Tam, Jacob ben-Meir (Rabbenu)

(c. 1110–71)

   French scholar. A grandson of the great RASHI, Tam was a prosperous wine producer and moneylender in Ramerupt, northern France. It is related that he was wounded in an attempt to convert him by force in the religious fervour whipped up during the Second Crusade, and was rescued by a passing knight. All the Jewish scholars in Europe of the day - even those as far afield as Italy, Spain and Russia - acknowledged the authority of Rabbenu (‘our Master’) Tam, as he was called. Students came from far and wide to study in his school. At one of the most important Jewish assemblies of the time, the synod of Champagne over which he presided, Rabbenu Tam ruled that the Jews must settle their disputes among themselves and refrain from appealing to the gentile courts. There was barely anything affecting Jewish life of the period with which he was not concerned, from the rights of Jewish slaves who escaped to freedom in the Holy Land, to the ritual murder charge in Blois in 1171, when the community was accused of having thrown a Christian boy into the river and fifty of them were burned to death. Of an authoritarian nature, Rabbenu Tam was criticized for being high-handed with anyone who opposed him. Tam was the chief of the tosafists, the men who wrote comments on points in the Babylonian Talmud which were designed as ‘additions’ (tosafot) to Rashi’s commentary.