rabbis in the west (1000– 1500 ce) 317
truly the word of the Lord and the words are ancient, the Ancient of Days
said them.It is all the more striking that the replies that Jacob claimed to have
received in his dreams – none of which diverged from the teachings of
other French rabbis in his time – were cited as halakhic rulings by later
authorities.^7
The centres in which halakhic developments were thrashed out had
become very geographically dispersed by the eleventh century, and such
dispersion increased through the rest of the Middle Ages. Between 900
and 1100 the pre- eminence of the Babylonian academies in Sura and
Pumbedita was challenged within the Islamic world by Tiberias in Pales-
tine, Kairouan in North Africa and Cordoba in Spain, and in northern
Europe by the academies of Troyes in France and Worms in Germany.
From 1100 new academies in Provence and what are now Austria and
the Czech Republic became centres, as did academies in Poland from the
early fourteenth century. With no central institution to control develop-
ments, it is not surprising that regional variations in law and liturgy
emerged, despite the attempts at codification, but even within this diffuse
culture the authority of a few individuals seems to have achieved recog-
nition throughout the rabbinic world. One such individual was
R. Shlomo Yitzhaki (Rashi), whose extraordinary career in the second
half of the eleventh century was responsible for turning northern France
and Germany into centres for biblical and talmudic studies. Like other
great scholars of this period (including, as we have seen, the Rif and the
Rosh), Shlomo Yitzhaki was generally referred to within rabbinic circles
by an acronym of his name.^8
Rashi was born in Troyes, a town of some importance on the bank
of the River Seine, south- east of Paris. This was no provincial back-
water: there had been a city on the site since Roman times, with a bishop
since the fourth century and a cathedral since the ninth. By Rashi’s time
Troyes had developed as the hub of an important trading route, which
may explain the settlement of Jews there a generation before Rashi was
born. In any case, it was in Troyes that Rashi eventually set up an acad-
emy after studying with scholars in a number of other places, especially
Worms. About his life it is hard to distinguish fact from legend, apart
from his occupation in viticulture and the knowledge of French which
surfaces in the many places in his writings when he explained difficult
Hebrew words by reference to the French equivalent. But his influence,
both in his own day and on later generations, can unquestionably be