Born in Tunis and thus sometimes called al-Tunisi in Arabic, he left his native country to escape the persecutions that broke out there at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
[1] After residing in Rome and Florence, he settled in Venice, where he was engaged as corrector of the Hebrew press of Daniel Bomberg.
[4] Jacob's introduction to the Rabbinical Bible was translated into Latin by Claude Capellus in 1667,[5] and into English by Christian D. Ginsburg (Longman, 1865).
Jacob also wrote a dissertation on the Targum, prefixed to the 1527 and 1543-44 editions of the Pentateuch, and published extracts from Moses ha-Nakdan's Darke ha-Nikkud we-haNeginot, a work on the niqqudim and cantillation.
He revised the editio princeps of the Jerusalem Talmud (1523), of Maimonides' Mishneh Torah, and of many other works from Bomberg's press.