Unfortunately, the great use made of Rashi's commentaries necessitated a large number of copies, and frequent copying produced many mistakes. Naturally, it was the laazim that suffered most from the ignorance and carelessness of the copyists and printers, especially in the countries in which French was not the current language. Efforts have been made within the last two centuries to restore the laazim. Mendelssohn and his associates applied themselves to the commentary on the Pentateuch, Lowe, to the Psalms, Neumann, to the Minor Prophets, Jeitteles and Laudau, to the whole of the Bible, and the Bondi brothers, Dormitzer, and, above all, Landau, to the Talmudic commentaries. But these authors, not having consulted the manuscripts and knowing the French language of the middle ages only imperfectly, arrived at insufficient results. Even the identifications of Berliner in his critical edition of the commentary on the Pentateuch are not always exact and are rarely scientific. Arsene Darmesteter (1846-1888), one of the elect of French Judaism and a remarkable scholar in the philology of the Romance languages, realized that in the commentaries of Rashi "the science of philology possesses important material upon which to draw for the history of the language in an early stage of its developinent." With the aim of utilizing this material, he visited the libraries of England and Italy, and gathered much that was important; but his numerous occupations and his premature death prevented him from finishing and publishing his work. In the interests of French philology as well as for a complete understanding of the text of Rashi, it would be advantageous to publish the notes that he collected. In fact, such a work will appear, but unfortunately not in the proportions Darmesteter would have given it. Nevertheless, it will be found to contain information and unique information, upon the history, the phonetics, and the orthography of medieval French; for the first literary works, which go as far back as the eleventh century, the life of Saint Alexius and the epic of Roland, have not come down to us in the form in which they were written. "What would the trouveres of Roland and the clerics of Saint Alexius have said if they had been told that one day the speech of their warrior songs and their pious homilies would need the aid of the Ghetto to reach the full light of day, and the living sound of their words would fall upon the ears of posterity through the accursed jargon of an outlawed race?"[57]