4860–4931 AM · 1100 CE — 1171 CE

The School of the Tosafists and Rabbeinu Tam

Rashi's grandsons and their students create a new way of learning Talmud: setting distant passages against one another and resolving the contradiction.

Once Rashi's commentary made the Talmud intelligible, it became clear that the text was full of internal contradictions: what is said in one tractate conflicts with another. Rashi's descendants turned this into a method.

Rabbi Yaakov ben Meir, his grandson, known as Rabbeinu Tam (4860–4931), lived in Ramerupt and Troyes. He had a fearless mind: he disputed his grandfather, his brother the Rashbam, and the Rif, and his Sefer HaYashar is full of blunt refutations. In 4907, during the Second Crusade, knights attacked him in Ramerupt, inflicting five wounds 'for the five wounds of Jesus'; a passing nobleman saved him. He convened the first Ashkenazi rabbinic synod at Troyes, which enacted ordinances binding on the French communities.

The Tosafist method takes a line of Gemara, produces a contradictory passage from elsewhere, and resolves it, often with a fine distinction: here one case, there another. It is not a commentary but a living argument recorded by students. The Tosafot are printed on the outer margin of every Talmud page, facing Rashi, so the page reads as a conversation across three generations of one family.

Rabbeinu Tam's dispute with Rashi over the order of the passages in tefillin was never settled; many still don a second pair, 'Rabbeinu Tam's tefillin.'

📜Sources

The Tosafot are printed on the outer margin of every folio of the Babylonian Talmud. Rabbeinu Tam's Sefer HaYashar contains his novellae and responsa. The dispute over the order of the tefillin passages is at Menachot 34b with Tosafot there; the practical ruling is Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 34. The ordinances of the Troyes synod appear in the collections of Ashkenazi takkanot.

👤People and places

Rabbeinu Gershom · Rashi · Rabbeinu Tam · Avraham ibn Ezra · Troyes · Rishonim

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