to the leader of the Jews of Spain at the time, Hasdai ibn Shaprut. In his book, he was the first Hebrew grammarian to distinguish between transitive and intransitive verbs, the first to list verbs by their three-letter roots in the Paal construction, and the first to distinguish between "light" and "heavy" roots. He also condemned Menahem ben Saruq for failing to see the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic. Dunash also wrote a book containing two hundred reservations about the teachings of his old mentor, Saadia Gaon. The students of Menahem ben Saruq responded with a scathing attack on Dunash, condemning him for using Arabic meter and grammar in studying the Hebrew language, as well as on issues of Jewish philosophy about which they were at odds. Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra also wrote a response to Dunash's work, in defense of Saadia Gaon. These challenges were met by Yehudi ben Sheshet, one of Dunash's students, who wrote a work in defense of his master that strongly opposed all of his detractors. The debates between Dunash and others were finally decided in the centuries after his death by Rabbeinu Tam, a grandson of Rashi, who attempted to judge between the two schools of thought, and by Rabbi Joseph Kimhi, father of the noted grammarian Rabbi David Kimhi (RaDaK), who supported Dunash's positions. Nevertheless, many of the issues raised by Dunash have yet to be resolved today. Dunash is remembered as a poet and a grammarian who uncovered many of the major problems of Hebrew grammar. Poetry of Dunash's wife Though her name is unknown, Dunash's wife is held to be the author of a poem on the subject of Dunash's exile. This makes it the only known medieval Hebrew verse by a woman (and the only known medieval verse by a Jewish woman apart from those of Qasmuna and, if she was Jewish, Sarah of Yemen). Giving both verse and prose translations, it reads: An incomplete text of the poem was discovered and published in the 1940s in two fragments from one eleventh-century manuscript, Mosseri IV.387 and Mosseri VIII.202.2. At that time, the poem was assumed to be by Dunash.Poetry (Mosseri IV.387.2). But a manuscript declaring the poem to be by Dunash's wife came to light in the 1980s, in the form of a probably eleventh-century fragment from the Cairo Geniza (where it is now catalogued as Cambridge, Cambridge University Library,