The Development of Rabbinic Judaism

Overview

Recall questions on Rashi and his commentary on Torah and Talmud, the tosafists, Judah Halevi on Israel, philosophy, prophecy and the Songs of Zion, and Potok and Halkin on Rashi and Halevi.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Who was Rashi?

   Model answer

   Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki, who lived in Troyes in northern France in the eleventh century and worked as a vintner as well as a scholar. He wrote running commentaries on almost the whole Hebrew Bible and on most of the Babylonian Talmud, and he became the standard guide for Jewish readers of both.

2. 2

   What does Rashi's commentary actually do?

   Model answer

   It works line by line, stopping wherever the wording is difficult and supplying the minimum needed to move on: a grammatical note, the sense of a rare word, sometimes a French gloss, sometimes a rabbinic story where the plain sense will not carry the verse. Its famous quality is economy. He explains only what a reader would stumble over.

3. 3

   How do contemporary events surface in Rashi's work?

   Model answer

   He lived through the massacres of Rhineland Jewish communities at the time of the First Crusade, and the pressure of Christian polemic and persecution shows in the way he handles verses about exile, suffering and the standing of Israel. His commentary is not detached scholarship; it is written for a community under threat.

4. 4

   Why is Rashi's Talmud commentary regarded as indispensable?

   Model answer

   Because the Talmud is a compressed record of debate with no punctuation and much left unsaid, and Rashi supplies the missing steps: who is speaking, what the question assumes, where the argument turns. He was the first to do this comprehensively, and his commentary is printed on the inner margin of virtually every page of the standard Talmud.

5. 5

   Who were the tosafists, and how did their method differ from Rashi's?

   Model answer

   They were Rashi's pupils, sons-in-law and descendants in France and Germany over the following two centuries. Where Rashi explains a passage where it stands, the tosafists work across the whole Talmud, setting one passage against another and resolving the clash. Their notes sit on the outer margin, facing Rashi, so the page itself displays two ways of reading. Their leading figure was Rashi's grandson Jacob ben Meir, known as Rabbenu Tam, who disagreed with his grandfather sharply and openly, which shows how much reasoned dissent the tradition allowed.

6. 6

   Who was Judah Halevi?

   Model answer

   A Hebrew poet and thinker of Muslim and Christian Spain in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, best known for the Kuzari, a dialogue in which the king of the Khazars questions a philosopher, a Christian, a Muslim and finally a rabbi. Late in life he set out for the Land of Israel.

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