Judah Messer Leon

Judah ben Jehiel, (Hebrew: יהודה בן יחיאל, c. 1420 to 1425 – c. 1498), more usually called Judah Messer Leon (Hebrew: יהודה מסר לאון), 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 ("comprehensive scholar"), 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.