Among the contemporaries Rashi cites in his commentaries, Moshe ha-Darshan is quoted a relatively few, yet still significant, number of times: Rashi cites him by name 17 times in his Tanakh commentary and twice in the Talmud commentary. Moshe ha-Darshan was a scholar active in Provence in the first half of the 11th century, in the generation before Rashi’s. Though connected culturally to Tzarfat (northern France) where Rashi lived, especially in the 11th and 12th centuries, Provence was a distinct community. Rashi’s repeated citations of him point to the prominence of Moshe ha-Darshan, whose beit midrash in the city of Narbonne, one of the oldest Jewish Provençal communities, apparently produced works that were influential and well-circulated…
