His most important production is the Yefeh 'Enayim, (trans.: "beautiful eyes") giving the parallel passages found in the Babylonian Talmud, the Yerushalmi, the Midrashim, the Pesichtas, and other ancient rabbinic productions, occasionally with critical remarks which are of the greatest value to the rabbinic student.
The Judean sources, the Yerushalmi and the haggadic midrashim, introduce baraitot from this Mekilta with the phrase, "Teni R. Shim'on" = "R. Simeon has taught" (comp. Friedmann, introduction to his edition of the Mekilta, pp. 55 et seq.; Hoffmann, l.c. p. 48).
The haggadic interpretations are derived for the most part from scattered passages in the Talmud and in the Midrashim, while the arrangement is capricious, the individual words being arranged neither according to the order of the alphabet nor according to the sequence of the books of the Bible.
Midrash (pl. Midrashim) – Hebrew word referring to a method of reading details into, or out of, a Biblical text.
Jellinek thinks (l.c.) that there were several haggadic midrashim to Canticles, each of which interpreted the book differently, one referring it to the exodus from Egypt, another to the revelations on Mt. Sinai, and a third to the Tabernacle or the Temple in Jerusalem; and that all these midrashim were then combined into one work, which, with various additions, forms the present Shir ha-Shirim Rabbah.
The De Rossi Manuscript No. 541, at Parma, was discovered by S. Buber to contain, among other things, midrashim on four of the five "megillot": Canticles, Book of Ruth, Lamentations, and Ecclesiastes; these he published (Berlin, 1894) under the title of "Midrash Zuṭa," to distinguish them from the "Midrash Rabbah."