Nicholas de Lyra
possessed knowledge rare among Christians, knowledge of the
Hebrew language, and he knew Hebrew so well that he was thought
to be a converted Jew. In his works, polemical in character, he
comes out against the mystical tendencies in the interpretations
of the rabbis, and does not spare Rashi, even attributing to him
explanations nowhere existing in Rashi's writings. But these
criticisms of his, as he himself says, are "extremely rare."
Moreover he does not refrain from accepting for his own purposes
a large number of Midrashim borrowed from Rashi. It was from
Rashi's commentaries, in fact, that he learned to know rabbinical
literature - only to combat it. On one occasion he said, "I
usually follow Rabbi Solomon, whose teachings are considered
authoritative by modern Jews." He sometimes modified the text of
the Vulgate according to the explanations of the rabbi, and his
commentary on the Psalms, for instance, is often only a
paraphrase of Rashi's. For this reason Nicholas de Lyra was
dubbed, it must be admitted somewhat irreverently,
simia
Salomonis, Rashi's Ape. Nevertheless, he exercised great
influence in ecclesiastical circles, comparable to that of Rashi
among the Jews. His commentary was called "the common
commentary." Possibly it was in imitation of Nicholas's work
that the name
glosa hebraica (the Hebrew commentary), or
simply
glosa, was bestowed upon Rashi's work by a
Christian author of the thirteenth century, who, if not the
famous scholar and monk Roger Bacon, must have been some one of
the same type.
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