to the development of its genius.[1] Maimonides, however, was
also more than this; perhaps he presents as much of interest from
the point of view of Arabic as of Jewish culture; and expressing
more than the Jewish ideal, he does not belong to the Jews
entirely. Of Rashi, on the contrary, one may say that he is a
Jew to the exclusion of everything else. He is no more than a
Jew, no other than a Jew.


BOOK I
RASHI THE MAN

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CHAPTER I

THE JEWS OF FRANCE IN THE
ELEVENTH CENTURY

Great men - and Rashi, as we shall see, may be counted among
their number - arrive at opportune times. Sometimes we
congratulate them for having disappeared from history in good
season; it would be just as reasonable, or, rather, just as
unreasonable, to be grateful to them for having come at exactly
the right juncture of affairs. The great man, in fact, is the
man of the moment; he comes neither too soon, which spares him
from fumbling over beginnings and so clogging his own footsteps,
nor too late, which prevents him from imitating a model and so
impeding the development of his personality. He is neither a
precursor nor an epigone, neither a forerunner nor a late-comer.