The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time by Michael Shapiro Page A
Authors: Michael Shapiro
Tags: Religión, History, Biography, Biographies, Religious, Jewish, Judaism, Jews, ranking, jewish 100, influential
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forgotten village a master of the Word, of God’s law.
He was born and died in the Champagne region of northeast France, living most of his life in a town called Troyes. His maternal uncle was a well-respected rabbi who had studied with Rabbenu Gershom of Mainz (dubbed the “Light of the Diaspora”), the leading Talmudist of the tenth century and a forerunner of Rashi. He studied for a time in Worms and at Mainz under Isaac ben Judah, a rabbi dubbed the “Frenchman,” whom Rashi always considered his master. Rashi’s study at various Talmud schools reflected his aim first to absorb the disciplines of several traditions and then to incorporate them into a new vision.
Rashi stressed that the truly learned man must support himself with work “of the hands,” and to prove his point he labored in his family’s vineyard. Failing to till and irrigate the soil would surely leave it barren—and so the mind. To be a rabbi was an honor.
When he was about thirty, Rashi founded a school in Troyes. It became the center of Talmudic studies for the region and served as a catalyst in reviving Jewish learning and scholarship (especially after the devastation and massacres brought about by the Crusaders during 1096 in Central Europe). Rashi’s brilliant teaching and extraordinary example contributed greatly toward the reinvigoration of Jewish culture and morale during a time of extreme religious persecution. His Responsa or answers to questions on the law served as models for generations of students. The revival of scholarship inspired by Rashi was also in many ways comparable to the rise of Christian literary movements led nearby by Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux.
Rashi’s commentaries on the Talmud and the Bible are glosses, usually short discussions on individual words or small phrases from the holy text. Rashi was the perfect commentator, never a gigantic, universal thinker like Philo or Maimonides, never seeking to compose a grand compendium of all philosophy and logic or reconcile his conclusions with natural science. Rashi’s goals were simple. He wished to explain the law in clear, comprehensible terms. “To write like Rashi” came to mean to write intelligibly, similar to the modern computer jargon term WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”).
Rashi was a master grammarian and lexicographer. He established the correct text of the Talmud, then a confusing jumble of conflicting scrolls. His biblical commentaries, while more subjective in presentation than those on the Talmud, were for hundreds of years devotional best sellers, accessible to the general reader. The commentaries on the Talmud, on the other hand, were academic texts comprehensible to both the interested student and the learned rabbi. The more you knew, the more meaningful they were, Rashi’s clear descriptions coming into sharper focus with expanding knowledge.
Rashi’s work exerted lasting influence on almost nine centuries of rabbinical thought. How many other writers (perhaps other than the great Greek philosophers) have exerted such influence for so long? After Rashi’s death, his sons-in-law and then his grandsons established a kind of Rashi dynasty, earning the honored acronyms of Rashbam, Rabbenu Tam, and Ribam, contributing tossafot, additional glosses on his commentary and further enriching the Talmud.
But the institutionalized prejudice of the Church kept this great thought out of view, away from the mainstream of the world’s intellectual development. Copies of the Talmud were burned in bonfires of hate. However, until the Enlightenment and emancipation in the 1700s, in little Jewish villages all across the Diaspora, geniuses and simpletons toiled together, hidden from the fires of Inquisition, quietly and patiently studying Talmud, Rashi’s wondrous commentaries always leading the way.
21
Benjamin Disraeli
(1804-1881)
U nlike the wealthy banker Sidonia in his novels Coningsby and Tancred, Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of
He was born and died in the Champagne region of northeast France, living most of his life in a town called Troyes. His maternal uncle was a well-respected rabbi who had studied with Rabbenu Gershom of Mainz (dubbed the “Light of the Diaspora”), the leading Talmudist of the tenth century and a forerunner of Rashi. He studied for a time in Worms and at Mainz under Isaac ben Judah, a rabbi dubbed the “Frenchman,” whom Rashi always considered his master. Rashi’s study at various Talmud schools reflected his aim first to absorb the disciplines of several traditions and then to incorporate them into a new vision.
Rashi stressed that the truly learned man must support himself with work “of the hands,” and to prove his point he labored in his family’s vineyard. Failing to till and irrigate the soil would surely leave it barren—and so the mind. To be a rabbi was an honor.
When he was about thirty, Rashi founded a school in Troyes. It became the center of Talmudic studies for the region and served as a catalyst in reviving Jewish learning and scholarship (especially after the devastation and massacres brought about by the Crusaders during 1096 in Central Europe). Rashi’s brilliant teaching and extraordinary example contributed greatly toward the reinvigoration of Jewish culture and morale during a time of extreme religious persecution. His Responsa or answers to questions on the law served as models for generations of students. The revival of scholarship inspired by Rashi was also in many ways comparable to the rise of Christian literary movements led nearby by Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux.
Rashi’s commentaries on the Talmud and the Bible are glosses, usually short discussions on individual words or small phrases from the holy text. Rashi was the perfect commentator, never a gigantic, universal thinker like Philo or Maimonides, never seeking to compose a grand compendium of all philosophy and logic or reconcile his conclusions with natural science. Rashi’s goals were simple. He wished to explain the law in clear, comprehensible terms. “To write like Rashi” came to mean to write intelligibly, similar to the modern computer jargon term WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”).
Rashi was a master grammarian and lexicographer. He established the correct text of the Talmud, then a confusing jumble of conflicting scrolls. His biblical commentaries, while more subjective in presentation than those on the Talmud, were for hundreds of years devotional best sellers, accessible to the general reader. The commentaries on the Talmud, on the other hand, were academic texts comprehensible to both the interested student and the learned rabbi. The more you knew, the more meaningful they were, Rashi’s clear descriptions coming into sharper focus with expanding knowledge.
Rashi’s work exerted lasting influence on almost nine centuries of rabbinical thought. How many other writers (perhaps other than the great Greek philosophers) have exerted such influence for so long? After Rashi’s death, his sons-in-law and then his grandsons established a kind of Rashi dynasty, earning the honored acronyms of Rashbam, Rabbenu Tam, and Ribam, contributing tossafot, additional glosses on his commentary and further enriching the Talmud.
But the institutionalized prejudice of the Church kept this great thought out of view, away from the mainstream of the world’s intellectual development. Copies of the Talmud were burned in bonfires of hate. However, until the Enlightenment and emancipation in the 1700s, in little Jewish villages all across the Diaspora, geniuses and simpletons toiled together, hidden from the fires of Inquisition, quietly and patiently studying Talmud, Rashi’s wondrous commentaries always leading the way.
21
Benjamin Disraeli
(1804-1881)
U nlike the wealthy banker Sidonia in his novels Coningsby and Tancred, Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of
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