The Tosafists בעלי התוספות
Rashi explains what is written. The Tosafists ask how it squares with what is written in another tractate. Out of that question grew two centuries of learning — and a way of thinking still taught today.
The Tosafot — "additions" — began in Rashi's own family: his sons-in-law, his grandsons Rashbam and Rabbeinu Tam, then Ri the Elder, Rabbeinu Peretz, Rabbi Shimshon of Sens and dozens of others in France and Germany in the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. Exactly how many there were nobody knows: many are known only from quotations, with no biography.
Their method is single and recognisable. A passage in the Talmud is set against a passage in another tractate that contradicts it. The question is put: "and if you should say…" An answer is given that distinguishes the two cases. Often there are several answers, and all of them stand.
This is not commentary but analysis. Rashi answers the question "what does it say here"; the Tosafists answer "how does this square with everything else." That is why in the printed Talmud they stand on opposite sides of the text: Rashi on the inside, Tosafot on the outside, and the page is read in three voices.
The school ended together with the Ashkenazi communities that sustained it: expulsions, massacres and the burning of the Talmud in Paris broke it off by the fourteenth century. But the way of working survived and became the basis of all later yeshiva study.
On the timeline
Sources
Rishonim
- Tosafot in the margins of the Talmud — the outer margin of the page, opposite Rashi
- Sefer HaYashar — Rabbeinu Tam's book, in which the method's workings are visible
Basis: documents and evidence.