The usual name applied to Rashi (R Sh I) is formed, in accordance with a well-known Jewish custom, from the initials of his name and patronymic in Hebrew, Rabbi Shelomo Izhaki[9], which the Christians translated by Solomon Isaacides, just as they made Maimonides of Moses ben Maimon. Raymond Martini, the celebrated author of the <I>Pugio fidei,</I> seems to have been the first who saw in Rashi the initials of the words, R. Solomon Yarhi. He confused Rashi either with a Solomon of Lunel, mentioned by the traveller [traveler sic] Benjamin of Tudela, or with a grammarian, Solomon ben Abba Mari, of Lunel, who lived in the second half of the fourteenth century. Sebastian Munster, the German Hebraist (1489-1552), and the elder Buxtorf (1564-1629), the humanist and highly esteemed Hebrew scholar, popularized the mistake, which soon gave rise to another. L'Empereur, also a scholar in Hebraica, of the seventeenth century, went even further than his predecessors, in holding Lunel [10] to have been the birthplace of Rashi, while Basnage (1653-1725), the celebrated historian of the Jews, spoke of "Solomon the Lunatic." Though as early a writer as Richard Simon (1638-1712) protested against the error of making Lunel the native city of Rashi, the mistake crept even into Jewish circles. Since this city of Languedoc was one of the principal centres [centers sic] of Jewish learning in the Provence during the middle ages, Rashi, in most unexpected fashion, came to swell the number of "scholars" of Lunel, of whom mention is frequently made in rabbinical literature. It even seems that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Jews of Bordeaux went to Lunel on a pilgrimage to his tomb. In point of fact Rashi was neither a German nor a Provencal; he was born and he died in Champagne, at Troyes. At that time France was divided into a dozen distinct countries, one of the most important of which was the countship of Champagne, to the northeast, between the Ile-de-France and Lorraine. There were Jews in all the important localities of the province, especially in the commercial cities. In the period with which we are dealing, fairs took place every year successively at Lagny, Bar- sur-Aube, Provins, Troyes, and again Provins and Troyes. The principal city was Troyes, which at the end of the ninth century, when it contained about twelve thousand inhabitants, was chosen as their capital by the counts of Champagne.