THIS ESSAY was written for a volume accompanying an exhibition of the printed Talmud at the Yeshiva University Museum. Brevity was then the order of the day, and this study should be complemented by the next essay, ‘Catastrophe and Creativity’, which, its title notwithstanding, contains a detailed survey of the Tosafists.

OPEN ANY COPY OF THE TALMUD PRINTED within the past halfmillennium and you will find on the inner side of the page the commentary of Rashi (1040–1105), and on the outer side of the page Tosafot, the glosses of the French Talmudists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Why did Rashi and Tosafot become so central to talmudic study and why is their study the core of the traditional Jewish canon?

If one reads an accurate translation of the Talmud, such as the translation published by the Soncino Press, one will understand all the words of the text and the general line of argument, but the individual steps lack clarity and the argument as a whole hangs loosely together. The reason is that the Talmud is, as it were, a ‘telegrammatic’ text: the main points are stated, but the flow, the linkage of the various points, is left up to the reader to reconstruct. It is this flow and linkage that Rashi supplies, and with remarkably few words. Rashi was gifted with an inordinate ability to detect both minor gaps in a presentation and the slightest ambiguity of language, and to correct them succinctly. Realizing the cumulative effect of trivial errors, he deftly guides the student through the text with a mere word or two, preventing a host of possible misunderstandings. So definitively did Rashi solve these problems that no one ever attempted again to write a similar commentary on the Talmud, and all dissimilar ones—regardless how prestigious—were swiftly consigned to oblivion. Provence discarded its classic commentary, that of R. Avraham ben David of Posquières (d. 1198), and even Yemenite Jewry, which revered Maimonides (1135–1204) as few other Jewish cultures have venerated a scholar, allowed Maimonides’ commentary on the Talmud to disappear.

Rashi's commentary did not arise out of nowhere. Genius alone could never discern the meaning of the innumerable Persian, Greek, and Latin words that abound in the Talmud.