Rashi's Biblical and Talmudic commentaries contain 3157 laazim, of which 967 occur in the Biblical commentaries and 2190 in the Talmudic, forming in the two commentaries together a vocabulary of about two thousand different words. In the Biblical commentaries, concerned, as a rule, not so much with the explanation of the meaning of a word as with its grammatical form, the laazim reproduce the person, tense, or gender of the Hebrew word; in the Talmudic commentaries, where the difficulty resides in the very sense of the word, the laazim give a translation without regard to grammatical form.
At the present time these laazim are of interest to us, not only as the expression of Rashi's ideas, but also as vehicles of information concerning the old French. As early an investigator as Zunz remarked that if one could restore them to their original form, they would serve as a lexicon of the French language at the time of the Crusades. But even Zunz did not realize the full value to be extracted from them. The rare specimens that we possess of the <I>langue d'oil</I>[55] of the eleventh century belong to the Norman dialect and to the language of poetry. Written, as they were, in Champagne, the laazim of Rashi represent almost the pure French (the language spoken in Champagne lay between the dialect of the Ile-de-France and that of Lorraine [56]), and, what is more, they were words in common use among the people, for they generally designated objects of daily use. These laazim, then, constitute a document of the highest importance for the reconstruction of old French, as much from a phonetic and morphologic point of view, as from the point of view of lexicography; for the Hebrew transcription fixes to a nicety the pronunciation of the word because of the richness of the Hebrew in vowels and because of the strict observance of the rules of transcription. Moreover, in the matter of lexicography the laazim offer useful material for the history of certain words, and bring to our knowledge popular words not to be found in literary and official texts. In the case of many of these terms, their appearance in Rashi is the earliest known; otherwise they occur only at a later date. And it is not difficult to put the laazim back into French, because of the well-defined system of transcription employed. Even the laws of declension (or what remained of declension in the old French) are observed.
Unfortunately, the great use made of Rashi's commentaries necessitated a large number of copies, and frequent copying produced many mistakes. Naturally, it was the laazim that suffered most from the ignorance and carelessness of the copyists and printers, especially in the countries in which French was not the current language. Efforts have been made within the last two centuries to restore the laazim. Mendelssohn and his associates applied themselves to the commentary on the Pentateuch, Lowe, to the Psalms, Neumann, to the Minor Prophets, Jeitteles and Laudau, to the whole of the Bible, and the Bondi brothers, Dormitzer, and, above all, Landau, to the Talmudic commentaries. But these authors, not having consulted the manuscripts and knowing the French language of the middle ages only imperfectly, arrived at insufficient results. Even the identifications of Berliner in his critical edition of the commentary on the Pentateuch are not always exact and are rarely scientific.
Arsene Darmesteter (1846-1888), one of the elect of French Judaism and a remarkable scholar in the philology of the Romance languages, realized that in the commentaries of Rashi "the science of philology possesses important material upon which to draw for the history of the language in an early stage of its developinent." With the aim of utilizing this material, he visited the libraries of England and Italy, and gathered much that was important; but his numerous occupations and his premature death prevented him from finishing and publishing his work. In the interests of French philology as well as for a complete understanding of the text of Rashi, it would be advantageous to publish the notes that he collected. In fact, such a work will appear, but unfortunately not in the proportions Darmesteter would have given it. Nevertheless, it will be found to contain information and unique information, upon the history, the phonetics, and the orthography of medieval French; for the first literary works, which go as far back as the eleventh century, the life of Saint Alexius and the epic of Roland, have not come down to us in the form in which they were written. "What would the trouveres of Roland and the clerics of Saint Alexius have said if they had been told that one day the speech of their warrior songs and their pious homilies would need the aid of the Ghetto to reach the full light of day, and the living sound of their words would fall upon the ears of posterity through the accursed jargon of an outlawed race?"[57]
In this chapter I have made some general observations upon the composition and the method of the Biblical and Talmudic Commentaries of Rashi. Concerning their common characteristics there is little to add, except to remark that the explanations are generally simple, natural, and unforced. This is especially true of the Talmudic commentaries. Rashi in large part owes the foundations upon which his works are built to his predecessors, and no higher praise could be accorded him than to say that he knew the great mass of traditions and the explanations made before him.
However, Rashi rather frequently gave his own personal explanation, either because he did not know another, or because those propounded before him did not seem adequate or satisfying. In the latter case, he usually put down the rejected explanation before setting forth his own. Yet there are cases in which intelligence and imagination fail to supply knowledge of some special circumstance; and such lack of knowledge led Rashi into many errors. On the whole, however, the commentaries contain invaluable information, and are of the very highest importance for Jewish history and literature, because of the citations in them of certain lost works, or because of hints of certain facts which otherwise would be unknown. Modern historians justly recognize in Rashi one of the most authoritative representatives of rabbinical tradition, and it is rare for them to consult him without profit to themselves.
CHAPTER VI
THE BIBLICAL COMMENTARIES
"Thanks to Rashi the Torah has been renewed. The word of the Lord in his mouth was truth. His way was perfect and always the same. By his commentary he exalted the Torah and fortified it. All wise men and all scholars recognize him as master, and acknowledge that there is no commentary comparable with his." This enthusiastic verdict of Eliezer ben Nathan[58] has been ratified by the following generations, which, by a clever play upon words, accorded him the title of <I>Parshandata,</I> Interpreter of the Law.[59] And, verily, during his life Rashi had been an interpreter of the Law, when he explained the Scriptures to his disciples and to his other co-religionists; and he prolonged this beneficent activity in his commentaries, in which one seems to feel his passionate love of the law of God and his lively desire to render the understanding of it easy to his people. Yet it is true that all scholars did not share in the general admiration of Rashi, and discordant notes may be heard in the symphony of enthusiasm.
Of what avail these eulogies and what signify these reservations?