{"id":21385,"date":"2017-10-30T21:30:22","date_gmt":"2017-10-30T21:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.journals.cambridge.org\/?p=21385"},"modified":"2017-10-30T21:30:22","modified_gmt":"2017-10-30T21:30:22","slug":"exegesis-and-appropriation-reading-rashi-in-late-medieval-spain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2017\/10\/30\/exegesis-and-appropriation-reading-rashi-in-late-medieval-spain\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cExegesis and Appropriation: Reading Rashi in Late Medieval Spain\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"bsf_rt_marker\"><\/div><p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-21388 alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.journals.cambridge.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Lawee-photo.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"267\" height=\"178\" \/>The<em> Commentary on the Torah<\/em> of Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac; 1040\u20131105) stands out as the most widely studied and influential Hebrew Bible commentary ever composed. Among Jews, it has shaped perceptions of the meaning of the foundation document of Judaism for over nine centuries.<\/p>\n<p>Given its quasi-canonical status, it comes as no surprise that the <em>Commentary<\/em> has evoked extensive scholarly inquiry. Yet investigation of reactions to Rashi\u2019s exegesis in religiously, culturally, and geographically disparate communities of the Jewish world has been amazingly scant. This article explores some of the ways that medieval Spanish scholars who composed commentaries on Rashi\u2019s scriptural <em>magnum opus<\/em> (\u201csupercommentaries\u201d) treated what appeared to them, and many other southern Mediterranean scholars, to be problematic aspects of the midrashic tradition that comprised the dominant component of Rashi\u2019s exegesis.<\/p>\n<p>The larger frame for the study is \u201cexegesis and appropriation.\u201d The examples studied show how the Spanish supercommentators\u2019 interpretations of Rashi\u2019s ideas often took a productive turn, reading the greatest of Ashkenazic biblical commentaries in ways that met conditions of understanding prevalent in the Ibero-Jewish milieu in which they wrote. In this way, the article explores processes of \u201cappropriation,\u201d a conceptual category that points away from the idea of one-way transmission and towards the complex ways in which intellectual, literary, and material expressions or artifacts are brought to represent something \u201cdifferent from their original purposes\u201d (Ashley and Plesch, \u201cThe Cultural Processes of \u2018Appropriation\u2019,\u201d <em>Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies<\/em>\u00a032 [2002]:\u00a06). What emerges is a successive unfolding of meaning as the divinely vouchsafed prophetic word is refracted through the <em>Commentary <\/em>and then through Sephardic-tinted lenses supplied by the supercommentators.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/journals\/harvard-theological-review\/article\/exegesis-and-appropriation-reading-rashi-in-late-medieval-spain\/222CDE56D47EB0AB4811051D6F2AE035\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Read the full article here<\/a> with free access until November 30, 2017.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Commentary on the Torah of Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac; 1040\u20131105) stands out as the most widely studied and influential Hebrew Bible commentary ever composed. Among Jews, it has shaped perceptions of the meaning of the foundation document of Judaism for over nine centuries. Given its quasi-canonical status, it comes as no surprise that the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":725,"featured_media":21389,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6,1,372],"tags":[3580,3586,746,3583,3579,3584,3377,3582,3585,3581,3587],"coauthors":[3578],"class_list":["post-21385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-humanities","category-news","category-religious-studies-humanities","tag-appropriation","tag-ashkenazi","tag-bible","tag-eric-lawee","tag-exegesis","tag-hebrew","tag-judaism","tag-medieval-spain","tag-mediterranean","tag-rashi","tag-sephardic"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/725"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21385\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21385"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=21385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}