Rashi script or Sephardic script (), is a

typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands o ...

for the

Hebrew alphabet The Hebrew alphabet ( he, אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewi ...

based on 15th-century

Sephardic Sephardic (or Sephardi) Jews (, ; lad, Djudíos Sefardíes), also ''Sepharadim'' , Modern Hebrew: ''Sfaradim'', Tiberian: Səp̄āraddîm, also , ''Ye'hude Sepharad'', lit. "The Jews of Spain", es, Judíos sefardíes (or ), pt, Judeus sefa ...

semi-cursive handwriting. It is named for the rabbinic commentator

Rashi Shlomo Yitzchaki ( he, רבי שלמה יצחקי; la, Salomon Isaacides; french: Salomon de Troyes, 22 February 1040 – 13 July 1105), today generally known by the acronym Rashi (see below), was a medieval French rabbi and author of a compre ...

, whose works are customarily printed in the typeface (though Rashi himself died several hundred years before the script came into use). It was taken as a model by early Hebrew typographers such as Abraham Garton, the

Soncino family The Soncino family (משפחת שונצינו) is an Italian Ashkenazi Jewish family of printers, deriving its name from the town of Soncino in the duchy of Milan. It traces its descent through a Moses of Fürth, who is mentioned in 1455, back to ...

and Daniel Bomberg in their editions of commented texts (such as the Mikraot Gedolot and the Talmud, in which Rashi's commentaries prominently figure).

History

The initial development of typefaces for the

printing press A printing press is a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium (such as paper or cloth), thereby transferring the ink. It marked a dramatic improvement on earlier printing methods in which the ...

was often anchored in a pre-existing

manuscript culture A manuscript culture is a culture that depends on hand-written manuscripts to store and disseminate information. It is a stage that most developed cultures went through in between oral culture and print culture. Europe entered the stage in c ...

. In the case of the Hebrew press, the tradition of using square or

block letter Block letters (known as printscript, manuscript, print writing or ball and stick in academics) are a sans-serif (or "gothic") style of writing Latin script in which the letters are individual glyphs, with no joining. Elementary education in ...

s were

cast Cast may refer to: Music * Cast (band), an English alternative rock band * Cast (Mexican band), a progressive Mexican rock band * The Cast, a Scottish musical duo: Mairi Campbell and Dave Francis * ''Cast'', a 2012 album by Trespassers William ...

for

Biblical The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts of ...

and other important works prevailed. Secondary religious texts, such as rabbinic commentaries, was, however, were commonly set with a semi-cursive form of Sephardic origin, ultimately normalised as the Rashi typeface. A corresponding but distinctive semi-cursive typeface was used for printing

Yiddish Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a ve ...

. It was termed ''mashket'' or ''

vaybertaytsh ''Vaybertaytsh'' () or ''mashket'' (), is a semi-cursive script typeface for the Yiddish alphabet. From the 16th until the early 19th century, the ''mashket'' font distinguished Yiddish publications, whereas Hebrew square script were used for cl ...

'', the Yiddish word ''vayber'' meaning "women" (Weiber) and ''taytsh'' being an archaic word for "German" (Deutsch), since works printed in ''mashket'' were often intended for a female readership.

Comparison with square Hebrew

Ladino usage

Besides usage for the

Hebrew language Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserve ...

, an adapted form of Rashi script alphabet is commonly used for writing Ladino language texts in the Hebrew alphabet. To express additional fricative sounds found in Ladino, the alphabet is expanded by adding diacritic marks to existing letters. Whereas in block print a Hebrew letter is typically modified by an adjacent geresh, in the Rashi script, new letters are formed by adding a breve-shaped ''varrica'' (“little crossbar”) rafe diacritic (ﬞ ) directly onto a letter. Historically, a cursive script known as " solitreo" served as the standard handwritten form of Ladino in the Balkans and Turkey, that complemented the Rashi script character set used for printing.

References

{{list of writing systems Abjad writing systems Hebrew alphabet Judaeo-Spanish