His contemporaries considered him the
highest rabbinical authority, and he was consulted by persons as
remote as in the south of France and the north of Spain. He
possessed a remarkably original, broad yet subtle intellect, and
his writings display keen penetration and singular vigor of
thought. He devoted himself chiefly to Biblical exegesis; but in
this domain he obtained a reputation less through the purely
exegetical parts than through the critical work in which he
defended the grammarian Menahem against the attacks of
Dunash.[138] His liturgical compositions and the short poems
with which he sometimes prefaced his Responsa show that he was a
clever poet, an imitator of the Spaniards. Abraham Ibn Ezra
while on his rovings in France was one of his correspondents.
However, Jacob Tam, or, to call him by his title of honor,
Rabbeun Tam, - in allusion to Gen. xxv. 27, where Jacob is
described as "tam," a man of integrity - owed his renown to his
Talmudic activity, which he exerted in an original line of work
though he was not entirely free from the influence of Rashi. If
he was not the creator of a new sort of Talmudic literature, he
was at least one of its first representatives. Either because he
considered the commentaries of his grandfather impossible to
imitate, or because he could not adapt himself to their
simplicity and brevity, he took pleasure in raising ingenious
objections against them and proposing original solutions.
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