Lazare Landau

Origins and early life

Lazare Landau was born at Strasbourg on 1 August 1928 and died in the same city on 3 January 2012, at eighty-three.

Work and career

He was a French Jewish historian descended from Rabbi Yehezkel Landau of Prague, the Noda Biyhudah, one of the great halakhic authorities of the eighteenth century; his father spoke Yiddish and kept Hasidic ways, his mother spoke German, which is a fair description of Alsatian Jewry between two worlds. He became professor of the history of religions at the University of Strasbourg and worked on two subjects that turn out to be one: the Jewish history of Alsace from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, and the history of Jewish-Christian relations.

His doctoral thesis of 1976 was on Jules Isaac, France and the Jews, 1877-1939 — Isaac being the historian whose work on the Christian teaching of contempt led to the Second Vatican Council's revision of the Church's language about Jews — and Landau became Isaac's literary executor. He published on the medieval persecutions, on Franco-Jewish relations and on the reconciliation between Christians and Jews, a subject on which a man of his family could have been forgiven for declining to work.