Who was Rashi?
Shlomo ben Yitzchak — known by his acronym RaShI — is regarded as the foremost Jewish scholar of the European Middle Ages. Born around 1040 in Troyes in Champagne, he wrote running commentaries on nearly the entire Hebrew Bible and on the Babylonian Talmud. His explanations are so clear, concise and precise that they still shape the way both texts are read: in almost every traditional Talmud edition Rashi’s commentary runs along the inner margin of the page, printed in a distinctive semi-cursive typeface known for that reason as „Rashi script“. Anyone studying Talmud today studies it with Rashi.
Rashi was not a man of the Moselle — there is no record that he ever lived there. But his intellectual home was the very world in which the Jewish communities between Trier and Koblenz were rooted: medieval Ashkenaz, whose heart lay in the Jewish academies of the Rhine. Without that Rhineland world the Jewish history of the Moselle cannot be understood — and Rashi is its towering figure.
The Rhineland academies — ShUM and Ashkenaz
In the eleventh century the Rhineland was the intellectual centre of Ashkenazi Jewry. In the three communities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz — called ShUM after the Hebrew initials of their names (Shpira, U for Warmaisa, Magenza) — Talmud academies of Europe-wide standing arose. Students came from many lands to study under scholars such as Rabbenu Gershom ben Judah, the „Light of the Exile“, and his pupils. The religious ordinances later issued by the ShUM communities (the Takkanot ShUM) were binding for all of Ashkenazi Jewry. In 2021 the ShUM sites were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as the first Jewish World Heritage Site in Germany.
The young Rashi too travelled to this Rhineland. He studied in Worms under Yaakov ben Yakar and Isaac ben Eleazar ha-Levi, and in Mainz under Isaac ben Judah — all of them pupils or heirs of Rabbenu Gershom. Only around 1070 did he return to Troyes and found his own school. What he absorbed on the Rhine and from these masters he passed on to posterity in his commentaries. Through Rashi and his grandsons, the Tosafists, Rhineland learning radiated across the whole Ashkenazi world — down to the small rural communities of the Moselle, the Eifel and the Hunsrück.
Rashi the winemaker
Rashi was not a salaried rabbi — teaching Torah for pay was held to be improper. Like many scholars of his time he earned his living by the work of his own hands: he owned vineyards in Champagne, grew grapes, pressed and sold wine. This union of scholarship and viticulture is more than a biographical footnote. It shows in his work: Rashi’s commentaries are full of exact knowledge of vine, harvest, press, fermentation and cask — the practical knowledge of a man who knew the vineyard at first hand.
Where a Hebrew or Talmudic word needed explaining, Rashi reached for his everyday language, Old French, and noted down so-called la‘azim — vernacular glosses in Hebrew letters. Many of them concern the tools and processes of viticulture. Rashi’s work is thus also one of the earliest sources for medieval wine terminology of any kind. That the great interpreter of Jewish tradition lived from wine links him in a curious way to the Moselle, where Jews too lived from wine for centuries — see the page on Wine.
The Moselle within the Ashkenazi sphere
Trier is the oldest Jewish community in south-west Germany; Jewish life is attested here from the high Middle Ages. Like the other communities on the Rhine and Moselle, Trier lived by the religious standards set by the Rhineland academies: by the ordinances of Rabbenu Gershom, by the interpretation of the Talmud as Rashi and the Tosafists had shaped it, by the Ashkenazi rite. The Moselle was not a separate intellectual cosmos but part of this one religious landscape, whose centre lay on the Rhine.
Rashi belongs on a website about the Jewish Moselle, then, not because he worked here but because he embodies the intellectual world from which the Moselle communities lived. When a cantor in Wittlich or Bernkastel chanted the weekly Torah portion, a pupil in Trier studied Talmud, a family kept Passover — they did so within the tradition that had found its classic form in Rashi. For centuries his commentary was the primer with which Jewish children across the Ashkenazi world, the Moselle included, first learned to read Scripture.
Legacy
Rashi’s influence reaches far beyond Judaism. The Christian scholar Nicholas of Lyra (fourteenth century) drew on Rashi’s biblical exegesis; through Lyra it reached Martin Luther and his Bible translation. So a Jewish winemaker from Troyes, schooled at the Talmud academies of the Rhineland, indirectly helped shape the German of the Lutheran Bible. Within the Jewish world his standing is undisputed: to this day Talmud study begins with Rashi, and no commentary has been printed more often than his.