Thus Rashi's reputation has not diminished in the course of eight centuries. On the first of August, 1905, it was exactly eight hundred years that the eminent scholar died at Troyes. As is proper, the event was marked by a commemoration of a literary and scientific character. Articles on Rashi appeared in the Jewish journals and reviews. Such authorities as Dr. Berliner, Mr. W. Bacher, and others, sketched his portrait and published appreciations of his works. Dr. Berliner, moreover, issued a new edition of Rashi's Pentateuch Commentary in honor of the anniversary, and, as was mentioned above, Mr. S. Buber celebrated the occasion by inaugurating the publication of the hitherto unedited works of Rashi, beginning with the <I>Sefer ha-Orah</I>. CONCLUSION The beautiful unity of his life and the noble simplicity of his nature make Rashi's personality one of the most sympathetic in Jewish history. The writings he left are of various kinds and possess various interests for us. His Decisions and Responsa acquaint us with his personal traits, and with the character of his contemporaries; his religious poems betray the profound faith of his soul, and his sensitiveness to the woes of his brethren. But above all Rashi was a commentator. He carved himself a niche from which he has not been removed, and though his work as a commentator has been copied, it will doubtless remain impossible of absolute imitation. Rashi, then, is a commentator, though as such he cannot aspire to the glory of masters like Maimonides and Jehudah ha-Levi. But the task he set himself was to comment upon the Bible and the Talmud, the two living sources that feed the great stream of Judaism, and he fulfilled the task in a masterly fashion and conclusively. Moreover he touched upon nearly all branches of Jewish literature, grammar, exegesis, history, and archaeology. In short his commentaries became inseparable from the texts they explain. For, if in some respects his work despite all this may seem of secondary importance and inferior in creative force to the writings of a Saadia or a Maimonides, it gains enormously in value by the discussion and comment it evoked and the influence it exercised. Rashi, one may say, is one of the fathers of rabbinical literature, which he stamped with the impress of his clear, orderly intellect. Of him it could be written: "With him began a new era for Judaism, the era of science united to profound piety."