Legends
There are a couple of legends about Rashi’s daughters, all suggesting that they possessed unusual piety and scholarship.
The most well-known, and most likely to be true, states that they were learned in Torah and Talmud at a time when women were forbidden to study these sacred texts. While it seems impossible for girls with a yeshiva in their home to grow up without knowledge of Torah, there is more evidence than this. A responsum of Rashi notes that he is too weak to write so he is dictating to his daughter, which indicates that she was capable of understanding and writing complicated legal issues in Hebrew. Interestingly, there are two versions of this responsa, the other stating that Rashi was dictating to the "son of my daughter" instead of just "my daughter." However, it seems unlikely that Rashi would use the awkward expression, "son of my daughter" instead of, "my grandson," and more likely that "son of" was added in later. There is also evidence that Rashi’s daughters and granddaughters taught Torah to local women and served as models for the proper performance of Jewish rituals.
While there is no evidence that Rashi’s daughters themselves wore tefillin, it is known that some women in medieval France and Germany did, and that Rabbenu Tam, Rashi’s grandson, ruled that a woman doing any mitzvah that she is not obligated to, including tefillin, must make the appropriate blessing.
Read more about this topic: Rashi's Daughters
Famous quotes containing the word legends:
“Farm boys wild to couple
With anything with soft-wooded trees
With mounds of earthmounds
Of pine straw will keep themselves off
Animals by legends of their own:”
—James Dickey (b. 1923)
“Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)
“a child’s
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sunlight
And the legends of the green chapels
And the twice-told fields of infancy”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)