Scholarship in the humanities has seen a recent burgeoning interest in the processes of “appropriation,” a conceptual category that moves us away from the idea of one-way transmission or “influence” and allows us to explore the complex ways in which intellectual, literary, and material expressions or artifacts come to represent something “different from their original purposes.”Footnote 1 Though the term has not acquired much currency in studies of medieval Jewish biblical scholarship, its fruitful deployment is amply attested in broader explorations of premodern exegetical literature.Footnote 2 This investigation takes “exegesis and appropriation” as a revelatory integrating perspective on a neglected body of Hebrew scriptural scholarship: commentaries on the most important and influential work of Jewish biblical interpretation ever written, the Commentary on the Torah of Rashi (Solomon Yitzhaki; 1040–1105). The focus falls on “Rashi supercommentaries” (as glosses on Rashi's Commentary are usually called) from medieval Spain and on some striking religio-intellectual dynamics evident in their pages. The study thereby addresses Moshe Idel's call for scholarship to engage more with questions about “the meaning of the arrival of a corpus of writings in a new cultural environment.”Footnote 3
The status of Rashi's Commentary as the most widely studied Hebrew Bible commentary of all time is beyond dispute. So is its decisive role in shaping Jews’ perceptions of the meaning of Judaism's foundational document for over nine centuries. Contemporary Torah commentator Avivah Zornberg supplies this vivid metaphor: the Commentary was “absorbed into the bloodstream of Jewish culture.”Footnote 4
Rashi's Sephardic glossators would readily have assented to heroic assessments of Rashi's exegetical achievements. Their view of Rashi was highly admiring, even reverential (not least because Rashi served as the paramount commentator on rabbinic Judaism's other great canonical text, the Babylonian Talmud). One should, then, by no means proceed on the assumption that the “posture of critique” often associated with appropriation operates in the works of the Sephardic supercommentators.Footnote 5 Nor, on the evidence of the Rashi supercommentaries, is it a given that categories often seen as mutually exclusive, such as “divergence” and “adherence” or even “assault” and “homage,” need be understood in this way.Footnote 6 One can speak of the supercommentators’ genuine veneration of Rashi alongside their implicit critiques of, or at least dissatisfaction with, the plain-sense meaning of some of Rashi's interpretations. The results of such engagements with the text appear from their readings of these comments in ways that make them congenial to Sephardic teachings and sensibilities, whatever the considerable internal diversity of those teachings. The question of supercommentarial appropriation becomes more complicated still when one considers the issue of the consciousness (or, as Bernard Levinson would have it, “false consciousness”) of the hermeneut.Footnote 7 Put simply, while Sephardic glossators at times engage in what seem like extravagant refashionings of Rashi's words, they provide no indication of doing so consciously. Instead, these writers adopt a stance familiar in many an exegete over the ages, tacitly disclaiming innovative or transformative dimensions of their interpretations (and the ideas arising from them) while purportedly doing nothing more than unfolding meanings latent in the text itself.
As is often remarked, most of the interpretations that Rashi advances in his Commentary have roots in rabbinic tradition. Indeed, a recent study argues that despite the work's glossarial form, its literary character is that of a medieval midrashic anthology.Footnote 8 At the same time, cautioning that it would be a great mistake to see Rashi's commentaries as “nothing more than anthologies,” Avraham Grossman points to Rashi's careful selection among midrashim and typical reformulation of them prior to inclusion in his interpretation of holy writ. An image supplied by Grossman is helpful: midrash, he writes, is as “dough to be kneaded” in the hands of this exegetical confectioner.Footnote 9
However one characterizes the nature and degree of Rashi's originality as an exegete, it is clear that Rashi's midrashim exhibit a basic feature of his exegesis that was likely to challenge, and at times disturb, a large number of his Sephardic readers. Israel Ta-Shma notes that although Rashi glosses difficult words or phrases and answers obvious technical questions regarding midrashim in his Talmud commentary, he never shows any sign of being “taken aback” by a midrash in its plain sense, no matter how supernatural or seemingly bizarre.Footnote 10 By contrast, many nonlegal rabbinic dicta, understood literally, could leave Mediterranean Jewish savants, especially those of a rationalist stripe, perplexed, or even scandalized. Where a midrash defies nature or a seemingly basic precept of decency, such scholars have a ready solution: they assume, in keeping with a view going back to some of their most famous Babylonian predecessors, the Geonim, that the midrashic speaker must not have intended his expression to be taken literally.Footnote 11
Rashi's midrashic interpretations, and approach to rabbinic discourse more generally, were consequential. They could even stir heated debate. Consider acerbic exchanges arising from the inter-communal controversies over rationalism that consumed scholars across much of the Jewish world in the 1230s. Irate protests of a southern French rationalist demonstrate the extent to which Rashi was the exegete who commanded the most attention in northern France; he clearly served as a rallying point for the widespread vision of Judaism held there and the traditional Ashkenazic exegetical approach to classical texts on which it rested. For their part, anti-rationalists complained that rationalists were quick to engage in illicit deviation from the plain sense of scriptural and rabbinic words in favor of nonliteral (often allegorical) readings. At the same time, those in the north could be chagrined by rationalist biblical commentaries that cultivated plain-sense exegeses that diverged from classical midrashic interpretations. The contention between the southern Mediterranean rationalists and Franco-German traditionalists hinged, then, not on a conflict between an allegorical as opposed to a literalist hermeneutic but on a conflict between a combined plain-sense and allegorical approach favored by many rationalists and the traditional midrashic one that it so frequently displaced.Footnote 12
With issues of method so central, some northerners held up Rashi as the final arbiter in the interpretation of classical texts, if not in regard to details (since northern French scholars routinely deviated from Rashi in specific instances) then at least in regard to an approach that generally took biblical and rabbinic texts at face value. One of the rationalists responded. Sages in the north were free to make their “beloved” Rashi an exclusive authority if they wished, he argued, but these self-appointed “princes and judges” had no business foisting that choice on others “without our consent.”Footnote 13 Certainly such scholars had no truck with those who dared to question the rationalists’ Andalusi-Egyptian hero, Maimonides, who advocated a nonliteral approach to classical texts when they conflicted with precepts of reason. Against this background, we might expect Rashi supercommentaries composed in Spain to return to Maimonidean ideas frequently and on this score, as we shall see, they do not disappoint.
If, as noted, Rashi explains selected aspects of rabbinic dicta in his Talmud commentaries, his Commentary on the Torah almost never elaborates on the meaning of the midrashim that he so routinely adduces, let alone stops to explore their conceptual messages.Footnote 14 For reasons that have been discussed elsewhere, the Commentary won an increasingly central place in the world of Sephardic learning over the course of the Middle Ages.Footnote 15 This being so, problematic midrashim invited a Sephardic response. Enter the supercommentators, who, in cases of perplexity, explain Rashi's midrashim in ways that bridge the gap between a certain fantastical reading of the Torah grounded in midrashim understood literally and ideas about religious fundaments that obtained widely in southern Mediterranean centers of Jewish learning.
Though a few outlines of the Sephardic branch of the Rashi supercommentary tradition have been traced, its contents remain almost wholly uncharted.Footnote 16 Bearing in mind the meaning of the Latin root verb appropriare, “to render or make one's own,” this study explores the ways in which Sephardic supercommentators could make perplexing or even vexing comments in the Commentary their own. In so doing, it illustrates a crucial mode of religio-intellectual transformation and vitality in the heavily commentarial tradition that is Judaism.
Samuel Almosnino on the “Exceptional Donkey”
The outstanding figure in the early phase of Sephardic Rashi supercommentary is Samuel Almosnino, whose work first appeared in an anthology of glosses on Rashi published in Constantinople around 1525. Though biographical particulars are nearly nonexistent, his likely floruit was the end of the fourteenth century. An inspiration for later Sephardic glossators on the Commentary, Almosnino left a significant if unacknowledged mark on the most influential of Rashi supercommentators, Elijah Mizrahi.Footnote 17
In fulfilling his supercommentarial duties, Almosnino regularly explains Rashi's midrashic interpretations. At times, he is keen to show how ones that might seem groundless actually have a textual trigger, even to the degree that they can be deemed interpretations “according to the method of plain sense” (pĕšāṭ).Footnote 18 In other cases, Almosnino sets out to explain one strange midrash or another. A case in point is his unpacking of a comment of Rashi's relating to the return of Moses's family to Egypt, where Scripture states that Moses took his wife and sons and mounted them on a donkey.
Rashi addresses the pedigree of the donkey on the basis of Pirqē Rabbi ’Eliezer, an early medieval work generally taken by later medieval authors to be the work of its namesake, the rabbinic sage R. Eliezer ben Hyrcanos. No ordinary beast, this donkey figures in fateful turning points of Jewish history. Thus Rashi writes:
“Mounted them on the donkey” [
]: the exceptional donkey, it being the donkey that Abraham saddled [to travel to Mount Moriah] for the binding of Isaac, and it being the one upon which in the future the King Messiah will be revealed, as it says: “humble, riding on a donkey” (Zech 9:9).Footnote
19
Here, as in countless other cases where Rashi finds occasion to cite a midrash, grounds for homily are easily discerned. As Avraham Grossman explains, the midrashist, and Rashi after him, seeks to clarify two things. First, why should the Torah bother to recount at all that Moses, on the cusp of his redemptive role, mounted his wife and family on the donkey? Second, why should the Torah refer to the donkey, as if a specific or previously mentioned beast were meant?Footnote 20
Beyond a basis in the sort of “surface irregularities”Footnote 21 that regularly fired the midrashic imagination, Rashi's exposition displays typically midrashic features in its substance. Most notable is the penchant of midrashists to “concentrate” the action of biblical narratives by identifying otherwise nameless or seemingly incidental figures, objects, or details. Isaac Heinemann speaks of the midrashic propensity to “bridge the expanses of time” in ways that created a “compressed historical picture that the eye could easily grasp.” The result in the case of the donkey, as Heinemann notes, is “to envision and make visible the spiritual dimension embedded within the physical one.”Footnote 22 More broadly, Rashi's midrash alerts readers to the donkey's role as a bearer of Jewish and, ultimately, world history: the donkey associated with the deliverer of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage—that same beast that delivered Abraham to the site of his supreme spiritual achievement—would convey the Messiah on his mission of final deliverance in the eschatological future.Footnote 23
Yet just how was one to make sense of this last idea? As usual, Rashi reports the midrash without the least elaboration, leaving even Sephardic readers who appreciated its textual warrant and indicators of history's spiritual high points to puzzle over its precise meaning and the many quandaries that it left in its wake. That the midrashic donkey, now ushered into the mainstream of Jewish interpretation by Rashi, did perplex scholars rooted in a tradition of exegetical reasonability, especially ones shaped by Jewish offshoots of the Greco-Arabic philosophic tradition, appears from a work composed shortly after Spanish Jewry's expulsion in 1492. Its author, Isaac Abarbanel, the most famous Sephardic scholar of the day, insists that a literal interpretation of this midrash is clearly misdirected, pronouncing it “impossible” that a donkey “should have lived more than three thousand years!”Footnote 24 As Avraham Grossman notes, this is precisely the sort of obvious objection that Rashi would never have thought to raise.Footnote 25 Of a similar stamp is the question why a particular donkey should have been singled out and assigned a repeated role in history's spiritual and redemptive high points. Or, as the foremost Ashkenazic theologian of early modern times asks after noting that “one ought to be very surprised” by the midrash: “What makes this donkey different from all other donkeys?”Footnote 26
Perhaps due to such difficulties, early medieval Spanish writers forbear to cite the midrash on the donkey, though Pirqē R. ’El. was known in Spain from the turn of the twelfth century.Footnote 27 By contrast, late medieval Sephardic Jews could hardly ignore a midrash that appeared in the Commentary. The foremost Sephardic biblical exegete, Moses ben Nahman (Nahmanides), alludes to the issue in a passage in which he lauds Rashi's mastery of biblical and rabbinic literature, bestowing the status of “primogeniture” on Rashi's Commentary, but also speaks of the “impregnable”—and often difficult—midrashic dicta that Rashi included in this work.Footnote 28
Among supercommentators, Samuel Almosnino was, if his tentative dating to the late fourteenth century can be upheld, the first to modulate Rashi's tantalizing but confounding comment on Exod 4:20 into a register intelligible to a Sephardic audience. He does so by applying to it exegetical tools and a theological template familiar from earlier tracts in the Jewish philosophic tradition, including Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed. The key is to translate what the supercommentator takes to be the midrash's imagery into “scientific” terms, the better to place it within a framework of an intellectualist account of human perfection. In short, Almosnino appeals to the time-honored Sephardic device of nonliteral interpretation of rabbinic sayings where these seem implausible, or impossible, taken literally. It is an approach that had received its most authoritative rationale from Maimonides. It is also one that had begun to be applied systematically for the first time to large parts of the vast rabbinic corpora in the Spain of Almosnino's day. A likely contemporary of Almosnino's, for example, the late fourteenth-century Navarrese Shem Tov ibn Shaprut, wrote Pardēs rimmonim, a commentary on talmudic midrashim. Stating his basic interpretive assumptions and aspirations at the outset, Shem Tov opines that the sages spoke in “riddles and metaphors,” that “the more bizarre the riddle, the more impossible its plain sense,” and that strange midrashim must be interpreted so as to allow Jews to “speak of them before the nations.”Footnote 29
Almosnino's interpretation of Rashi on Exod 4:20 is facilitated by a stock metaphor drawn from the tradition of philosophic exegesis that Ibn Shaprut exemplifies. The metaphor reflects a wordplay that parlays references to a donkey (ḥamor) in biblical and rabbinic texts into a basic category of medieval Hebrew Aristotelianism: matter (ḥomer). After citing the biblical text and a lemma from the Commentary, Almosnino makes much plain in a few words, invoking the classic Maimonidean trope of human matter as a barrier to the attainment of the final human end, intellectual apprehension:
“On the donkey,” [Rashi says] “the exceptional donkey, it being the donkey that Abraham saddled, etc.” Now the principal engagement of the wise is to understand and apprehend intellectually, for which purpose it is necessary that the powers of the intellect prevail over the corporeal powers. Something that prevails may, figuratively speaking, be said to ride on that over which it prevails, while that which is prevailed upon is [represented figuratively] as a donkey [ḥamor] [being ridden upon] with respect to it [i.e., the prevailing force]. By contrast, among those who err, their matter prevails over their form [i.e., the intellect]. This being so, he [Rashi] said that it [Moses's donkey] was the very same donkey that Abraham saddled, subdued, and rode on. And so it is with the Messiah, because their form prevailed over the matter in them.Footnote 30
In his gloss on Rashi, Almosnino reads a midrash that speaks about a donkey's improbable participation in great spiritual moments, past and future, as a timeless philosophically informed exemplum on human flourishing. His gloss exudes a Maimonidean spirit in any number of ways, starting with its initial assertion that the principal engagement of the wise is “to understand and apprehend intellectually.” Here Almosnino endorses the intellectualist ideas regarding human flourishing argued by Maimonides with singular force, in terms familiar from any number of Maimonides's tracts.Footnote 31 Next comes the notion that the goal of intellectual apprehension can be attained only by freeing the intellect from bodily appetites or “corporeal powers.” It is these powers that dominate in “those who err” and obstruct such higher pursuits. As Maimonides laments in the Guide, the human being's “very noble form” is inextricably bound up with the “earthly, turbid, and dark matter” that calls down “every imperfection and corruption.” Yet that human form also enjoys the potential for “power, dominion, rule and control over matter” in order to “subjugate” matter and “quell its impulses.”Footnote 32 Matter, then, stands in a permanent tension with the material intellect's ability to attain its higher form, the “acquired intellect”—the “form” Maimonides had identified as the divine image to which human beings ought to aspire.Footnote 33
In the rest of his gloss, Almosnino applies such familiar insights to the midrash at hand, now borrowing exegetical insights culled from the Maimonidean corpus. A prominent chapter in the Guide expounds, with reference to the deity as rider of the heavens, the verbal root “to ride” (
), the same root used in Exod 4:20 to describe Moses's mounting of his family on “the donkey.” Maimonides indicates that the verb is equivocal. In the first instance, it refers to a person “riding in the usual manner on beasts.” In the second instance, however, it can be used figuratively “to designate domination over a thing, for a rider dominates over and rules that which he rides.”Footnote
34
Adapting this notion to Rashi's midrashic ḥamor, Almosnino explains that to overcome ḥomer, the matter that generates bodily desires and impedes the capacity to understand, one must ensure that one's intellect dominates (“rides on”) one's matter. Armed with this understanding, what “he [Rashi] said” proves wholly luminous: Abraham and Moses overrode “the matter in them” and so would the Messiah at the end of time. Through their attainment of human form in a superlative measure, these figures provide a model for “the wise” in all times and places.
What sort of reception would Almosnino's reading of Rashi have received in late medieval Spain? The answer, it seems, would have depended on any given reader's stance within the rather chaotic variety of positions adopted there regarding the hotly disputed legitimacy of Maimonides's intellectualist ideal.Footnote 35 Philosophic stalwarts could have found in Almosnino's gloss a perfect realization of Maimonides's habit of uncovering philosophic truths within the nonlegal component of rabbinic discourse. Dissenters from the philosophically informed vision of human perfection championed by Maimonides would necessarily have found Almosnino's reading of Rashi mostly wrongheaded, imputing to Judaism's foremost luminaries from the biblical past and messianic future a vision of human perfection that they saw as an alien import from Greco-Arabic philosophy, and a spiritually corrosive one to boot. One thing is certain: Almosnino's recasting of the matter of Rashi's comment on the donkey in Maimonidean form would have left Rashi utterly bewildered. Not only would he have been at a complete loss to grasp its conceptual substance and key terms of reference; he would also have been utterly confounded by the operation of interpretation performed by his supercommentator that turned a midrash about a donkey into a taut, symbolically rich homily on form, matter, and intellectual apprehension as the final human end.
An Anonymous Supercommentator on the Angels of Jacob's Dream
Samuel Almosnino does not refer to the riots that engulfed Spain's Jews in 1391–1392, leaving thousands dead and thousands more forcibly converted to Christianity, but an anonymous Sephardic supercommentator on Rashi wrote in their shadow.Footnote 36 As he pondered a comment of Rashi's on the angels seen by Jacob at Bethel, this writer may have had that catastrophe in mind. As we will see, he reads that comment in terms of a decreased divine providence operating outside the land of Israel. As Spanish Jews after 1391 well knew, the consequences of such diminished governance for Jews living “in exile” could be widespread and painful.
Jacob's vision at Bethel raises many questions, not least concerning the “angels of God” said to be ascending and descending a ladder “set on the ground . . . [whose] top reached to the sky” (Gen 28:12 NJPS). Who are these angels and why does the Torah describe them as first going up and only then going down, since their natural locus could reasonably be expected to be on high? Rashi elegantly addresses these issues by way of a midrash that describes two cohorts of angels, one accompanying Jacob “in the land [of Israel]” and going up and another coming down to replace that cohort as he prepared to head off into exile in Aram. By way of further clarification, Rashi explains that the first group is restricted in their sphere of operation, since they “do not go outside of the land.”Footnote 37 In other words, as James Kugel explains this midrashic motif, there was a kind of “changing of the guard,” with new angels appearing to accompany Jacob as the land-of-Israel angels necessarily took their leave.Footnote 38 Winning as the midrash might be, it invites further probing on the basic question: Why is the original angelic retinue unable to perform duties “outside the land”? Rashi, true to form, feels no need to raise the issue, let alone address it. Fortunately, like Almosnino, the anonymous supercommentator could read a vivid but perplexing interpretation of Rashi to theological purpose.
It goes without saying that the supercommentator is aware of the possible metaphorical valences of Rashi's midrashic angels. “You never find . . . that an act was performed by God other than through an angel,” Maimonides had intoned. Indeed, in his account, “angels” became a most protean rubric, serving as figures for the nearly endless intermediaries found in the processes of natural causation through which God governs the universe.Footnote 39 The supercommentator discerns in the angels mentioned by Rashi figures for providence but, in a manner characteristic of the less staunchly rationalist ambience of his Catalo-Aragonese milieu at the turn of the fifteenth century, weds providential theory with the decidedly non-Maimonidean idea of a unique metaphysical status enjoyed by the land of Israel. For his part, as one “resolutely opposed to hypostatized entities endowed with intrinsic sanctity” of all sorts, Maimonides declined to accord to “the land” such a status.Footnote 40
After citing a lemma both from Scripture and the commentary, as super-commentators often will (with citation of a lemma from the commentary being a supercommentary's distinctive formal feature),Footnote 41 the glossator clarifies what “Rashi explained”:
“[And angels of God were] going up and down [on it].” Rashi explained: “Going up first [and only afterwards coming down]. The angels who escorted him in the land [do not go outside the land].” He [Rashi] meant that the divine providence that is in the land was more intense and constant [
] than that divine providence that is not in the land since the chosen land is more prepared for the divine effulgence [
]. This is [the meaning of] their [the rabbinic sages’] dictum “Whoever dwells outside the land is as one who has no God,” meaning that his providence [outside the land] is not quite as constant [
], as it says [in Deuteronomy regarding the land of Israel]: “[It is a land which the Lord your God looks after,] on which the Lord your God always keeps His eye” [Deut 11:12 NJPS].Footnote
42
Gone, in this elaboration, is any notion of supernatural angels—or, to put it another way, present here is a Maimonidean view of angels as entities drained of any ontological reality.Footnote 43 Replacing it are angels as figures for providence, with the two cohorts of angels falling along a gradient of divine governance, the one prevailing in the land of Israel and another one operative everywhere else.Footnote 44 To clinch his point, the supercommentator adduces a midrash that could rivet (and, presumably, greatly trouble) Jews “in exile” according to which the Jew dwelling outside the land is “as one who has no God.” Softening this stark assertion considerably, the supercommentator insists that the midrash does not teach a complete absence of providence outside the land but its lesser intensity and consistency there. (Working in an exegetical context, he is not forced to clarify just what he means when he says that providence outside the land of Israel is “not quite as constant” as the divine governance operative in “the land.”) By contrast, as the verse that the supercommentator cites makes clear, the land of Israel is constantly subject to divine scrutiny and governance.
By interpreting Rashi as he does, the supercommentator invokes terminology and concepts that put him in step with a number of immediate Catalo-Aragonese predecessors and contemporaries. Profayt Duran, whom the supercommentator mentions in his work,Footnote 45 enjoins Jewish occupation with Scripture on the view that Scripture possesses a sĕgullāh, that is, an “occult virtue,” which draws down a divine “effulgence” (šefa‘) that confers providential protection.Footnote 46 The term šefa‘ is the one used by the supercommentator when he speaks of the privileging of the chosen land as a place uniquely prepared for providence. Duran's contemporary, Hasdai Crescas, cites the midrash regarding the godless status of those outside the land as part of his effort to explain how a tiny sliver of the globe, the land of Israel, enjoys a surplus of divine providence not found everywhere.Footnote 47 The supercommentator's invocation of the midrash puts him in step not only with Crescas but with a line of Sephardic scholars stretching back to Nahmanides, who undoubtedly noticed Rashi's inclusion of the midrashic idea in his Commentary.Footnote 48 Crescas's teacher, Nissim ben Reuven Gerondi, also cites the dictum, this time to explain what he argues is the diminished divine responsiveness to prayers uttered by those dwelling outside the land of Israel. In so doing, he employs the “not quite as” qualifier that the anonymous supercommentator uses when explaining the status of divine providence outside the land.Footnote 49 In short, here is a gloss on a midrash in the Commentary in a turn-of-the-fifteenth-century Sephardic supercommentary that reflects language, sources, and teachings circulating in what, by all indications, was its author's Catalo-Aragonese milieu. Thus did the genre of supercommentary serve as a way to wed obscure midrashic notions propounded by Rashi to an ongoing trajectory of Sephardic teachings on angels, providence, prayer, and the land of Israel, in a brief but carefully crafted exegetical weave.
Noah and the Suspicious Raven
In the face of some midrashim in the Commentary that troubled Sephardic scholars, supercommentators could adopt another strategy: disassociating Rashi's meaning from the rabbinic source that he cited. This approach appears to have been rare, most probably because while it had the virtue of redeeming Rashi, it left his midrashic source without defense. A related set of cases where this mode of appropriation was undertaken occurs in a number of Sephardic supercommentaries on a midrashic gloss of Rashi's in which the raven of Genesis 8 refused to leave the ark due to suspicions of Noah's amatory designs on his mate. While the midrash is clear on the raven's interspecies sexual suspicions, the form in which Rashi restates the midrash leaves just enough room for the Sephardic supercommentators to impute to him a different meaning. Rather than focusing on the raven's concern with Noah's sexual designs, they find Rashi positing that the raven exhibited an entirely reasonable (and indeed rather poignant) fear for the preservation of his species.
Rendered with a somewhat stilted literalism (the better to bring out what some consider its appreciable textual ambiguities), the lone verse that relates the raven's story states that Noah “sent forth a raven, which went out going out and returning, until the drying up of waters from the earth” (Gen 8:7).Footnote 50 Unlike the dove that Noah subsequently sent “to see whether the waters had decreased,” the raven's assignment, if any, is not stated. This raises the question: Why did Noah send out the raven?Footnote 51 Then too, the verse is not entirely clear as to whether the raven did in fact leave the ark. To judge that issue, one has to adjudicate a complex verb structure that provides a sense of the raven's ceaseless movement, but without specifying precisely to what effect. Read synthetically, the verbs in the verse could be taken to yield the finding that the raven aborts its departure from the ark; read antithetically, they could indicate the raven leaves continuously and, as some have thought, permanently.Footnote 52 In a succinct gloss, Rashi opts for the former view, and then goes on to explain why the raven refused the undefined mission that, on Rashi's understanding, he had been assigned:
“Went to and fro”: going round and round the ark in circles, but he [the raven] did not go on his mission, because he suspected Noah with regard to his mate, as we find in the chapter ’Aggādat ḥēleq [
].Footnote
53
In this compressed gloss, Rashi makes two points. First, he suggests that the raven circled around the ark rather than attending to his mission. As we will see, some supercommentators thought that this reading, improbable as it might seem, reflects the verse's plain sense. More importantly, Rashi explains (without delving into any prurient details) why the raven refused to depart: he harbored suspicions regarding Noah's erotic designs on his mate and felt constrained to monitor the situation. Here, surely, is a gloss that took a strong—and decidedly bizarre—midrashic turn.
A number of Rashi's southern European glossators sought to make sense of this midrashic idea, with Moses ibn Gabbai, whose supercommentarial efforts display many of the tensions inherent in Sephardic engagement with the Commentary, speaking to the midrash at greatest length. Ibn Gabbai, an Aragonese Talmudist, completed his supercommentary on Rashi titled ‘Eved šĕlomoh (Servant of Solomon) in North Africa three decades after arriving there as a refugee from the anti-Jewish riots of 1391. As his work's title suggests, his allegiance to “Solomon the Frenchman” was not in doubt.Footnote 54 In the introduction to his work, he describes Rashi as a “master, eminence, father of Israel,” and a “great luminary who enlightens the eyes of the blind with true precepts and just judgments.” He also fiercely denounces groups critical of the Commentary. One group, he writes, “buried in their ignorance,” “pounced” on Rashi's exegesis for being “utterly rife with dĕrāšot and ’aggādot.” In sum, they strove “to raise objections, cast doubt, and denigrate, to satisfy their craving” to undermine Rashi's exegesis. Another, worse yet in his mind, it would seem, was a group of “little foxes that ruin the vineyards,” who did not scruple to “mock” Rashi, claiming that “scriptural plain-sense meanings were remote” from him. Ibn Gabbai apparently alludes to the reason for their criticism when he describes these faultfinders as “ones who drank the insolent waters that passed over the souls of those who study foreign sciences.” We infer that these critics thought Rashi deficient due to his ignorance of science that, far from being “foreign” in their eyes, stood as a prerequisite for understanding Scripture aright.Footnote 55
Clearly, Ibn Gabbai recoils from such brazen critics, yet outside of the polemical fray the problem of midrash runs through his supercommentary like Ariadne's thread. More to the point, this ostensibly submissive “servant of Solomon” frequently indicates misgivings about midrashic interpretations espoused by his hero. In the case of Rashi's comment on the raven, he adopts a twofold strategy. First, he severs Rashi's gloss from its clear midrashic source, reading it instead in light of an adjacent midrashic text. Second, having put the midrashic idea of the raven's suspicion regarding Noah at a remove from Rashi, Ibn Gabbai seeks to uphold the honor of the problematic midrash by characterizing it as a specific type of broadly attested rabbinic speech: what he calls an “elegant witticism.”
Ibn Gabbai begins his gloss with an expression that he often uses to set an inquiry into a perplexing interpretation of Rashi in motion: “astonishing!” What seems implausible in the first instance is Rashi's claim that the raven merely circled the ark when Scripture appears to make it clear that the bird left and returned (multiple times, as Ibn Gabbai surmises, probably following the great twelfth-century Andalusian exegete Abraham ibn Ezra).Footnote 56 Though Ibn Gabbai grants that Rashi's gloss seemingly controverts the Torah's “plain sense,” he seeks to sustain it by suggesting that while the bird intended to depart, he became afraid when he saw the mighty waters outside, and circled back, returning to the ark just as Rashi indicates.Footnote 57 In this way, Ibn Gabbai offers a straightforward interpretation of Rashi's understanding of the reason that the raven aborted its departure from the ark but one that, it must be said, infiltrated into the Commentary an idea that Rashi did not mention there.
Switching focus, Ibn Gabbai now turns to what Rashi explicitly casts as the reason for the raven's failure to leave—not an alleged fear of the floodwaters but the fact that the raven harbored a suspicion about Noah “with regard to his mate.” The first thing Ibn Gabbai does is to identify this idea as a dĕrāš of the sages. While Rashi does at times label his interpretations grounded in rabbinic literature in this manner, he had forborne to do so in this case.
As it happens, midrashic ideas regarding the raven abounded, and many were shot through with sexual motifs. There was, for instance, a talmudic reading adopted by Rashi at several points in his Commentary that posits the existence of a rule of sexual abstinence for all the ark's inhabitants, human and otherwise. The Talmud has the raven as one of three violators of the prohibition, together with Noah's son Ham and the dog.Footnote 58 In the same talmudic passage, a midrash reports a heated exchange between the raven and Noah:
“And he sent out the raven”: Resh Lakish said: The raven gave Noah a triumphant retort. It said to him: “Your Master hates me, and you hate me. Your Master hates me, since [he commanded] seven [pairs] of the clean [creatures to be taken but only] two of the unclean [and I am among the latter; cf. Deut 14:14]. You hate me, seeing as [in choosing to send out a bird] you leave the species of which there are seven [pairs] and send one of which there are only two. . .. Or perhaps [you decided to send me in particular since] it is my mate that you require [to satisfy your sexual desire].”Footnote 59
Noah's response in the continuation of the exchange makes it clear that he understood perfectly well that it was his sexual requirements that the raven had in mind in imputing to him improper intentions regarding the raven's mate. Needless to say, the midrash easily could be found offensive, if not utterly obscene.Footnote 60 A century and a half after Ibn Gabbai, with Christian agitation against rabbinic literature reaching new heights, the midrash was found to be just that. In the period of the burning of the Talmud in 1553, Jewish biblical commentaries, especially those that imparted rabbinic teachings, fell under threat as well. As a result, a list of “errors” in Rashi's Commentary was assembled at the behest of Pope Gregory XIII. Not too surprisingly, the gloss on Noah and the raven appears on this list.Footnote 61 What is more, its compiler, Robert Bellarmine, makes it clear that Rashi's comment was simply an encapsulation of the talmudic midrash—that is, he cites the Commentary’s description of the raven's concern about Noah as if it renders the meaning of the indecent midrash more or less in total (“Monet R. Salomon. . . . Ad quod etiam confirmandum testimonium producit ex Talmud”).Footnote 62
Yet as Moses ibn Gabbai quietly determines, a fastidious (though some would undoubtedly say hypercritical) study of Rashi's verbal formulation could yield a different conclusion. What allows Ibn Gabbai tacitly to drive a wedge between Rashi's comment and what the likes of Robert Bellarmine understandably deemed its indisputable talmudic source is Rashi's tendency not to reproduce midrashim in all their verbal particulars. In the case in question, Rashi offers a version of the midrash that, on the one hand, clearly posits a suspicion of Noah on the raven's part but, on the other, fails to specify its contents. Ibn Gabbai fills in this blank by asserting that what the raven feared was not Noah's own sexual designs on the raven's mate but that “Noah would perhaps give his mate to another bird.” In other words, what exercised the raven as it contemplated a departure into the dangerous world beyond the ark was Noah's likely plan to mate his spouse with another species of bird should he fail to return. From this perspective, the raven's refusal to leave the ark reflects a concern not with Noah's designs on his companion but instead for the preservation of his species and, it might even be inferred, for conservation of the full plenitude of species with which God had originally endowed creation, now threatened by his departure as ordained by Noah and by his possible demise in its wake.Footnote 63 In short, Ibn Gabbai takes Rashi's source to be the above-cited midrash in which the raven asserts God's and Noah's hatred of him. In the continuation of that midrash, the raven asks, “Should the angel of heat or of cold smite me, would not the world be short of one species?” When Ibn Gabbai suggests that Rashi's understanding of the raven's failure to fulfill his charge reflects a rabbinic dĕrāš, it was this midrash that he had in mind, not the adjacent one that relays the raven's fear of Noah's sexual designs on his mate.
Ibn Gabbai's unexpected turn to this other midrash reflects a growing tradition in supercommentary on Rashi in high and late medieval southern Europe. Indeed, a connection between Rashi's gloss and the midrash on the raven's concern for his species appears in what was perhaps the first of the Sephardic supercommentaries on Rashi, by Samuel ibn Shoshan. Compared to Ibn Gabbai's comprehensive tome, Ibn Shoshan's work is highly episodic. It is therefore telling that Ibn Shoshan chooses to explain Rashi's gloss on the raven at some length:
[Rashi said:] “He suspected him with regard to his mate.” They [the rabbinic sages] explained this well to mean that he [the raven] did not wish to depart [the ark] lest calamity befall him, as a result of which the world would be lacking in one species. [His argument was] that it would be better to take from the species of which there are seven pairs, and so Noah [ultimately] did.Footnote 64
Even according to this noble rendering of the raven's concern, Ibn Shoshan feels compelled to explain what the rabbinic sages meant in speaking additionally of the raven's “suspicion” regarding Noah:
What they [the sages] meant is that God placed cowardice in his [the raven's] heart in order to inhibit him from going until Noah realized that the matter [of the raven's refusal] was from God and until he grasped that he had acted inappropriately by endangering him [the raven].Footnote 65
In this reclamation of considerable subtlety, Ibn Shoshan finds an elegant way to rationalize what an ancient midrashist had cast as a bird's outspoken objection to Noah. It was all just a fanciful way of saying that the raven acted on an instinct implanted in him by God in order to secure the biodiversity divinely intended for creation by giving Noah time to see the error of his ways. The raven's inhibition gave Noah the time that he needed to come to appreciate that the raven's refusal was an act of providence and not, as he first thought, nothing more than the raven's obstinacy. Anticipating Ibn Gabbai, Ibn Shoshan basically reads Rashi's reference to his source in “the chapter ’Aggādat ḥēleq” in terms of the midrash on the raven's concern for his species. He studiously ignores the midrash alongside it that airs the raven's suspicion of Noah's lust for his mate.
Yet those in the talmudic know could not have found it easy to expound Rashi's comment on the raven in his Commentary while simply disregarding the midrash on Noah's lust. Witness the ruminations of thirteenth-century supercommentator Jacob ben Shabbetai, who possibly originated the line of interpretation of Rashi favored by Ibn Shoshan and Ibn Gabbai. Minimally, his work, which comes down under the name Ḥizquni (not to be confused with a far more famous Torah commentary sharing the name Ḥizquni, by Ben Shabbetai's approximate contemporary, Hezekiah ben Manoah), may have furnished upwards of 10 percent of the glosses in ‘Eved šĕlomoh.Footnote 66
Jacob ben Shabbetai's supercommentary awaits a full characterization. It is clear, however, that its author is familiar with strands of Sephardic tradition, including the exegesis of Abraham ibn Ezra, whose peregrinations in southern France, where Ben Shabbetai apparently wrote, left a strong mark a century earlier.Footnote 67 Though hardly a die-hard rationalist, Ben Shabbetai displays, in his commentary on Rashi's gloss on the raven, elements of a rationalist temper that he owes to Ibn Ezra and his ilk.
Ben Shabbetai is sure Rashi does not mean to impute to the raven a suspicion of Noah's erotic designs on his mate, and this for two reasons. First, he argues, such relations are inherently “base and despicable.” Some deeds are so sordid that not even a raven would entertain suspicions about them. Second, there is the logistical dimension: intimate relations between a human being and a bird are patently “impossible.” Thus, there is only one conclusion to draw when Rashi speaks of the raven “suspecting” Noah: his fear is that “Noah would mate his spouse with another bird not of his species.” Yet while Ben Shabbetai is sure that this must be Rashi's intention, he feels constrained to mention the talmudic midrash that clearly does raise the specter of Noah's sexual designs on the raven's wife.Footnote 68 Having paid his debt to intellectual honesty by mentioning the midrash, however, Ben Shabbetai stops short. So does the anonymous Sephardic supercommentator from the period of Profayt Duran discussed above, whose interpretation of Rashi follows Ben Shabbetai's in all essentials, including its notation of that interpretation's incompatibility with the problematic midrash found in the Talmud.Footnote 69 In sum, though earlier writers anticipate Ibn Gabbai's reading of Rashi, they all leave the midrash that they find a way to disassociate from Rashi without justification.
This is an outcome that Moses ibn Gabbai, who follows Ben Shabbetai and the anonymous commentator in their interpretation of Rashi, cannot abide. He will not hide behind his official role as an expositor of Rashi. On this occasion, he feels compelled to go beyond that role in order to explain how the midrash on Noah's wish for sexual congress with a bird ought to be understood. Before doing so, however, Ibn Gabbai rebuts Ben Shabbetai's proof that Rashi could not possibly have been referring to such a notion on the grounds that even a raven would not be so sordid as to conjure in his mind relations so “base and despicable.” Such words are nothing short of “astonishing,” says Ibn Gabbai. After all, the raven “does not possess intelligence such that it can distinguish the base and contemptible from the perfect and noble.”Footnote 70 Ibn Gabbai does not address Ben Shabbetai's proof based on the logistical impossibility of relations between bird and human being.
Yet to say that the midrash found in the Talmud is not refuted on the grounds supplied by Ben Shabbetai is not to say that its notion of a bird's fearing Noah's sexual designs on his mate requires no explanation. To provide such an explanation, Ibn Gabbai returns to a discussion in the introduction to his supercommentary in which he classes midrashic sayings into eight categories. His classification requires its own study, but suffice it to say that it in large measure synthesizes ideas and schematizations developed by Ibn Gabbai's gaonic and southern Mediterranean forerunners. For example, he posits hyperbole as his first discursive mode adopted by ancient midrashists. Ibn Gabbai demonstrates this by the rabbinic statement that “the land of Israel will in the [eschatological] future bring forth ready-baked rolls.” The source for this example is not far to find. It is an example used by Maimonides to demonstrate the way in which some rabbinic dicta clearly contain exaggerations.Footnote 71
Turning to the midrash on the raven, Ibn Gabbai refers his reader to the third category of rabbinic utterances in his classification, statements made by way of what he calls “elegance in the manner of witticism.” The term that he uses for elegance, ṣaḥot, had long been a byword for the sort of biblically based polished Hebrew style that Sephardic scholars prized.Footnote 72 The term that he uses for witticism, bĕdiḥutā’, has roots winding back to rabbinic statements about nonlegal rabbinic sayings. Some midrashim, it is implied, reflect expressions made jocularly and with a diversionary aim. As the thirteenth-century Italian scholar Hillel ben Samuel of Verona formulates it, the aim of these midrashim is to “gladden the mind” wearied from arduous study.Footnote 73 Obviously, it is a mistake to seek deep meaning in such expressions, which, it is implied, can safely be ignored. In a similar vein, Ibn Gabbai casts the midrash regarding the raven's suspicion about Noah's designs on his mate as an “elegant witticism,” which, he implies, can be enjoyed as one wishes, but should essentially be ignored.Footnote 74 Here is a story quietly but often reprised in the Sephardic supercommentaries, with techniques of southern Mediterranean “discourse analysis” applied to midrashim cited by Rashi in ways that would have been wholly unfamiliar in the Ashkenazic milieu in which Rashi worked and wrote. What bears repeating here as elsewhere is this: in Rashi's world, there was no felt need to read midrash in such ways, since Rashi and his early and high medieval Franco-German colleagues were rarely if ever “taken aback” by midrashim such as the one concerning Noah's designs on the raven's mate in the first place.
Supercommentarial Ghostwriting in Reverse?
The importance of Rashi's Commentary on the Torah can hardly be overstated. It has shaped perceptions of the Torah's meaning among scholars, lay readers, and initiates in Jewish learning for more than nine centuries. To this day, it remains the classic commentary on Judaism's classic text. It is perhaps little wonder, then, that a vast body of supercommentary came to surround Rashi's work. What is more, given the status of the Commentary, it stands to reason that explorations in these neglected supercommentarial tomes can open a window on significant trends in Jewish religious and intellectual history.
In the case of the Sephardic supercommentaries on Rashi's scriptural magnum opus, they collectively bespeak an encounter between medieval Ashkenazic Jewry's foremost scholar and a line of exegetes shaped by intellectual trends and spiritual currents very different from the ones that prevailed in the Franco-German sphere in which the Commentary came into being. From the outside, these supercommentarial works can easily look like the writings of plodding epigones. Yet, considered finely, they often can be seen to take a subtle, carefully calibrated, productive turn, reading the greatest of Ashkenazic biblical commentaries in ways that met conditions of understanding prevalent in the world in which the Sephardic supercommentators wrote.Footnote 75 There is, it should also be noted, an important counterpoint to this trend that requires separate investigation. At times, the Sephardic supercommentators reread Rashi's midrashic ideas in a manner that removes their problematic character while granting that Rashi understood those midrashim in a different way—indeed, in ways from which the Sephardic supercommentators recoiled.Footnote 76
Acts of appropriation are generally understood to occur across the boundaries of distinct cultures.Footnote 77 It might therefore be asked: How much are interchanges between Ashkenaz and Sepharad to be characterized, strictly speaking, as acts of this sort? Certainly the trope of “Ashkenaz versus Sepharad” has a long history, with H. J. Zimmels observing long ago that “the problem of the relations between the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim has always been of interest to Jewish circles” and proposing that there was “almost no department in which they did not differ.”Footnote 78 The evidence adduced above should suffice to show that the category of “appropriation” does have, at the least, heuristic utility in understanding Sephardic engagements with the Commentary, both in regard to interpretive techniques brought to bear on Rashi by his Sephardic readers and their substantive results, which often saw transpositions of Rashi's midrashic exegeses into a key consonant with teachings and sensibilities prevalent in the Sephardic domain.
In principle, Sephardic supercommentators aimed to clarify the textual cruxes or deeper meanings of Rashi's glosses. Following citations of a lemma from the Commentary, they typically use a formula such as “he said” (Almosnino), “he meant that” (the anonymous supercommentary), and so forth.Footnote 79 In this manner they introduce clarifications and elaborations of Rashi's often terse, cryptic glosses. Yet modern-day readers can justifiably feel that the supercommentarial elaborations following such formulae sometimes depart decisively from what Rashi intended—nay, as we have seen, at times from what Rashi could have intended. It is at this point that the interplay of commentary and interpretive creativity imposes itself with acuteness.
That exegesis may serve as an agent of creativity will hardly come as news, but the applicability of this principle can vary widely from one setting to another. To see the case of Rashi supercommentary in sharper relief, it is helpful to consider supercommentators on the great representative of Andalusian Jewish biblical commentary mentioned above, Abraham ibn Ezra. Like Rashi's glossators, supercommentators on Ibn Ezra stemmed from a range of geocultural environments. At the same time, Ibn Ezra's glossators generally shared his exegetical approach and the main theological underpinnings of the commentary that they sought to explain. They shared, for example, Ibn Ezra's quest for reasonability in exegesis and concurred in such mainstays of his thought as astral-magical aspects of ritual.Footnote 80 The same holds for supercommentators on the Torah commentary of the third medieval Jewish biblical exegete to attract a commentary tradition of any magnitude, Nahmanides. Almost without exception, his glossators were fellow mystics who focused their supercommentarial attention on Nahmanides's kabbalistic ideas out of their shared sense that these comprised Judaism's deepest levels of meaning as embedded in the Torah's esoteric stratum. Among themselves, these supercommentators could contest specifics of Nahmanides's mystical hints, but they all were in step with his conception of Scripture and wholly sympathetic to his theosophic orientation.Footnote 81 By contrast, supercommentaries on Rashi over the ages have hailed from a much wider range of geocultural settings than glosses on Ibn Ezra or Nahmanides, and they have also been composed over a more sustained period of time. It is predictable, then, that for this and perhaps other reasons, Rashi supercommentators engaged in more elaborate acts of mediation of the Commentary to new readerships than glossators on Ibn Ezra or Nahmanides.
As noted at the outset, it is hard to judge the degree of consciousness with which the Sephardic supercommentators refashioned Rashi's midrashim. As we know, the phenomenon of “ghostwriting in reverse,” which saw commentators (and other types of writers) seeking authority for their ideas by ascribing them to esteemed predecessors, was, in the Middle Ages, very common.Footnote 82 Yet if the Sephardic supercommentators consciously rewrote the Commentary, they certainly covered their tracks. This being so, the moral issues often debated with regard to appropriation may recede. As Stephen Prickett observes, it can be hard to shake the implication born of the Latin tradition that appropriation is a form of “theft”—that it comprises the “wrenching of an idea” from its original context and its improper placement in a new setting where it often comes to mean something different. Prickett urges a more balanced view according to which appropriation contains “both a quality of thinly disguised theft and a recognition that such a take-over is a necessary part of the way in which any person, or even society, makes an idea its own.”Footnote 83 In short, conscious or not, appropriation can be a sign of intellectual, literary, or artistic vitality.
Based on the sample seen above, it is clear that one result of Sephardic supercommentarial efforts was to show how even the strangest of midrashim cited by Rashi bore profound (or at least not wholly outlandish) ideas. What emerges in the Sephardic supercommentaries is a successive unfolding of meaning as the divinely vouchsafed prophetic word is refracted through the Commentary and then through Sephardic-tinted lenses supplied by the supercommentators. As these “third authors” conferred new meanings on Rashi's words, it may be surmised that their appropriations of the Commentary endeared this work to the hearts and minds of their Sephardic readers.
