The LANDAU Monologues in Six Parts (3 of 6)

Part 3 of 6 — R. Loebel Jonas (Arjeh Jehuda Leib) LANDAU

I think I made no real progress on my LANDAU research from 1998 to 2008 — though that gap didn’t have to be that long.  In 1998, I reviewed all the Kempen birth, marriage and death records available on the LDS microfilms.  In early February 2008, I was looking at them again, and probably not for the first time since 1998.  But this time, in the death records, an item caught my attention — the entry for Loebel Jonas LANDAU (ca.1780-1838).

In late January 2008, I had added a lot of the family of the Noda b’Jehuda to my family file based on information in Neil ROSENSTEIN’s “The Unbroken Chain” (2nd ed. 1990).  The “hook” for including the LANDAU family was that R. Joseph LANDAU of Klimontov, brother of R. Ezekiel LANDAU of Prague, had married a daughter of Bezalel KATZ of Ostra, son of Naftali KATZ (1649-1719), my father's 6x great uncle, and great great grandson of the MaHaRaL of Prague, R. Jehuda Löw ben Bezalel (ca.1520-1609), my 10x great grandfather.

Having just added R. Arjeh Jehuda Leib (Loebel) LANDAU, son of R. Israel Jonah LANDAU, to my extended family tree a few days before, when I ran across the death entry for Loebel Jonas LANDAU in the Kempen records, it was easy to see the connection; that he was Loebel “ben” Jonas, more formally, Arjeh Jehuda Leib ben Israel Jonah.

That alone would have been a nice coincidence, running into the Kempen death record just days after learning about this man from “The Unbroken Chain”.  But the amazing thing about that death record was that it included all of the then living children of R. Loebel Jonas LANDAU, starting with Nesche (age 34), wife of Haskel LANDAU — most Kempen death records did not come with such complete family information.

Now, I had a link from Amalie through her mother Nesche to R. Arjeh Jehuda Leib (Loebel) LANDAU, and from him into the rabbinic LANDAU family.  Amalie could not claim descent from the Noda b’Jehuda, but she was part of the same family — her great great great grandfather R. Jitzhak LANDAU of Opatow (Apt), Lemberg (Lwow / Lviv) and Krakau (Krakow) was the uncle of the famous R. Ezekiel LANDAU of Prague.

I could easily imagine that being from the same family as R. Ezekiel LANDAU could have, over a few generations, been remembered as being descended from R. Ezekiel LANDAU.

And that could have been the end of that trail if not for the fact that Amalie LANDAU’s father Haskel was also a LANDAU.