Rashi is missing where nobody studied

Claim (verbatim)

The standard printed Talmud presents a "Rashi" commentary running the length of the Bavli - but it does not. On several tractates Rashi's commentary was never written or did not survive, and the printers filled the gap with other hands: the commentary attributed to Rabbenu Gershom Me'or ha-Golah covers much of the order Kodashim (Bekhorot from a point, Arakhin, Temurah, Keritot, Me'ilah, Tamid) and part of Bava Batra, while tractates such as Nedarim, Nazir and Me'ilah carry non-Rashi commentaries of disputed authorship. The pattern is not random: it tracks the medieval yeshiva curriculum. A tractate learned generation after generation drew and preserved a base commentary; a tractate that fell out of the syllabus - above all the Temple-order Kodashim, with no living practice to anchor it - did not, and whatever early commentary existed thinned to the point where a substitute had to stand in. Mechanism: commentaries survive by being copied, copying is driven by study, and study followed a curriculum that privileged the practical orders. Prediction restated: the Bavli tractates whose printed base commentary is not Rashi's cluster overwhelmingly in the order Kodashim and the handful of little-studied outliers - a survival map of the syllabus, readable directly from Sefaria's commentary-layer attributions.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: tabulating, per Babylonian tractate in Sefaria, whether the primary base-commentary layer is Rashi or a substitute (Rabbenu Gershom or an anonymous/attributed hand), a clear majority (> 0.6) of the tractates whose base commentary is not Rashi will belong to the order Kodashim (or to the small set of curricular outliers such as Nedarim and Nazir), while the heavily-studied orders Moed, Nashim and Nezikin will be almost uniformly Rashi-covered - primary clause: the > 0.6 Kodashim/outlier share among non-Rashi tractates; the verdict follows it. The test voids if Sefaria does not label base-commentary authorship at tractate granularity.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Sefaria's Babylonian Talmud commentary layers - read the base-commentary attribution for every tractate, classify each as Rashi versus substitute, and cross-tabulate the substitutes against Mishnaic order, with Urbach's Ba'alei ha-Tosafot and the standard Vilna Shas commentary attributions as the census control.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The census the prediction would re-derive is a tabulated standard datum of the commentary literature: pseudo-Rashi on Nedarim, Nazir, Ta'anit and Mo'ed Katan; the Mainz commentary printed as 'Rabbenu Gershom' standing on Bava Batra and on the Kodashim tractates (Bekhorot, Arakhin, Temurah, Keritot, Me'ilah, Tamid); Rashbam completing Bava Batra from 29a and Rivan Makkot from 19b - all set out, with the curricular explanation (Kodashim and the little-studied tractates outside the living study cycle), in Ta-Shma's survey, Grossman's Hakhmei Tsarfat, and Urbach. On that printed census every non-Rashi base commentary falls in Kodashim or the named curricular outliers, so the > 0.6 share is direct list-arithmetic on the published attributions; reading Sefaria's labels adds no new answer.

• I. M. Ta-Shma, Ha-Sifrut ha-Parshanit la-Talmud, vol. 1: 1000-1200 (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1999)
• A. Grossman, Hakhmei Tsarfat ha-Rishonim (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1995), on Rashi's Talmud commentary corpus and the pseudo-Rashi attributions
• E. E. Urbach, Ba'alei ha-Tosafot (4th ed., Jerusalem: Bialik, 1980)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.