Rav Samuel ben Ali רב שמואל בן עלי

He stood at the head of the Baghdad academy for some thirty years and died in 1194. His by-name is 'ha-Levi', and in the reference works he ranks as the most considerable Babylonian scholar of the twelfth century.

The reach of his authority is attested from outside. Rabbi Petachiah of Regensburg, who passed through those parts, recorded: in all Assyria, in Damascus, in the towns of Persia and Media and in Babylonia there is no judge but one appointed by Samuel. For an Ashkenazi traveller this was the shock of the journey: a community that has authority, not only consent.

And he is also the beginning of the argument about Maimonides. He wrote glosses on the Mishneh Torah and objected to Maimonides on the resurrection of the dead and the world to come; with Maimonides' student Rabbi Joseph ben Judah he disputed the same to his face. In answer Maimonides wrote the Treatise on Resurrection. Forty years later the same argument will break out in Provence and end with books burned—but it began here, in the lifetime of the man argued about.

He had a learned daughter, known as Bat ha-Levi: she taught while remaining unseen behind a window.