Samuel ben Samson

Also known as Shmuel ben Shimshon

French rabbi who accompanied a delegation of three hundred Provençal and English Jewish scholars to the Holy Land in 1210–11 and recorded their visits to the tombs of biblical and rabbinic figures across Galilee.

Samuel ben Samson was a rabbi of northern France who in 1210 took part in one of the most ambitious organised Jewish journeys of the medieval period — the so-called Aliyat ha-Sheloshmeʾot, the 'pilgrimage of the three hundred' English and French Tosafist scholars who set out for the Holy Land together. The motives of the group are not fully recovered, but the move was substantial enough to repopulate the Jewish communities of Acre and Jerusalem in the early years of the thirteenth century.

His brief Hebrew account is one of the chief witnesses to that journey. It records the route from the coast through Galilee, the visits the group paid to the traditional tombs of the prophets, patriarchs, and Talmudic sages — particularly at Meron, Tiberias, and the cluster of holy graves at Tzfat and the upper Hula — and the prayers said at each of them. The text is fragmentary and has only survived through later anthologies of Jewish travel literature, but it is the principal eyewitness Hebrew description of the Galilean tomb-pilgrimage tradition that became central to later Jewish piety.

Read alongside Yehuda Alharizi a few years later, Samuel gives us the working religious geography of Jewish Palestine just before the Khwarazmian and Mamluk catastrophes of the mid-thirteenth century.

Read more on Wikipedia: English article