Judah Leib Ben-Ze'ev (Hebrew: יְהוּדָה לֵיבּ בֵּן־זְאֵב, German: Juda Löb Bensew; 18 August 1764 – 12 March 1811) was a Galician Jewish philologist, lexicographer, and Biblical scholar.

[6] He was married off at the age of 13 and settled in the home of his wife's parents in Kraków,[7] where he spent his days studying Talmud and his nights clandestinely acquiring the knowledge of Hebrew philology and secular subjects.

[1] He settled in Vienna as a proofreader in the Hebrew presses of Joseph Hraszansky and Anton Edler von Schmid and remained there till his death.

[17] Ben-Ze'ev's Mesillat ha-limmud, a grammatical work for school-age children,[18] was translated into Italian by Leon Romani (Vienna, 1825) and into Russian by Abraham Jacob Paperna (Warsaw, 1871).

[19] Ben-Ze'ev released new editions and commentaries to the Saadia Gaon's The Book of Beliefs and Opinions (Berlin, 1789) and Yedidya ha-Penini's Beḥinat ha-'Olam (1789).

[25] Ben-Ze'ev also composed the earliest-known Hebrew erotic poems in the modern era,[26][27] which circulated widely in manuscript form but were not published until the 20th century.

[21] These include Shir agavim, published by Getzel Kressel in 1977,[25][28] and Derekh gever be-almah, a description of sexual intercourse using combinations of fractions of biblical verses.