ר׳ שלמה יצחקי

ר׳ שלמה יצחקי (1040–1105), universally known by the acronym רש״י, was the foundational northern French commentator on the Hebrew Bible and Babylonian Talmud. Born and based in Troyes in Champagne, he travelled as a young man to the Rhineland academies of Mainz and Worms, where he studied traditions descending from ר׳ גרשום מאור הגולה under teachers including ר׳ יעקב בן יקר, ר׳ יצחק בן יהודה, and ר׳ יצחק בן אליעזר הלוי. Returning to Troyes, he served as teacher, dayan, and respondent while building an academy whose students and descendants helped create the Tosafist movement. His concise biblical commentary selects rabbinic interpretation while repeatedly attending to the contextual sense of Scripture; its many Old French glosses are also important evidence for medieval French language. His Talmud commentary explains vocabulary, syntax, legal assumptions, and the unfolding argument, making difficult tractates accessible as continuous texts. His daughters married scholars within his school, and his grandsons included ר׳ שמואל בן מאיר and ר׳ יעקב בן מאיר. The First Crusade destroyed the Rhineland communities in which he had studied, although scholarship notes that his surviving works contain no unambiguous direct account of the massacres. Rashi’s commentaries, copied and revised through his school, became inseparable from the standard printed forms of Torah and Talmud study.