דוד בן יהודה מסר לאון

Rav David ben Yehuda Messer Leon (c. 5230/1470–c. 5286/1526) was an Italian rav, physician and philosopher whose life bridged the academies of Renaissance Italy and the Torah world of the Ottoman East. Educated in Avellino in the school of his father, Rav Yehuda Messer Leon, he received semichah at eighteen from chachamim of Ashkenaz and France, and a second from Rav Yehuda Minz of Padua — a double crown for a young chacham who joined the breadth of the sciences to Torah in the derech of Italian Jewry.

When the French conquest of Naples in 5255/1495 loosed violence on the Jews, he fled east through Istanbul to Salonica — then filling with the exiles of Spain, Sicily and Portugal — and taught Torah there in the city’s years of great intellectual ferment.

His chief work, Tehillah L’David, printed by his grandson in Constantinople in 5337/1577, stands in the Rambam‘s defense: a structured treatment of the worth and rank of Torah, the foundations of the mitzvot and the principles of emunah, written against the critiques leveled at the Moreh by later thinkers, among them Rav Yosef Albo and Don Yitzchak Abarbanel. His Kevod Chachamim defends the honor of the chachamim and their learning.