Judah ben Samuel

Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg (1150 – 22 February 1217), also called Yehuda HeHasid or Judah the Pious in Hebrew, was a leader of the Ashkenazi Hasidim a movement of Jewish mysticism in Germany (not to be confused with the 18th-century Hasidic Judaism founded by the Baal Shem Tov). Judah was born in 1150 in the small town of Speyer, now in the Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, but later settled in Regensburg, now in Bavaria, in 1195. He wrote much of Sefer Hasidim ("Book of the Pious"), as well as…