RASHI's MOST IMPORTANT literary creation, the work that gained him his greatest fame through the ages, is his commentary on the Babylonian Talmud, one of the finest Hebrew works ever written. Other sages preceded him in writing commentaries on various talmudic tractates or even on the entire Talmud, but none of them matched Rashi's interpretative achievements, and their ongoing influence on the study of Talmud was relatively minor. Rashi's commentary displaced nearly all those written in Ashkenaz before his time, and many of those other commentaries were simply forgotten.

Research into Rashi's commentary on the Talmud is centred on six principal questions, which will be considered over the course of this chapter:

For Whom Did Rashi Write his Commentary on The Talmud?

Scholars disagree on the identity of Rashi's intended audience. Most believe that the talmudic commentary—and, to a certain degree, the biblical commentary— was meant for advanced students, not beginners. As Lipschuetz puts it, ‘[Rashi] did not write his commentary to be an open book for the masses and the common people; rather, [he meant it] for the educated people of his time, those versed in Torah.’ Yonah Fraenkel offered proof of this: he examined Rashi's interpretation of one hundred terms in the Babylonian Talmud and found that rare terms—that is, those appearing no more than five times in the entire Talmud—were explained every time they appeared. Other terms were treated in inverse proportion to their frequency of appearance; very common terms were not explained at all unless they were used in an unusual manner. It follows, according to Fraenkel, that Rashi did not write his commentaries for beginners.