Natan Friedland (Hebrew: נתן פרידלנד, 1808 – 27 March 1883) was a Russian rabbi, writer, maggid (itinerant preacher), and proto-Zionist activist.

[1] At a young age, he travelled to nearby Salantai in order to study the Torah under the guidance of that town's foremost teachers — Zvi Hirsh Broide and Zundel Salant.

The Damascus affair in particular — well documented in those publications — left a strong impression on Friedland regarding the apparent helplessness of Jewish communities in the diaspora.

Friedland eventually became determined to help lay the ideological groundwork for a movement to return the Jews to the Land of Israel in order to usher in the Messianic Age.

[2] He felt that this goal was to be accomplished in stages; once Jews began to settle there through land acquisition and the introduction of agriculture, they would achieve quasi-independence under the reigning power.

He took up writing in order to circulate his ideas to an even wider audience, with his output eventually becoming some of the most influential proto-Zionist works of the Hibbat Zion (lit.

In 1871 he published a pamphlet in German called Settling the Land of Israel, at the end of which he wrote an essay stressing that living in the diaspora was unsafe since the Jews were subjugated to the whims of the local rulers.

While Friedland did not have that much to show for all of his travels and advocacy, in 1860 a campaign was started by Hayim Luria of the Jewish community of Frankfurt to create an association which collected money for the cause of Zion.

The campaign utilized Kalischer's pamphlet, Derishat Zion and Friedland's own work, Kos Yeshuah VeNehamah as ways to disseminate their ideas.

[13] Friedland's collected writings, including his most popular work Kos Yeshuah VeNehamah, were translated from the Yiddish to Modern Hebrew.