Rashi's Commentary on the Torah: Canonization and Resistance in the Reception of a Jewish Classic by Eric Lawee (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rashi's Commentary on the Torah: Canonization and Resistance in the Reception of a Jewish Classic by Eric Lawee Yedida Eisenstat Eric Lawee. Rashi's Commentary on the Torah: Canonization and Resistance in the Reception of a Jewish Classic. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 478 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000227 Lawee's volume is the history of how Rashi's Commentary on the Torah (hereafter: the Commentary) attained its unparalleled status in the post-talmudic Jewish canon. The book is thus both a reception history, which details the embrace as well as the rejection of the Commentary—both of which contributed to its canonization—and an intellectual history, in its recounting of the philosophical and religious currents the Commentary encountered as it spread throughout the Jewish world. How does a work gain its place in a canon? This is the central question Lawee sets out to answer in the first part of this work of careful and erudite scholarship. Lawee follows the reception of the Commentary through time and place and takes up theories of canon—for example, whether canons are normative or formative. Whereas the reception of the Commentary in northern France has long been studied, Lawee traces the Commentary's reception, embrace, and growing canonical status as it spread through much of the medieval, and later, premodern Jewish world. The second part of the book bears the fruit of the author's years-long exploration of the nearly uncharted territory of the Commentary's eastern Mediterranean supercommentaries; here Lawee recounts the previously unknown story of the vituperative rejection and resistance with which Rashi's work was met in eastern Mediterranean locales, where a more rationalist Judaism had already taken root. "What is at stake in the battle over the Commentary," writes Lawee, "is not just a proper reading of the Torah … but irreconcilable visions of Judaism, with the Commentary embodying a traditionalist version of the faith untainted by distorting Greco-Arabic encumbrances," that is, rationalism and philosophy (59). Among this book's major insights is that the battle for the character of Judaism was waged on the terrain of Rashi's Commentary (149). Lawee continues with a masterful discussion of the nature of the Commentary and of key scholarly debates. While many have long contended that Rashi set out to write a peshat biblical commentary (we may translate the term as "plain sense," though this does not do it justice), the Commentary's primary character is midrashic. [End Page 432] Indeed, its midrashic character was the basis of the thirteenth-century ruling that allowed for the weekly review of the Commentary in place of reading the Aramaic Targum Onkelos to fulfill the rabbinic program of "Scripture twice, Targum once"—which led to the Commentary's popularity outside of Ashkenaz and subsequent wide dissemination. The Commentary's midrashic character is also what drew the response of nearly all of its supercommentators and "rejectionist readers"; their selection of the Commentary as an interpretive subject set in motion the processes of canonization. A large portion of the book is devoted to Lawee's presentation of the evidence for the Commentary's arrival in new locales and his analysis of ensuing local literary responses. He accounts for the factors that moved the Commentary from one place to the next and describes the modes of reading and interpretation to which it was then subject. The picture that emerges is one in which biblical commentators embraced, critiqued, or rejected Rashi's Commentary. In Spain, the work first encountered criticism from the vantage points of rationalism, philosophy, and Kabbalah, and was openly mocked for its overuse of midrash and seeming ignorance of the peshat, presaging future eastern Mediterranean critiques. One anonymous mystical defender observed the widely accepted authority of the work and thus asserted its divine inspiration (60). Here, too, Spanish supercommentators subjected the Commentary to "omnisignificant" interpretation—that is, the exegetical ascription of significance to even the most minute details of the text—otherwise reserved for study of the Bible and the Talmud, a reflection of its authoritative and canonical status. Southern France was a hybrid region where Andalusian rationalist learning pitted itself against "antirationalist" Ashkenazic traditionalism, embodied in the giants...