Jacob M. Landau

Jacob M. Landau was born in 1924 in Chișinău

Landau was born in 1924 in Kishinev, Bessarabia. His father, Michael Landau, was a lawyer who sat in the Romanian parliament from 1928 to 1933. In 1935 the family moved to Palestine and settled in Tel Aviv, where he finished the Herzliya Gymnasium in 1942.

He studied history and Arabic at the Hebrew University from 1942 to 1946, writing his thesis on the nationalist movement in Egypt. He earned his doctorate at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London under Bernard Lewis, with a study of parliaments and parties in Egypt. He later held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard and taught at Brandeis University in 1955 and 1956.

He taught history and Arabic at the Hebrew University's high school and served in the army from 1951 to 1953. In 1958 he joined the Hebrew University's political science department, where he later held the Gersten Chair. He founded the Arabic department at Bar-Ilan University in 1960 and was research director at the Ben-Zvi Institute from 1971 to 1973.

His research covered nationalism, minorities, pan-Islam, pan-Turkism and Central Asian politics. He wrote 24 books and edited 12. He died in November 2020 and was buried at Har HaMenuchot in Jerusalem.