רש"י

Rav Shlomo Yitzchaki (4800/1040–29 Tammuz 4865/1105), known to every generation as Rashi, was the commentator of the Chumash and the Talmud — “Parshandata,” the interpreter of the Torah — and one of the builders of French Jewry in the days of the Rishonim. He was born in Troyes, in Champagne in northern France; his mother’s brother, Rav Shimon HaZaken, was a talmid of Rabbeinu Gershom Meor HaGolah. Around the age of twenty he set out for the great yeshivot of the Rhine: in Mainz he learned six years under his rebbe muvhak, Rav Yaakov ben Yakar, a talmid of Rabbeinu Gershom, and afterward under Rav Yitzchak ben Yehudah, and in Worms under Rav Yitzchak HaLevi — years of poverty he later described as lacking bread and clothing, with a millstone on his neck.

About 4829/1069, at close to thirty, he returned to Troyes, joined the beit din, and was soon answering halachic questions for the communities of France and the Rhine, taking no pay. The yeshiva he founded there drew talmidim from France, from Ashkenaz — among them the Riva of Speyer — and from the Slavic lands, and he enacted takanot for the kehillot of northern France, many of them in matters of communal taxes. He earned his bread from trade; an old tradition, supported by the knowledge of vineyards and wine that fills his peirushim, makes him a wine merchant.

His peirush on the Torah — “I have come only for the peshuto shel mikra” — draws the plain sense of every pasuk out of the Talmud and the midrashei Chazal, in language open to beginner and talmid chacham alike. It was accepted at once in Ashkenaz and Sefarad alike, became the first dated Hebrew book ever printed, and more than three hundred supercommentaries have been written upon it. His peirush on the Talmud, grown from the kuntresim of his yeshiva, covers nearly the whole of the Bavli and has stood on the printed page of every edition since the first printings; his laazim preserve hundreds of words of Old French. When the Crusaders of 4856/1096 destroyed the kehillot of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz — among the murdered were three sons of his rebbe Rav Yitzchak HaLevi — he mourned them in selichot, seven of which survive, among them one still said on erev Rosh Hashanah and one on Tzom Gedalyah.

In his last years a hard illness left him unable to write, and he dictated his teshuvot to the talmidim around him, among them Rav Yaakov bar Shimshon. He had three daughters, Yocheved, Miriam, and Rachel; the first two married his talmidim Rav Meir ben Shmuel and Rav Yehudah ben Natan — who completed his peirush on Makkot — and Yocheved’s sons were the Rashbam, who completed his grandfather’s peirush on Bava Batra and on Pesachim, the Rivam, and Rabbeinu Tam, pillars of the Baalei HaTosafot. Rashi was niftar on Thursday, 29 Tammuz 4865/1105, at sixty-five, and was buried in his native Troyes; the site of the old cemetery, long forgotten, was identified again in modern times, and a monument and plaque now mark it as the resting place of Rashi and other Rishonim.

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