LANDAU, SAUL RAPHAEL

LANDAU, SAUL RAPHAEL (1870–1943), early member of the Labor Zionist movement and one of Herzl's aides. Born in Cracow, Landau contributed to the German and Polish press on Jewish affairs, and with Herzl's appearance he was already a veteran Jewish nationalist publicist. Landau joined Herzl immediately upon the publication of Der Judenstaat and became one of his close advisers, particularly on the matter of founding Die *Welt. According to Herzl's wishes, Landau took the editorship of the paper upon himself, but held the post only four months (until October 1897). He participated in the First Zionist Congress in Basle. In 1898 he began to come into conflict with Herzl, and their disagreements later broke out in public and led to alienation and mutual animosity.

Under Herzl's influence, Landau had begun to carry out the dissemination of Zionist ideas among Jewish workers. He published a series of articles on the situation of Jewish workers in Galicia and Poland in Die Welt that still hold great value for study of the Jewish proletariat in the 1890s (they were reprinted as a book entitled Unter juedischen Proletariern (1898)). He also edited a newspaper, Der juedische Arbeiter (1898–99), in the same spirit, and it was a forerunner of the Zionist labor press. Landau published polemical books attacking the assimilationists and a propaganda pamphlet on Zionism in Poland. Afterward he concerned himself with his legal practice and edited the newspaper Neue Nationalzeitung (1906–17). With the annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany (1938), he left for the United States and there published his memoirs, Sturm und Drang im Zionismus (1937) on his contacts with Herzl; they contain an abundance of photographs, documents, and letters from the period.

bibliography:

T. Herzl, Complete Diaries, ed. by R. Patai, 5 vols. (1960), index; G. Kressel, in: Pirkei Galiẓyah (1957), 411–7; M. Eisland, in: Asufot, 6 (1959), 87–97.

[Getzel Kressel]