Scienceיעקב כ"ץ

Jacob Katz

Jacob Katz was a Jewish historian and educator who studied Jewish society and the formation of Orthodoxy, and received the Israel Prize in 1980.

1904 to 1998Study of traditional Jewish societyResearch on Orthodoxy's formationTradition and CrisisStudies of antisemitism

Born: 15 November 1904, Magyargencs
Died: 20 May 1998, Jerusalem
Occupation: historian, university teacher, educator, rabbi
Education: Goethe University Frankfurt

Jacob Katz was born in 1904 in Magyargencs

Katz was born in 1904 in Magyargencs, a village in western Hungary, the third of 6 children. His father was a merchant. The village had no Jewish school, so he attended a Protestant school and learned Jewish subjects from the local slaughterer.

At 12 he went to study in Celldomolk, and at 16 he moved to a yeshiva in Gyor. In 1925 he reached the Pressburg Yeshiva, where he also read Schiller, Herzl and Ahad Ha'am. In 1928 he moved to Frankfurt, studied at a yeshiva and the university, and submitted a doctoral thesis on the assimilation of German Jews in 1934.

He married Gerti-Bina Birnbaum in Jerusalem in 1936 and settled in Tel Aviv, where he taught at the Moriya school. From 1945 to 1950 he was a teacher and director at the Talpiot teachers college. He also wrote a 4 volume history textbook for elementary schools.

In 1949 he began teaching at the Hebrew University. He used sociological methods to study traditional Jewish society, Orthodoxy, the Haskalah, antisemitism and Jewish relations with non-Jews. He died in 1998 and had 3 sons.