Isaac ben Samuel of Acre

Isaac ben Samuel of Acre (fl. 13th–14th century) (Hebrew: יצחק בן שמואל דמן עכו, Yitzhak ben Shmuel d'min Akko) was a Jewish kabbalist who fled to Spain.

According to Chaim Joseph David Azulai, Isaac ben Samuel was a pupil of Nahmanides.

Isaac ben Samuel was at the Crusader-controlled town of Acre when town was taken by a Mamluk army led by Al-Ashraf Khalil. He was arrested and thrown into prison with many other Jews, but escaped the massacre, and in 1305 went to Spain. Abraham Zacuto states in his Yuḥasin, that Moses de Leon discovered the Zohar in the time of Isaac of Acre.

However, Isaac doubted the authenticity of the Zohar, not having heard of it in the Holy Land, and made inquiries about it of Naḥmanides' pupils, without, however, any satisfactory result. When Isaac met Moses of Leon at Valladolid, the latter took an oath that he had a copy of the Zohar written by Shimon bar Yochai himself in his house at Ávila. However, de Leon died before he could return to Ávila, and Isaac, more than ever desirous of obtaining the truth, consulted at Ávila a man named David Rafan.

Rafan told Isaac that Moses of Leon's wife and daughter had revealed to the wife of a certain R. Joseph the fact that Moses of Leon had written the book himself, an anecdote accepted as historical by Heinrich Graetz, philosophy professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and academic authorities on the Kabbalah such as Gershom Scholem (author of the Zohar's entry in Encyclopaedia Judaica) and Berkeley professor Daniel C. Matt, while Landauer claims it to be apocryphal and tries to demonstrate that the Zohar was discovered much later.

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