Writing on the web site eJewishphilanthropy Liam Hoare “walks in the footsteps” of the 11th century Jewish sage Rashi in Troyes, France and adds to the ongoing discussion about how the tangible and intangible entwine to form a hybrid — virtual? — form of visitable heritage.
Walking in the footsteps of Rashi, one sees that what was once a cemetery for both Jewish and Christian bodies – and it is unknown whether the graveyard was separated into two parts or Jewish and Christian headstones mingled together – is now a car park. At the end of the car park is a small square containing a monument to Rashi, unveiled by Elie Weisel on Rashi’s 950th birthday. I was also shown the site where a synagogue in the medieval Jewish quarter once stood, which from Rashi’s descriptions sounds more like a house of meeting, a beit knesset, than a house of worship. The stones from that synagogue were repurposed in the construction of a church.
While the institutions of Jewish life today in Troyes invoke the name of Rashi, and most certainly are connected to him through his ideas and his spirit, they are entirely modern and distinct from the original settlement of Jews in the town. The Rashi Synagogue, located in a sixteenth-century building outside the walls of the old town, conducts services in accordance with Sephardic rites, a reflection of the fact that its congregation finds its origins in North Africa. Across the street, the Institut Universitaire Européen Rachi opened its doors in 1989 and is a centre for Hebraic and Judaic studies in France. The Musée d’Art Moderne was created out of a donation to the French state of artworks collected by the textile industrialists Pierre and Denise Lévy.
Rashi, thus, is nowhere to be found in modern Troyes. He lingers on in folkloric tales, and his writings are the best indication of how the Troyes of his time looked and functioned, but his Troyes no longer exists in its physical form. It is only possible to walk in his footsteps, to go in search of his ghost, but in spite of that Troyes does attract some tourism – a small amount, one wouldn’t want to exaggerate it – purely based on the fact that Rashi once lived, worked, and thought there. There was a spike in 2005, the 900th anniversary of his death, particularly of tourists from the United States, while the synagogue in Troyes sees people from Paris wanting to have their bar mitzvah in the town that gave the world Rashi.
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