Nevertheless the three centuries of
fruitful activity were not entirely lost to the future; and the
Jews of France, who had gone in numbers to foreign lands, carried
with them their books and their ideals.
III
For a long time previous to the events just recorded, Rashi and
the Tossafists - the two words summing up the whole intellectual
movement of the Jews of France - had brought to all Judaism the
reputation of the academies of Champagne and of Ile-de-France.
"He brew literature in France," wrote E. Carmoly, "exercised
upon the Jewish world the same influence that French literature
exercised upon European civilization in general. Everywhere the
Biblical and Talmudic works of Troyes, Rameru, Dampierre, and
Paris became the common guides of the synagogues." Rashi's
commentaries, in especial, spread rapidly and were widely copied,
sometimes enlarged by additions, sometimes mutilated and
truncated. It is for this reason that certain commentaries of
his no longer exist, or exist in incomplete form.
In view of the fact that at the beginning of the thirteenth
century relations between remote countries and Christendom were
rare, and that the Christian and the Mohammedan worlds had
scarcely begun to open up to each other and come into contact, it
is readily understood why Rashi was not known in Arabic countries
in his life-time, or even immediately after his death, and why he
exercised no influence upon Maimonides, who died exactly a
hundred years after him.
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