Rashi — Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (1040–1105)

Shlomo Yitzchaki of Troyes, Champagne, studied in the academies of Mainz and Worms and returned home to write a running commentary on nearly the whole Bible and the Babylonian Talmud. His explanations — plain sense first, drawn from rabbinic tradition, salted with Judeo-French glosses (la’azim) — became inseparable from the texts themselves: the 1475 Reggio di Calabria edition of his Torah commentary is the first dated Hebrew book (a group of undated Roman Hebrew prints of 1469–72 predates it), and to this day "the commentary" in a yeshiva means his. ◈ Jewish Virtual Library