Dr. J. L. Landau - Chief Rabbi of the Federated Synagogues of the Witwatersrand

(We are indebted to “Ben Eliezer” of the “Zionist Record” for some of the material contained in this article.)

DR. JUDAH LEO LANDAU, scholar, poet, dramatist and Rabbi, was born on May 4th, 1866, in Zalosce, near Brody, Galicia. Both his parents belonged to distinguished families, his father being descended from the Chacham Zevi and Reb Ezekiel Landau, his mother a daughter of Reb Meishe Levisohn of Zalosce. His abilities were early exhibited in the course of his Jewish education, which he received mainly at the hands of the poet N. I. Fischman, the author of “Kesher Shebna” and “Mapelet Sisra,” of his grandfather in the Yeshivah, and through private study. From his earliest years he became actively identified in all Jewish cultural and national endeavour, taking to the writing of Hebrew poems, dramas and pamphlets when barely in his teens, and intent on fostering the Hebrew language and disseminating the Jewish national ideal not only in Lemberg (where he spent many years of his youth and early manhood) but throughout Galicia, being associated with such men as the Hebrew novelist, R. A. Braudes, Dr. Feld and Adolph Stand. He was during these years strongly under the influence of the great Jewish nationalist, Perez Smolenskin.

Pursuant upon his decision to prepare himself for a profession, he removed to Brody and later to Vienna, matriculating in the year 1893, and receiving in 1898 the degree of Ph.D. from the University of Vienna and at the same time the title of Rabbi from the Rabbinical Seminary of Vienna, then under the rectorate of A. Schwartz, A. H. Weiss and M. Friedman. In this new sphere he continued unabated his national endeavours and was among the first to join Theodor Herzl on his appearance in Vienna. The fourth Zionist Congress brought him to London in August, 1900, and here he was persuaded by Dr. M. Gaster to remain in England. Some months of study and lecturing were followed by the call of the North Manchester Hebrew Congregation to act as their Rabbi. Two years later, in 1903, he came out to South Africa in response to the invitation to fill the position of Rabbi to the Johannesburg New Hebrew Congregation.

In this capacity Dr. Landau has since then worked with uninterrupted and unflinching zeal for the advance of all Jewish interests in the sub-continent. He has been a leading figure in all phases of communal, religious, educational and national endeavour, and now occupies the post of Professor of Hebrew at the University of the Witwatersrand and Chief Rabbi of the Federated Synagogues of the Witwatersrand. He is Senior Vice-President of the S.A. Zionist Federation, a position which he has occupied for many years. He has occupied many other honorary posts in the work of the community, among them Honorary Life President of the S.A. Board of Jewish Education, and President of the S.A. Jewish Historical Society.

He has evinced an active interest in the life of the general community, and has been a member of the Johannesburg Hospital Board for many years.

While Dr. Landau's work in strengthening and consolidating the position of Judaism in South Africa is of necessity recognised and appreciated chiefly in that country, he has won a much wider recognition through his literary work. Starting to write at an unusually early age, and endowed with a prolific pen, he has produced work of considerable bulk and varied nature. Much of his work is scattered in the form of essays and articles in countless Hebrew journals. In book form, however, in the field of pure scholarship he has to his credit a Hebrew translation (1898) of the “Gzeira Shava” (Hermeneutic Analogy), the first part of Rector Schwartz's famous work, “Krochmal-ein Hegelianer,” (1903), an original study in German of the influence of Hegel on Krochmal; “Lectures on Hebrew Literature” (1925), published originally in the Zionist Record, which, because of the author's first-hand knowledge of the Hebrew literature of the 19th century, is a valuable contribution to the sparse English works on this period; and many articles in the “Ozar Israel,” the authoritative Hebrew Encyclopaedia of Eisenstadt, published in America.

In considering the more strictly literary output of Dr. Landau, there is, first, work done chiefly during its author's youth. Poems, essays and small sketches were published in various Hebrew journals since 1879, including a long epic under the name of “Love of Jonathan,” published at the age of 15, and “Neginoth” (Cracow, 1895), a volume of poems. As a pioneer of the Hebrew drama Dr. Landau must find a permanent place in Hebrew literature. Of the series of historical dramas in verse which he wrote, “Bar Kochba” (Lemberg, 1884); “Acharit Jerusalem” (ib. 1885); “Herod” (ib. 1887), subsequently translated into Yiddish, and staged at Lemberg with Bertha Kalich in a leading rôle; “Dom Tachat Dom” (“Blood for Blood”) (Cracow, 1897), some evoked a mixed reception, the Bar-Kochba being enthusiastically welcomed by the poet J. L. Gordon and no less strongly criticised by David Frischman. The “white-washing” of the character of Herod, in the play of that name, called forth considerable discussion at the time. Dr. Landau has, in his later work, continued to show the same preference for the dramatic form that he displayed in his early manhood, though he has discarded the verse medium in favour of prose. In two further historical dramas, “Don Yitzchok Abarbanel” (New York, 1919) and “Baal Shem” (Vienna, 1925) he has combined learning with historical imagination in reconstructing the environment in which these two characters had their being, while in “Lefonim U-leochor” (“Backwards and Forwards”) (Jerusalem, 1921) he presents a trenchantly realistic, if somewhat pessimistic, picture of present-day social and religious tendencies in Jewry.

In Dr. Landau's most recent publication, “Viduim” (“Confessions”) (Vienna, 1929), the author has been able to draw on his experiences in Eastern Europe and English-speaking countries to present some severe contrasts between religious and social phenomena in these two quarters of the Jewish world.

G. S. [Gustav Saron]