Graetz.--III, p. 392 [404].

SPANISH-JEWISH EXEGESIS AND POETRY.

Steinschneider.--_Jewish Literature_, pp. 141, 146-179.

CHAPTER XI

RASHI AND ALFASSI

Nathan of Rome.--Alfassi.--Rashi.--Rashbam.

Before Hebrew poets, scientists, philosophers, and statesmen had made
Spain famous in Jewish annals, Rashi and his school were building up a
reputation destined to associate Jewish learning with France. In France
there was none of the width of culture which distinguished Spain. Rashi
did not shine as anything but an exponent of traditional Judaism. He
possessed no graces of style, created no new literature. But he
represented Judaism at its simplest, its warmest, its intensest. Rashi
was a great writer because his subject was great, not because he wrote
greatly.

But it is only a half-truth to assert that Rashi had no graces of style.
For, if grace be the quality of producing effects with the least
display of effort, then there was no writer more graceful than Rashi.
His famous Commentary on the Talmud is necessarily long and intricate,
but there is never a word too much. No commentator on any classic ever
surpassed Rashi in the power of saying enough and only enough. He owed
this faculty in the first place to his intellectual grasp. He edited the
Talmud as well as explained it. He restored the original text with the
surest of critical instincts. And his conscience was in his work. So
thoroughly honest was he that, instead of slurring over difficulties, he
frankly said: "I cannot understand ... I do not know," in the rare cases
in which he was at a loss. Rashi moreover possessed that wondrous
sympathy with author and reader which alone qualifies a third mind to
interpret author to reader. Probing the depth of the Talmud, Rashi
probed the depth of the learned student, and realized the needs of the
beginner. Thus the beginner finds Rashi useful, and the specialist
turns to him for help. His immediate disciples rarely quote him by name;
to them he is "_the_ Commentator."

Rashi was not the first to subject the Talmud to critical analysis. The
Gaonim had begun the task, and Nathan, the son of Yechiel of Rome,
compiled, in about the year 1000, a dictionary (_Aruch_) which is still
the standard work of reference. But Rashi's nearest predecessor,
Alfassi, was not an expounder of the Talmud; he extracted, with much
skill, the practical results from the logical mazes in which they were
enveloped. Isaac, the s