Limitations on property ownership

Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes (“Rashi”: 1040–1105) was the foremost rabbi of late eleventh-century Europe, and his Torah commentary quickly became unprecedentedly popular throughout the Jewish world. Many later Jewish Bible commentators—including his grandson, Rashbam, Abraham ibn Ezra, and Ramban—respond to Rashi’s interpretations in their own comments. Much earlier scholarship has disproportionately focused on the minority of Rashi’s comments that present a “peshuto” interpretation of the biblical text, usually understood to be the text’s plain, unadorned, contextual meaning. ² However, most of the commentary is composed of first-millennium rabbinic interpretation—that is, midrash—and so, Rashi’s Torah commentary is best understood as a medieval midrashic anthology in the form of a commentary. Rashi’s goal in his Torah commentary was the full explanation of the text. ³ Against the historical backdrops of the increasing literacy and textualization of northern Europe’s twelfth-century Renaissance (c. 1050–1250) and the growing status of the Talmud in Ashkenaz (central Europe), Rashi very carefully selected and adapted earlier rabbinic literature and interwove it with the biblical text itself. The form of the commentary subtly teaches the necessity of the “Oral Torah” for understanding the Written Torah. Rashi shared the earlier Sages’ interpretive assumption that the Torah is perfect and divine. This assumption accounts for Rashi’s “omnisignificant” ⁴ interpretation—that is, ascription of meaning to extraneous elements, nuances, and quirks of the text, and his presentation of multiple interpretations of the same text. ⁵