Rabbi Yehuda bar Ilai, quoted in the Mishnah simply as “Rabbi Yehuda,” is the sage cited more often than any other in the Mishnah. He lived in the Galilee in the 2nd century CE, in the town of Usha.
He learned first from his father, Rabbi Ilai, a student of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, and then from Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva. He was one of the five students through whom Rabbi Akiva’s Torah was renewed after the Bar Kochba revolt, and is called in the Talmud “the first of the speakers in every place.”
Rabbi Yehuda was very poor. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 20a) describes a generation in which six students covered themselves with a single cloak and studied Torah. Yet he was famously joyful, and devoted to bringing joy to brides and grooms. According to tradition he is buried at Ein Zeitun, just north of Tzfat.
