Rashi's Commentary on the Torah

Abstract

Abstract Rashi’s Commentary on the Torah explores the reception history of the most important Jewish Bible commentary ever composed, the Commentary on the Torah of Rashi (Shlomo Yitzhaki, 1040–1105). The Commentary has shaped perceptions of the meaning of the Torah, Judaism’s foundation document, among leading scholars, lay readers, and initiates in Jewish learning for more than nine centuries. The Commentary has benefited from enormous scholarly attention but analysis of diverse reactions to this work has been amazingly scant. Viewing the Commentary’s path to preeminence through a wide array of religious, intellectual, and literary lenses, Lawee focuses considerable attention on a hitherto unexamined—and wholly unexpected—feature of the work’s reception: critical, and at times astonishingly harsh, resistance to it. At the same time, he shows how Rashi’s interpretation of the Torah became an exegetical classic, a staple in the curriculum, a source of shared religious vocabulary for Jews across time and place, and a foundational text that shaped the Jewish nation’s collective identity. The book takes as its larger integrating perspective processes of canonicity as they shape how traditions flourish, disintegrate, or evolve. Rashi’s scriptural magnum opus, the foremost work of Franco-German (Ashkenazic) biblical scholarship, faced stiff completion for canonical preeminence in the form of rationalist reconfigurations of Judaism abroad in Mediterranean seats of learning. It nevertheless emerged triumphant in an intense medieval battle for Judaism’s future. Investigation of the reception of Rashi’s Commentary throws light on issues in Jewish scholarship and spirituality that continue to stir reflection, and even passionate debate, in the Jewish world today.