Commentary on the Talmud

This chapter studies Rashi's commentary on the Talmud. 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. The chapter identifies the scope of the commentary, as well as the qualities that made Rashi's commentary the preferred one. It also assesses to what degree Rashi is linked to other interpretative traditions, especially to earlier commentaries written in Ashkenaz.