Rabbinic Axis

The Book of Strictures, the work of an unknown late medieval rationalist, is the most concentrated assault on Rashi’s biblical scholarship in the annals of Jewish literature. In devoting himself to an often scornful assault on Rashi’s exegesis and ideas, focusing almost exclusively on those of midrashic provenance, the work’s author put himself at odds with powerful intellectual, halakhic, and educational currents pulling in the opposite direction, each buttressing the work’s growing reach and authority. Sefer hassagot occupies a significant place in the reception history of Rashi’s work, especially when viewed in terms of the hermeneutics of canonicity. The author’s literary vehicle is the stricture (hassagah), to which he often appends a corrective to Rashi’s interpretation. In so doing, he insistently contrasts an understanding of scripture grounded in canons of plain sense interpretation and scientific criteria of credibility with Rashi’s more fanciful midrashic methods and fantastical mentality.

Rashi’s Commentary

The Commentary’s medieval reception unfolded in diverse centers of Jewish life and across a strikingly large number of spheres: exegetical, educational, polemical, and more. The chapter investigates the fortunes of the Commentary through the period of its early printing in the three key centers for its reception history: Ashkenaz (the Franco-German sphere), Sefarad (Spain), and southern France. The chapter concludes with an account of Rashi’s status as the paramount Torah commentator as it is brightly underscored in data from the first half century of Hebrew printing. In the four centuries prior to print, the Commentary had circulated in hundreds of copies—an enormous number for a Hebrew work in the chirographic age, the focus of the overview here. With printing, the number of editions exploded, reaching some three thousand in three decades. The record of early printings points to the Commentary’s status as a foundational text transcending time and place and embodying a collective Jewish identity.

Aaron Aboulrabi and “The Straight One”

The fifteenth-century Sicilian-born commentator, Aaron Aboulrabi, marks something new in the Commentary’s reception: the emergence of a tradition of rhetorically vehement resisting reading. His awareness of Eleazar Ashkenazi is up for some debate, but more than one passage strongly suggests he consulted him. He certainly knew the Book of Strictures. While sharing the incapacity for prevarication characteristic of Ashkenazi and Pseudo-Rabad, Aboulrabi was more eclectic in his convictions and appreciated elements of Rashi’s midrashic hermeneutic. He evaluates the Commentary in the first instance on the basis of consonance with the plain sense and frequently finds it wanting. He also promotes an approach nourished by rationalist convictions. Nor does he scruple to hurl invective at “the Straight One,” as he calls Rashi, and his rabbinic forerunners. In all of this, Aboulrabi carried on exegetical, theological, and rhetorical trends known to him from the writings of Abraham ibn Ezra while still occasionally putting himself in step with Rashi’s midrashic legacy.

Conundrums of the Commentary

Rashi’s Commentary evokes a number of challenges and perplexities, beginning with the fact that it has experienced more textual vicissitudes than any other medieval Jewish work. In addition, the character and aims of the Commentary remain elusive. The most striking feature of Rashi’s exegesis is its mixture of “contextual” meaning (peshuṭo shel miqra) and classical midrashic expositions, which have a much more exegetically fanciful and theologically free character. The problem lies in the relationship between the elements. Rashi’s use of midrash may be what has most endeared the Commentary to its diverse audiences for over close to a millennium. The element of midrash also meant that the ever more classic Commentary imparted a Jewish vision whose overall thrust was often clear—but using an elusive and allusive medium whose constituents remained pliably open to interpretation, and sometimes begged for it.

Afterword

Rashi’s Commentary became deeply and diversely embedded in Jewish life and has remained so, but modernity’s disintegrative and fragmenting effect took its toll, meaning one can also find signs in recent centuries of the work’s decanonization. Yet despite clear signs of its marginalization there are corresponding indicators of the Commentary’s ongoing influence and abiding contemporaneity. The variety of manners and modes in which the Commentary figures in Jewish life reflects the divergent and at times conflicting Jewish cultural spaces that it inhabits. Without attempting to chart all twists and turns, the Afterword provides a tour d’horizon that evokes key reference points in this story, providing a basis for detailed study of the Commentary’s modern fate.

Competing Canons

Rashi’s critics joined a battle that unfolded across the late medieval Mediterranean at the center of which stood divergent ideas not only as to the correct meaning of the Torah but how to realize the divine charge that the Torah communicated. Many in the eastern Mediterranean, including Rashi’s resisting readers, took inspirtation from teachings of the Spanish luminaries, Abraham ibn Ezra and Maimonides. The late medieval battle over Judaism’s future is apparent from a peculiar specimen of Jewish rationalism bearing the title ‘Alilot devarim (Book of Accusations). Its author put his satirical genius in the service of exposure of the obscurantism that, in his view, had come to degrade Jewish life in post-talmudic times. The corruption infiltrated every sphere, and this writer thought Rashi’s Commentary a major cause and symptom of it. In the end, amid competing canons, Rashi’s Commentary, standing in varying degrees of opposition to the exegetical and theological rationalism of Ibn Ezra and Maimonides, proved triumphant, as is betokened by the composition and popularity of the greatest of the Rashi supercommentaries by Elijah Mizrahi.

Introduction

The Commentary on the Torah by Solomon ben Isaac (1040–1105)—also known as Shlomo Yitzhaki, or Rashi—stands out as the most widely studied and influential Hebrew Bible commentary of all time. This chapter explores ways in which the Commentary can be seen not only as the most formative and authoritative of Jewish biblical commentaries but also as a work bearing canonical status, though it was never formally canonized and even met with pockets of stiff opposition. The chapter argues that criticism may actually have contributed to the Commentary’s attainment of preeminent status.

Interpreting the Interpreter

One main mode of response to the Commentary that played a decisive role in its canonization is the ardent tradition of commentaries that Rashi’s work called forth (what scholars call “supercommentaries”). Simply by selecting Rashi’s interpretation of the Torah as their object of exposition, supercommentators accorded it a special status and stamp of auctoritas. In the case of Spanish supercommentators, the interpretive suppositions they brought to their study of Rashi could even bespeak a stance toward his exegesis commensurate with the one adopted toward earlier biblical and rabbinic texts. If Rashi presented ideas that troubled supercommentators, they did not seek to deauthorize the Commentary, but in keeping with strategies of commentators on canonical works across traditions, they found ways to read a difficult idea in a manner that allowed the Commentary to realize its ability to take on a new life, and even inspire, in circumstances vastly different from the one in which it was composed.