תּוֹלְדוֹת
Judah Messer Leon, also known as Rabbi Yehudah ben Yechiel (יהודה מסר לאון), was a rav, posek, rosh yeshiva and physician in Italy in the fifteenth century, living from about 1420 to about 1498. He joined Torah with general learning and wanted his talmidim to excel in both; one of them was Rabbi Yochanan Alemanno.
He was born in Montecchio Maggiore, near Vicenza, the son of a doctor. While still in his early twenties he received semicha and a diploma in medicine. The title Messer, a title of knighthood, was given to him before he was thirty; by tradition Emperor Friedrich III granted it during his visit to Italy in 1452, perhaps for his service as a physician. Leon is a usual loazi name paired with Yehudah.
By the age of about thirty he headed a yeshiva and lectured at the university in Mantua. In 1454, while in Ancona, he issued takanot (communal ordinances) on laws concerning women, meant to guard the customs of Italian Jewry against the many Jews then arriving from Ashkenaz and Sefarad. He also forbade the study of the Ralbag’s peirush on the Torah, whose views he held to contradict the faith. He sent letters to all the communities of Italy placing a cherem on anyone who broke these rules, acting on his own authority as a communal leader. This turned rabbis in other cities against him, among them Rabbi Binyamin of Montalcino, rav of Florence.
During the 1460s he made his home in Padua, Bologna and Venice, and his son David was born in Venice. In 1469 he received an imperial doctorate in philosophy and medicine. His sefer Nofet Tzufim, on the art of Hebrew rhetoric, sets out to show that the Hebrew language can serve the needs of fine public speech. It was among the first Hebrew books ever printed, and the first to be printed while its author was still alive.
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רבי יהודה בן יחיאל מֶסֶר לאון, רופא, רב ופוסק מרכזי ביהדות איטליה במאה ה-15, אשר שילב תורה והשכלה כללית ושאף להפוך למנהיג יהדות איטליה. ספרו "נופת צופים: על אמנות הנאום העברי" הוא חיבור אסתטיקה-פילוסופי ובלשני שבו הוא מבסס את האפשרות של השפה העברית לשמש לצרכים רטוריים. ספר זה היה מראשוני הספרים העבריים שנדפסו, והראשון שיצא בדפוס בחיי מחברו. תוארו "מסר" (Messer) הוענק לו על ידי השלטונות בטרם מלאו לו שלושים, ומציין את היותו אדם רם-מעלה ובעל השפעה רבה בקהילתו.
Judah ben Jehiel,, more usually called Judah Messer Leon, was an Italian rabbi, teacher, physician, and philosopher. Through his works, assimilating and embodying the intellectual approach of the best Italian universities of the time, yet setting it inside the intellectual culture of Jewish tradition, he is seen as a quintessential example of a hakham kolel, a scholar who excelled in both secular and rabbinic studies, the Hebrew equivalent of a Renaissance man. This was the ideal he tried to instil in his students. One of his students was Yohanan Alemanno.