Bekhor Shorבכור שור
Orléans · 1145
בש
Yosef Bekhor Shor
Yosef Bekhor Shor
1140 CE–1190 CE · Rishonim · Orléans
R. Yosef ben Yitzchak Bekhor Shor (c. 1140-1190) of Orléans was a leading second-generation Tosafist student of Rabbenu Tam and one of the most original peshat commentators in the Ashkenazi tradition. His Torah commentary is notable for its rationalist tendencies — offering naturalistic explanations of miracles where possible, engaging directly with Christian anti-Jewish polemic (his commentary is one of the richest sources for the Jewish-Christian disputational context of 12th-century France), and freely disagreeing with Rashi where peshat warranted it. He was likely also the Tosafist 'Yosef of Orléans' cited extensively in Tosafot.
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Stop 1 of 11140–1190Lived
OrléansאורליאנסFrance — Loire valley
What they did here
Born and lived in Orléans — a French tosafist, exegete and poet. A student of Rabbeinu Tam (with whom he also corresponded), Joseph Kara and the Rashbam, his peshat-focused Torah commentary sought rational explanations for miraculous accounts and is counted among the boldest of the medieval French school.
About Orléans
Orléans is a city on the Loire in north-central France. A Gallic town destroyed by Julius Caesar in 52 BCE, it was later a Merovingian royal capital, and in 1429 Joan of Arc lifted the English siege of the city. Its university, founded in 1306 and known especially for law, drew John Calvin in 1528 and Theodore Beza, who studied law there from 1535 to 1539, and the city later sheltered many Protestants. Orléans also had a medieval Jewish community and was home to the twelfth-century Tosafist Joseph Bekhor Shor, a pupil of Rabbeinu Tam whose Torah commentary kept closely to the plain sense of the text.
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Yosef Bekhor Shor’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.