Commentators:R. Yosef Kara's Commentaries on Esther/1
R. Yosef Kara's Commentaries on Esther
Introduction
Introduction
R. Yosef Kara, a student/colleague of Rashi, was one of the intellectual giants of Biblical exegesis in Northern France in the 11th-12th centuries,1 and his scholarly efforts spanned also the fields of liturgy and Midrash. He authored commentaries on most of the books of Tanakh, and perhaps on all of them. Portions of several of his commentaries have been rediscovered and recovered only in recent years,2 and this has led to a greater appreciation of the centrality of the role he played in the development of the plain sense (peshat) Biblical exegesis in Northern France.
Multiple Commentaries
On a few books of Tanakh, multiple commentaries of R. Yosef Kara have survived. Megillat Esther is one of these books, and for it we possess textual witnesses for three different commentaries of R. Yosef Kara.
