Freiherr Jacob von Landau

Founder of Bankhaus Jacob Landau, then founder & director of National bank fur Deutschland and the Breslauer Disconto-Bank

According to his great grandson Paul Meyer: Jacob, born in Breslau had very little education and started working at the age of 13. He knew little about banking but had a gift for working with German aristocrats and industrialists and earning their trust. He became very successful and founded the Jacob Landau Bank. As thanks for lending money to a prince he received a title (Jacob Freiherr von Landau) that he didn't use, but some of his descendants did. Jacob was instrumental in financing the great Berlin Electrical Company (AEG) that purchased the American Edison Patents.

(According to NDB/ADB) Jacob was trained in a Breslau bank and then in Hamburg. in 1845 he became a citizen of Berlin, but then lost his citizenship since he lived in Breslau. Before he started banking Jacob ran a tobacco factory and was also involved with horse-trading (his father Moritz was a horse-trader.) and real estate. In 1847 he married Rosalie, daughter of Bernhard Ledermann, and gained the capital to found a bank. In 1852 he founded the Jakob Landau Bank in Berlin, which specialized in financing mining and metallurgy projects in Silesia. By the 1870s it was one of the leading private banks in Germany.

Jacob and Rosalie had 3 sons and 3 daughters, including Eugen, Hugo, Wilhelm,and Margarete.

Charlotte Landau ( was perhaps their niece.)

In his autobiography (translated by Paul Meyer, Jacob's son Hugo wrote about his father: "My father was a genius of sorts: he had worked his way up from being a poor man to becoming a well known banker and he had a splendid clientele, above all among the high nobility; but of the banking business as such he had no great knowledge. He was hampered by an inadequate education, which was inevitable since he had had to fend for himself since the age of thirteen. He was infinitely charitable, particularly towards his and my mother's family....When I was 17 my father had had me declared of age, and since he had already been very ailing before that, I had almost the entire task of installing the Jacob Landau Bank in Berlin and getting it underway.

Langjähriges Mitglied der »Gesellschaft der Freunde«, einem 1792 in Berlin gegründeten jüdischen Hilfsverein, der allerdings seit den 1880er Jahren vorwiegend als Club bzw. informelles Zentrum der Berliner Hochfinanz und Industrie fungierte.