Rashi | Page 7

archives, it
defines its part and mission in history. The study of men and facts in
the past permits of a sounder appreciation of recent efforts, of present
tendencies; for "humanity is always composed of more dead than
living," and usually "the past is what is most vital in the present."

No people has greater need than the Jews to steep itself again in the
sources of its existence, and no period more than the present imposes
upon it the duty of bringing its past back to life. Scattered over the face
of the globe, no longer constituting a body politic, the Jewish people by
cultivating its intellectual patrimony creates for itself an ideal
fatherland; and mingled, as it is, with its neighbors, threatened by
absorption into surrounding nations, it recovers a sort of individuality
by the reverence it pays to men that have given best expression to its
peculiar genius.
But the Jewish people, its national life crushed out of it, though
deprived of all political ambitions, has yet regained a certain national
solidarity through community of faith and ideals; and it has maintained
the cohesion of its framework by the wholly spiritual bonds of teaching
and charity. This is the picture it presents throughout the middle ages,
during the period which, for Christianity, marked an eclipse of the
intellect and, as it were, an enfeeblement of the reason to such a degree
that the term middle ages becomes synonymous with intellectual
decadence. "But," said the historian Graetz, "while the sword was
ravaging the outer world, and the people devoted themselves to
murderous strife, the house of Jacob cared only that the light of the
mind burn on steadily and that the shadows of darkness be dissipated.
If a religion may be judged by its principal representatives, the palm
must be awarded to Judaism in the tenth to the thirteenth century." Its
scholars, therefore, its philosophers, and its poets render Judaism
illustrious, and by their works and their renown shed a radiant light
upon its history.
Maimonides is one of those eminent spirits in whom was reflected the
genius of the Jewish people and who have in turn contributed to the
development of its genius.[1] Maimonides, however, was also more
than this; perhaps he presents as much of interest from the point of
view of Arabic as of Jewish culture; and expressing more than the
Jewish ideal, he does not belong to the Jews entirely. Of Rashi, on the
contrary, one may say that he is a Jew to the exclusion of everything
else. He is no more than a Jew, no other than a Jew.
BOOK I RASHI THE MAN
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CHAPTER I

THE JEWS OF FRANCE IN THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
Great men - and Rashi, as we shall see, may be counted among their
number - arrive at opportune times. Sometimes we congratulate them
for having disappeared from history in good season; it would be just as
reasonable, or, rather, just as unreasonable, to be grateful to them for
having come at exactly the right juncture of affairs. The great man, in
fact, is the man of the moment; he comes neither too soon, which
spares him from fumbling over beginnings and so clogging his own
footsteps, nor too late, which prevents him from imitating a model and
so impeding the development of his personality. He is neither a
precursor nor an epigone, neither a forerunner nor a late-comer. He
neither breaks the ground nor gleans the harvest: he is the sower who
casts the seed upon a field ready to receive it and make it grow.
It is, therefore, of some avail for us to devote several pages to the
history of the Jews of Northern France in the eleventh century,
especially in regard to their intellectual state and more especially in
regard to their rabbinical culture. If another reason were needed to
justify this preamble, I might invoke a principle long ago formulated
and put to the test by criticism, namely, that environment is an essential
factor in the make-up of a writer, and an intellectual work is always
determined, conditioned by existing circumstances. The principle
applies to Rashi, of whom one may say, of whom in fact Zunz has said,
he is the representative par excellence of his time and of his
circle.
* * * * *
In the great migratory movement beginning at the dawn of the
Christian era, which scattered the Jews to the four corners of the globe,
and which was accentuated and precipitated by the misfortunes that
broke over the population of Palestine, France, or, more exactly, Gaul,
was colonized by numbers of Jews. If we believe in the right of the first
occupant, we ought to consider the French Jews more French than
many Frenchmen. Conversions must at first have