Rashi Script, Block Capitals and Display Type

Open a Mikraot Gedolot, a page of Talmud or a traditional Chumash and the page splits into blocks set in visibly different type. The biblical or Mishnaic text sits in familiar square letters. Wrapped around it, in a script that looks like Hebrew seen through water, is the commentary. Most learners conclude at this point that classical Hebrew is beyond them. It usually is not. The first obstacle is typographic, the second is orthographic, and only the third is linguistic — and they are worth separating, because the first two can be cleared in an afternoon.

This page is recognition only. Nobody writes in these scripts; you will never be asked to produce one. The goal is that the commentary column stops being a wall.

What Rashi script actually is

It is not Rashi's handwriting. Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki died in 1105; the typeface named after him is a fifteenth-century Sephardic semi-cursive hand, cut into type by the first Hebrew printers. Abraham Garton used it in Reggio di Calabria in 1475 for Rashi's commentary on the Torah — the first dated printed Hebrew book — and the Soncino family and Daniel Bomberg carried the convention into the great commented editions, including the Venice Talmud whose layout is still the standard one today.

The reason it exists is purely editorial: printers needed the reader's eye to know instantly which text was scripture and which was commentary. Square type meant the received text; semi-cursive meant a human being talking about it. That hierarchy survives on every page of Talmud printed since — Gemara in the centre, Rashi in the inner column towards the spine, Tosafot on the outer margin, both commentaries in Rashi type.

The one principle, and the four letters

Rashi type is a rounded script: it takes the square letters and removes their corners. Most of the alphabet survives that treatment intact — of the twenty-seven signs, roughly eighteen are close enough to their square forms that a print reader decodes them without study, and another handful need a minute with a chart.

The real work is four letters that are effectively new symbols: א, צ and ש, on which every list agrees, plus a fourth that different charts give as ב or ז. Learn those and the page opens.

Then there is one trap that causes more misreadings than all the letterforms combined:

Because a web page cannot guarantee that a Rashi font is installed, the passage below is set in ordinary square type. Take it to a printed Chumash and find the same words in the commentary column — decoding a line you already know is how this skill is actually built. These are the opening words of Rashi's very first comment on the Torah, on בראשית ברא:

Note the spelling of that last word. Classical texts are quoted in the orthography they were printed in, not in modern ktiv male — one more reason a familiar word can look unfamiliar in a commentary.

The second obstacle: abbreviation

Once the letterforms stop fighting you, a different problem appears. Rabbinic commentary is written in a shorthand, and every printed abbreviation carries a gershayim ״ before its final letter (for acronyms) or a geresh ׳ at the end (for a truncated single word). These marks are letters in their own right, not English quotation marks — see geresh and gershayim.

Add to that the absence of niqqud, the near-absence of punctuation, and the fact that much of the Talmud is in Aramaic rather than Hebrew, and you can see why the page resists. But notice how separable those obstacles are: a modern Israeli hits the typography and the abbreviations exactly as you do, and is helped only by the Hebrew. Naming which of the three is stopping you turns "I can't read this" into a specific, solvable problem.

That is precisely why the Steinsaltz edition exists, and why using it is not cheating: it removes the orthographic obstacle so that the reader can spend attention on the argument.

כתב אשורי: the script of a Torah scroll

A third system, and the oldest of the three: כתב אשורי (ktav ashurí), the formal calligraphic square script used for the texts collectively called סת״ם — ספרי תורה, תפילין, מזוזות. This is the ancestor of ordinary print, so you can read it on sight; what makes it distinctive is craft rather than shape.

• Each letter has a halakhically prescribed form. A letter that touches its neighbour, or whose shape is ambiguous, can render the whole scroll unfit.
• Seven letters carry תגים (tagím), the little crowns on top: שעטנ״ז ג״ץ — ש ע ט נ ז ג צ.
• There is no niqqud, no punctuation and no verse numbering in a Torah scroll. The reader supplies the vowels and the cantillation from memory.
• A handful of letters appear deliberately oversized, undersized or inverted at fixed points in the text — scribal features preserved for over two thousand years.

Display type, and what Hebrew uses instead of capitals

Israeli typography runs on a small canon of body faces. Frank-Ruehl — designed by Rafael Frank and cut in Leipzig around 1910 — was the default text face of Hebrew books and newspapers for most of the twentieth century, and still reads as "serious print". David, designed by Ismar David in the 1950s, borrows from Hebrew calligraphy and is the face of countless Israeli documents and headings. Narkiss, by Zvi Narkiss, and Hadassah, by Henri Friedlaender, fill out the classical shelf; Koren, cut by Eliyahu Koren for his 1962 Bible, is the face of Tanakh and siddur editions. On screens you mostly meet the newer geometric families — Assistant, Heebo, Rubik — while headline and advertising type varies as wildly as it does in any language.

What typography has to work around is that Hebrew has no capital letters and no true italics. English uses capitals for names, sentence starts and emphasis, and italics for titles, foreign words and stress; Hebrew has neither device. The substitutes are:

• Weight — bold is the ordinary way to emphasise a word.
• Size and typeface — a heading is simply bigger or set in a different face.
• Letter-spacing — spacing a word out was the traditional emphasis in Hebrew books, and still turns up.
• Colour, in headings and on screens.
• Quotation marks, which do the job English italics do for titles and cited words.

A slanted "Hebrew italic" does exist in software, but it is usually a mechanical oblique of the upright face and looks wrong to an Israeli eye; the real distinction is weight. The knock-on effects of having no capitals — for proper names, for acronyms, for sentence boundaries — are covered on Hebrew has no capital letters.

Common Mistakes

1. Reading a Rashi final mem as a samech. The commonest single misreading, and the one that makes a familiar word look like a word you have never met.

2. Reading an abbreviation as a word. A geresh at the end of a word is not decoration; it means letters are missing, and the word is read out in full.

3. Dropping the gershayim from an acronym. Without the mark, an acronym is just an unpronounceable string, and dictionaries will not find it.

4. Swallowing the catchwords into the comment. Rashi opens each note by quoting the two or three words of the verse he is about to discuss — the דיבור המתחיל, abbreviated ד״ה in later editions. A reader who does not know this reads the quotation as the start of Rashi's own sentence and finds the grammar incoherent. Modern printings often set the catchwords in bold; older ones do not, and you have to spot the seam yourself.

5. Trying to learn to write Rashi script. It is a typeface, not a hand. No one has written it for centuries, and effort spent on producing it is effort not spent on everyday Hebrew handwriting, which you will actually need.

Key Takeaways

• Rashi script is a fifteenth-century Sephardic semi-cursive, adopted by early printers to separate commentary from text — not Rashi's handwriting.
• It rounds the square letters: most are decodable on sight, about four (א, צ, ש and either ב or ז) are new symbols, and the ם/ס confusion causes the most damage. Word position resolves it.
• A commentary page has three separate obstacles — typographic, orthographic (no niqqud, no punctuation, heavy abbreviation, and Aramaic) and linguistic. Name the one that is stopping you.
• כתב אשורי / סת״ם is the scribal square script of Torah scrolls, mezuzot and tefillin, with תגים crowns on שעטנ״ז ג״ץ and halakhically fixed letterforms.
• Israeli display typography runs on Frank-Ruehl, David, Narkiss, Hadassah and Koren, plus modern screen faces.
• With no capitals and no true italics, Hebrew emphasises with weight, size, letter-spacing, colour and quotation marks.